A memorable milestone
RANDOR GUY
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It is the 50th anniversary of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical celluloid epic, ‘Ten Commandments.’ His works have made the filmmaker immortal.
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Still popular: Ten Commandments
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical celluloid epic ‘Ten Commandments’ (1956), Paramount Pictures has brought out a Two-Disc DVD set, with a third disc as bonus, containing DeMille’s 1923 silent v
ersion of the same movie.
“Creativity is a drug I cannot live without,” DeMille said about what made him tick during a long successful innings in both silent and talking pictures of Hollywood. He made many classic and hit films in genres such as history, adventure, comedy and Biblical epics, which won him movie immortality.
Successful epic
The most successful of his Biblical epics are the two versions of ‘Ten Commandments.’ He made the silent version in 1923 (movies began to talk in 1927) and the second ‘talkie’ version in 1956. Each created movie history in its own way and the present DVD set, enables one to watch the silent version too.
The 1956 version is a memorable milestone, which continues to be popular to this day after more than half a century. It is constantly revived on television and screened in theatres around the world.
DeMille showed his mastery in picturising crowd sequences and orgies, daubing them all with religious fervour. The scenes in ‘Ten Commandments’ where Moses leads his followers to Israel or the one where the followers worship the Golden Calf underlined his expertise.
Dynamic, ambitious and artistic, he never compromised on quality and reality. If history books said that Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk, his Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) did bathe in it. In ‘Samson and Delilah,’ the heroine (Hedy Lamarr) had to wear a cape made of peacock feathers. At great expense, he ordered for the real stuff.
One of the events connected with the silent version of 1923 revealed his puckish sense of humour. DeMille shot the Egyptian sequences on the sandy dunes of a small town, Guadalupe, about 160 miles from Los Angeles.
Building sets
Here he constructed the entire Egyptian city of the pharaohs with colossal temples, 7.5 metre-tall statues and so on. The statues were all made in sections and carried in trucks from Hollywood to Guadalupe and the crew encountered many problems on the journey because of the number of overhead bridges under which the trucks had to pass.
After the shoot, the prop manager told DeMille that it would be too expensive to take the props and sets back to Hollywood. So DeMille told him to bury the entire set in the sand. Later he wrote, “If a thousand years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the news that the Egyptian Civilization, far from being confined to the Valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America!”
‘Ten Commandments’ (1956) tells the story of Moses from his birth to the triumphant moment when he leads the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt.
The pharaoh’s daughter (Yvonne De Carlo) discovers the abandoned child Moses and takes him home. The pharaoh raises Moses (Charlton Heston) as an Egyptian prince. He is the favoured successor to the throne, which makes Prince Rameses (Yul Brynner) angry and jealous.
Rameses and Moses compete for the throne and the love of the young princess, Nefretiri (Anne Baxter). When Moses learns the truth about his birth he joins the Jewish slaves in their fight for freedom. After receiving the Ten Commandments from God, Moses helps to free his race from the pharaoh’s tyrannical rule, surmounting many obstacles in his way. The abandoned infant Moses was played by Heston’s son and the Voice of God was Heston’s own, given an ethereal echoing effect with the use of special microphones. The parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus is one of the most inspiring events in movie history and many feel that the silent version’s scene was superior. How did he do it? A vat of gelatin was heated to turn it from a solid to a liquid, running state.
Second version
In the second version, the footage of the Red Sea was spliced with the film footage –— running it in reverse —of water pouring from large trip-tanks set up in the Paramount Studio back-lot. Even in this age of computer graphics and stunning special effects, the sequence is breathtaking. It received six Oscar nominations including Best Picture but won only for Special Effects.
Why did DeMille tell the story again after 30 years? He wrote, “ The world needs a reminder of the Law of God especially since the horrors of World War Two and the world’s awful experience of totalitarianism, fascism and communism had made many thoughtful people realise anew that the Law of God is the essential bedrock of human freedom.”
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