Focus Features

Cecil B. DeMille

Think of Cecil B. DeMille and what immediately comes to mind are his brash entertainments of the 50s – The Greatest Show on Earth, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments.

However, The Greatest Show on Earth is about the circus, so the brashness is appropriate, and the film industry concurred, awarding the film the year's Best Picture Oscar. Samson and Delilah is harder to defend; referring to Victor Mature's huge pectorals, Groucho Marx said he would never go to a film where “the man's tits are bigger than a woman's.” David Thomson calls it “one of the great trash epics, superbly cast, and made without one drop of irony or shame, and with momentous sexual daydreams in every scene.” 

The Ten Commandments is a different matter altogether. Grandiose it certainly is, but it does have its virtues. Scorsese referred to the film when he talked about the making of Taxi Driver: “We shot the film during a very hot summer and there's an atmosphere at night that's like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first-born, where a cloud of green smoke creeps along the palace floor and touches the floor of the first-born son, who falls dead. That's almost what it's like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we would slide along after it.”

The Ten Commandments was shot over 50 years ago, so DeMille didn't have access to the CGI effects that have become second nature to contemporary films. However, the hand-made aspect of the effects gives them a robust physicality that CGI so often lacks.

In his book reevaluating DeMille's career, Simon Louvish describes these effects:
“Among the many spectacular scenes in this most inherently spectacular of films, the Exodus itself stands out as the most crowded crowd scene in movie history. Whether there are 20 or 30,000 people in the great overhead crane shot in which the freed slaves move out below the stone gods of Egypt into the desert is moot. The point is that you are aware that these are people, each with his or her own quirk of movement, and not a sea of computer-generated things dictated by machine 'intelligence.' Somehow there is a great satisfaction in reality, even if it's the reality of ersatz grandeur, that instead of trying to fool perception actually pleases the eye. DeMille uses his signature method of controlling the crowd, setting myriad individual tasks for the extras to do, whether it is to rein in a goat, collect a child's doll, pull a donkey, witness a new birth in a cart, haul bundles, or in the most poignant self-reference in the scene, carry an emaciated H.B. Warner, who played Christ in DeMille's King of Kings 30 years earlier, as a dying grandfather bearing a few twigs which may be planted after he is gone in the Promised Land.

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Cecil B. DeMille

Think of Cecil B. DeMille and what immediately comes to mind are his brash entertainments of the 50s – The Greatest Show on Earth, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments.

However, The Greatest Show on Earth is about the circus, so the brashness is appropriate, and the film industry concurred, awarding the film the year's Best Picture Oscar. Samson and Delilah is harder to defend; referring to Victor Mature's huge pectorals, Groucho Marx said he would never go to a film where “the man's tits are bigger than a woman's.” David Thomson calls it “one of the great trash epics, superbly cast, and made without one drop of irony or shame, and with momentous sexual daydreams in every scene.” 

The Ten Commandments is a different matter altogether. Grandiose it certainly is, but it does have its virtues. Scorsese referred to the film when he talked about the making of Taxi Driver: “We shot the film during a very hot summer and there's an atmosphere at night that's like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first-born, where a cloud of green smoke creeps along the palace floor and touches the floor of the first-born son, who falls dead. That's almost what it's like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we would slide along after it.”

The Ten Commandments was shot over 50 years ago, so DeMille didn't have access to the CGI effects that have become second nature to contemporary films. However, the hand-made aspect of the effects gives them a robust physicality that CGI so often lacks.

In his book reevaluating DeMille's career, Simon Louvish describes these effects:
“Among the many spectacular scenes in this most inherently spectacular of films, the Exodus itself stands out as the most crowded crowd scene in movie history. Whether there are 20 or 30,000 people in the great overhead crane shot in which the freed slaves move out below the stone gods of Egypt into the desert is moot. The point is that you are aware that these are people, each with his or her own quirk of movement, and not a sea of computer-generated things dictated by machine 'intelligence.' Somehow there is a great satisfaction in reality, even if it's the reality of ersatz grandeur, that instead of trying to fool perception actually pleases the eye. DeMille uses his signature method of controlling the crowd, setting myriad individual tasks for the extras to do, whether it is to rein in a goat, collect a child's doll, pull a donkey, witness a new birth in a cart, haul bundles, or in the most poignant self-reference in the scene, carry an emaciated H.B. Warner, who played Christ in DeMille's King of Kings 30 years earlier, as a dying grandfather bearing a few twigs which may be planted after he is gone in the Promised Land.

DeMille while directing The Ten Commandments

Another familiar figure, Henry Wilcoxon – who was in Cleopatra and The Crusades 20 years earlier – manfully shadows the Queen of Egypt as a somber Egyptian captain. He is the one who says, 'I have known battle for thirty years, Pharaoh, but I have not known fear until tonight,' when the 'Angel of Death' fog of God's plague of the first-born drifts across Yul Brynner's balcony. 

The coup de cinema was, of course, the parting of the Red Sea, achieved using a tank at the Paramount lot with ramps down which the water would cascade, and then combining matte paintings, miniatures and the water flowing in and then reversing back out against the Egyptian location shots. On the big screen – and compared to seamless CGI effects – disbelief is not completely suspended, but the garishness of the scene, it's air of high drama, Technicolor, VistaVision and the Gustave Doré compositions make it work precisely as it was intended: a "state of the art" cinematic miracle: 'And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh...But the Children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea...' "

Over the course of his career, DeMille made 70 films – 50 of them were silents. And it is here in the silent period that his claim to have been a significant creative force in the evolution of movie language lies. He is almost the equal to D.W. Griffith in the visual invention of his filmmaking. These silent films are available in series of DVD box sets and there's real pleasure to be had in dipping into these films.

I'll leave you with a mention of his appearance in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, where he plays himself on the set of Samson and Delilah receiving a visit from Norma Desmond, who was a former star of his (Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson who was, in fact, the star of some of DeMille's most successful silent films).

As Louvish describes: "DeMille is totally at ease in the scene, as befits someone who created his own image and fulfilled it for the public for the last 36 years. There is no DeMillean yelling through his megaphone, no bullying of extras and assistants nor demands for the impossible realism of a nonsensical script. All is fatherly compassion for the star who shared the best moments of his own growing fame." 

Extracts from Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf by Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber, 2007).