Reviews and notes

This film was the opening attraction when the Embassy (then DeLuxe) opened in Wellington in 1924. This repeat screening is to celebrate the cinema's 100th birthday.


Cecil B DeMille's career took a different turn when his studio arranged a competition in association with the Los Angeles Times, offering a thousand dollar prize for the best idea for a picture. DeMille was struck by the number that suggested a religious theme; and the result was The Ten Commandments. With his faithful scenarist Jeanie Macpherson, DeMille concocted a scenario which linked a Biblical spectacle with a melodramatic modern story about two brothers, one of whom observes the commandments while the other breaks them, colourfully; and is in the end "himself broken by defiance of the law". Costing a million and a half dollars and striking fear into its backers, this was the first of the mammoth spectacles that were to be for ever associated with the name of DeMille. Ever afterwards the moral tone of DeMille's films was lofty, though it was never allowed to detract from display and sexuality. In condemning evil, DeMille believed in depicting sin graphically and entertainingly.
- David Robinson, Hollywood in the Twenties, 1968.




Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 The Ten Commandments is quite the landmark for the director. While not technically his first historical epic (that was the 1916 Joan the Woman), it was his first Biblical pageant and his first financially successful epic.

But it is also DeMille in the midst of his transition from the lively, witty director of sex farces and sexy romantic comedies with jazz-age sensibilities to the humorless director of white elephant epics, where he’s simultaneously become both more lurid and more pious, reveling in the sins of his characters and then punishing their excess to provide a lesson for us all.

DeMille spends a mere 45 minutes (of the film’s 135-minute running time) in ancient Egypt with Moses the Law Giver, who has already unleashed nine plagues as the film opens and exits after destroying the tablets in face of the blasphemy of his followers. For the rest, we dissolve to the present (circa early 1920s) to find a white-haired old mother reads from the good book to her two sons, one lost in the glory of the lesson (the all-American Richard Dix as John, a humble carpenter, of course), the other a restless, modern and cynical jazz-age kid (Rod La Rocque as Dan), bored with all “that bunk” of the Bible lessons. “No one believes in these commandment things anymore,” he sneers to his shocked old mother, and he marries another modern girl (Leatrice Joy as Mary, naturally) with a pledge to “live our life in our own heathen way.”

There’s plenty of decadence in both sides of this split identity production, from the orgiastic sin spectacle of hysterical partying and blaspheming with a false idol of the ancient section to Dan systematically breaking all ten commandments in his rapid rise to wealth (and, naturally, his precipitous fall) as a corrupt contractor whose reckoning comes when he builds a church with rotten concrete.

But DeMille’s trademark sensibility (revel in sin for the spectacle, then punish the transgressors for a moral lesson) aside, the two sections illustrate what the director gave up in his transformation into epic moviemaker. The section with Moses in the Holy Land is, dramatically speaking, little more than an epic version of a biblical pageant. Stodgy and stiff and as old fashioned as an early D.W. Griffith spectacle, it’s a series of tableaux with old man Moses (Theodore Roberts), in flowing white hair and madman beard, doing a lot of posing and pointing as he threatens the Pharaoh, leads his people into the desert and brings the wrath of God upon the Egyptian slavers and soldiers. But DeMille is a showman and he makes a show of this otherwise moving illustrations of bible stories with stunning special effects: the parting of the Red Sea (using the very same techniques as he did thirty years later in his 1956 edition), the wall of fire, the great balls of fire pyrotechnics for the will of God as he delivers the commandments to Moses.

The modern sequence, by contrast, is brighter, snappier, driven by the pace of life in the twenties and the lively energy of the jazz-age characters. And let’s face it, it’s more fun hanging out with Dan thumbing his nose at morality with his boozing, adultery and graft than watching good guy John try to pull his brother from the brink. But this is a moral lesson, after all, and whether it’s the hand of God or simply karma coming back to him, Dan is doomed to pay for his sins (and yes, he hits all the bases) and DeMille makes his punishment as thrilling as the rest of the spectacle. DeMille is more judgmental here than in his other jazz-age melodramas, which at least appreciated the sexual energy of his lively characters even as they brought everything back to the comfort of the status quo: home, hearth, family, responsibility.
- Sean Axmaker, Parallax View, 30 March 2011.




DE MILLE AND THE NEW MORALITY

The films of Cecil B. De Mille during the middle twenties reveal clearly how superficial, even hypocritical, this new morality essentially was. Apart from D. W. Griffith, De Mille was the best known and most successful director of the era; and no small part of his success lay in his shrewd ability to change with the changing times. He had realized at the very outset of his long career that the public's taste, as revealed at the box office, was the producer's surest guide, and he patterned his films accordingly. His first picture was a Western, The Squaw Man; made early in 1914 (and one of the first features produced in Hollywood). It proved an immediate hit, and De Mille quickly made several more movies in the same vein. When in 1915, however, the industry switched to a policy of filming stage plays with famous Broadway stars, De Mille promptly put into production a version of Carmen starring the noted diva Geraldine Farrar — and for added insurance, a movie favorite, Wallace Reid. Highly praised at the time for its "theatrical effects," Carmen established De Mille as a "name" director. Then, as the war clouds began to gather, he nimbly turned out a series of violently patriotic pictures — Joan the Woman (1917), The Little American (1917), The Whispering Chorus (1918).

Even before the war had ended, De Mille sensed that the demand for such films would soon be over. In casting about for a new popular subject he released in quick succession a series of pictures in sharply different styles and noted carefully the public's reaction to each of them. The swing, he decided, was toward a more sophisticated approach to sex; and in a long series of modern comedies produced between 1919 and 1923 De Mille catered to the postwar trend toward higher living, heavier drinking and looser morals. Dwelling on both the fashions and the foibles of the fabulously rich, he opened up a whole new world for the films, a world that middle-class audiences, newly won to the movies by the luxurious theaters then springing up, very much wanted to see. Male and Female (1919), For Better, for Worse (1919), Don't Change Your Husband (1919), Why Change Your Wife? (1920), Adam's Rib (1923) — all promised the last word in elegance, refinement and haute couture. And by linking fashion with fashionable undress, De Mille was able to provide something for everyone... De Mille turned out over a dozen pictures in this vein, celebrating the dawn of the jazz age, relishing the sybaritic opulence of the world of fashion and the new freedom from moral restraints. In all of them he condoned the new morality, the flouting of inventions, the hedonistic scramble for wealth and pleasure at any price.

And then, with a conjuror's quickness, he reversed himself. In The Ten Commandments (1923) De Mille climbed the mountain with Moses and thundered forth his "Thou shalt not's." The reformers' chorus had reached his ears; the Hays Office had been formed; the women's clubs throughout the land were making known their dissatisfaction with the amount of sex and sin they found in their theaters. The time had come for a change - of sorts. Sex would still sell tickets, but flagrant immorality would not. De Mille solved this dilemma in The Ten Commandments by simply masking the kind of sex melodrama that was typical of the era - the very kind that the women's clubs were protesting against most violently - behind a biblical facade. The modem part of the film presents Rod La Rocque as a building contractor who goes to the dogs over sultry Nita Naldi, skimping on the concrete for a cathedral he was building so that he might buy more silks and jewels for his charmer. All of this, of course, De Mille detailed with his customary relish for spicy high life. For the early reels, however, De Mille skipped back to Exodus to demonstrate, parable fashion, the moral lesson, "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not commit adultery," "Honor thy father and thy mother." For all impressiveness of such scenes as the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, their wanderings in the desert and Moses receiving the Law on Mount Sinai, none of this had much intrinsic bearing upon the modern story in the film. They were merely the cloak, the smoke screen for the sort of thing that, despite the hue and cry, De Mille felt sure would still make money. And who would dare to protest against a picture that included Moses and the Ten Commandments? Characteristically, even while Moses was receiving the Commandments on the Mount, De Mille made the most of the bacchanalian revels around the Golden Calf below.

Perhaps because De Mille has always trumpeted his moral lessons more sententiously than any other director would dare, his films have also carried more sensational sinning than anyone else's. Better than any other director of the era, he seems to have apprehended a basic duality in his audiences — on the one hand their tremendous eagerness to see what they considered sinful and taboo, and on the other, the fact that they could enjoy sin only if they were able to preserve their own sense of righteous respectability in the process. Certainly, De Mille gave them every opportunity, and his pictures won the crowds. For years The Ten Commandments remained among the top-grossing films; while The King of Kings (1927), his first all-out essay in the field of sin-cum-morals spectaculars, is still being shown. No one could have remained so completely successful for so long without a shrewd knowledge of his audience — and more than a little willingness to pander to the least common denominator of public taste.

What De Mille did with his special showmanlike flair, most of the other directors of the mid-twenties were also doing, somewhat less flamboyantly, as a matter, of studio policy. The Hays Office approach to morality, combined with the mass production of entertainment in the new, huge film factories, resulted in a preponderance of formula pictures - complete with built-in happy endings and an automatic meting out of just desserts to all the "heavies." Their characters were stock and immediately identifiable: the hero was a clear-eyed, clean-profiled young man; the heroine, blond and virginal; the villain was dark, mustached and addicted to cigarettes; the "other woman" was also dark, exotic, given to low-cut gowns and long, long cigarette holders. There was, in addition, generally a middle-aged comic-relief couple. The action was as obvious and predictable as the gaslit melodramas of the late 19th century. Early in the film the hero discovers his girl friend in some terribly compromising position nastily contrived by the villain; there follows a long misunderstanding between the two, the hero's chance discovery of the truth, the punishment of the villain and the big reconciliation scene. Originality lay in dreaming up some especially salacious situation for the misunderstanding and a sufficiently gruesome fate for the "heavies." By comparison, the European films, with no such standardized patterns, with no artificially imposed moral ending, inevitably seemed far more honest and true to life.
- Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art, 1957.

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