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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
What Mel Gibson owes to Cecil B. DeMille, whose "Ten Commandments" endures nearly 50 years after its scandalous opening.
Apr 1, 2004 | ABC's airing of Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic "The Ten Commandments" this Sunday will be the network's 24th broadcast of the film in 31 years. Almost every one has been timed to fall on either Palm or Easter Sunday, turning this glitzy, sexed-up production of the foundational Jewish story of deliverance from Egypt into a Christian Holy Week tradition. The "Ten Commandments" broadcast has also often coincided with Passover, when Jews retell that same story during a ritual dinner. Around the country, doubtless more than one family has wound down its Passover Seder amid empty Manischevitz bottles, watching Charlton Heston part the Red Sea.
The film still generally wins the night's top ratings; last year it won both the adult and kid markets, with an average of 10.6 million viewers. And its influence stretches further than anything Nielsen can measure, though especially to modern eyes it's little more than a load of camp, with outrageous costumes and overacting, which is never more apparent than in the bedroom scenes between Moses and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. "Oh Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool," she tells the prophet, who has spent the afternoon making bricks with his enslaved Jewish brethren. "You can worship any God you like, as long as I can worship you." TV Guide dubs the movie "a great big wallow, sublime hootchy-kootchy hokum." In a recent article on "The Passion of the Christ," Variety cites a Hollywood "axiom" that you can't make films about religion, "unless it's a harmless Cecil B. DeMille-type biblical saga."
The comparison between DeMille and Mel Gibson, however, is an improbably rich one. DeMille also thought he was creating a serious religious film -- a potential proselytizer -- and promoted it as rigorously as Gibson has "The Passion." DeMille deflected criticism of his racy portrayal by claiming he was creating an accurate representation of the Bible, just as Gibson has claimed immunity to charges of anti-Semitism and excessive violence. And long before Gibson invited audiences to "Share the Passion of the Christ" by purchasing promotional "Witness Cards" and crucifixion nail jewelry, DeMille conflated religious fervor and marketing finesse in remarkable ways. "The Passion's" impact can't yet be accurately measured. But nearly 50 years after the release of "Ten Commandments," DeMille's 70th and final picture has endured, launching a legacy of myth and intrigue that critics and scholars have had a difficult time penetrating.
Cecil's father, Henry DeMille, had aspired to be a minister. Though he delivered lay sermons at St. Stephen's Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was talked into playwriting by his wife. "[I]n the church he might be able to speak to thousands," Cecil explained in a 1951 interview, "through the theater he might be able to speak to hundreds of thousands -- and then when I came along the mantle fell on my shoulders in a new form which was the motion picture, and I was able to reach hundreds of millions."
Sex was DeMille's way or roping in wider audiences. "Hit sex hard!" was his frequent order to screenwriters. He dubbed the Golden Calf scene of "The Ten Commandments" -- a sultry bump and grind of sweaty Israelites -- "an orgy Sunday-school children can watch." But his critics were unable to reconcile the professed piousness of DeMille's vision with his vulgar showmanship and savvy. They constantly sought to expose his claim to a "unique ministry" of film as self-aggrandizing sham. To others, his films were "a fraud that enabled immorality to hide behind the protection of the Holy Book."
"I imagine that criticism will always follow him," says James D'Arc, a film scholar and curator of DeMille's archives at Brigham Young University. "But those who worked with him never doubted the fact that he was a believer, and that he was sincere about what he was doing."
There were also many instances of religious leaders and strident believers praising DeMille's work, and the director relays them in his "Autobiography." DeMille writes, after "The Ten Commandments" he received too many complimentary letters for him to single out one or two, "[b]ut there is one thought that runs through them like a refrain: 'This picture has made God real to me.'"
DeMille's eccentricities and penchant for exaggeration likely have fueled critics' distrust. They also made the careful management of his image difficult for his staff. In his memoir "Yes, Mr. DeMille," DeMille staffer and "personal representative" Phil Koury writes that the 1951 interview above was intended to settle ongoing confusion among staff members. "We were never quite certain whether the facts in the last interview were final or official, changing as they did from time to time," Koury writes. Even Cecil's older brother, William, didn't remember their father reading to the boys every night from the Bible and American history -- another of Cecil's favorite anecdotes.
"True or not ... it was DeMille the showman responding to an intuitive faculty for drama," Koury writes, "and more important, having those things accepted that pleased and edified him most."
For her oral history of the making of the movie, "Written in Stone," Katherine Orrison interviewed the film's producers, writers, actors, costumers, set designers, soundmen and others, ghostwriting the recollections of each. Orrison has since contributed commentary to the new DVD of "The Ten Commandments" (released March 9, at the height of "Passion" buzz). The man brought to life in "Written in Stone" is by turns a warmhearted mentor, a truculent boss and precisely the ridiculous-sounding cinematic missionary DeMille claimed to be. Regardless of the many glitzy and sultry liberties he took in the film, DeMille was intensely committed to research. His staff pored over the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and the work of early historians Philo and Josephus. The script was heavily annotated, with chapter and verse cited in the footnotes of every page, according to writer Jesse Lasky Jr. Some costumes were made at UCLA on re-creations of ancient Egyptian looms. DeMille's head researcher, Henry Noerdlinger, did so much back-reading he later published his own book on the subject.
"He was a veteran of all kinds of arrows shot at him by critics," says D'Arc. DeMille knew that "skimping on research" would leave him susceptible to more attacks.
But he also became notoriously self-righteous about his research. A qualm with one of his biblical pictures, he claimed, was a qualm with history and the Good Lord Himself. "The Ten Commandments" begins with a mini-lecture by DeMille, shot in a dignified-looking private library, where he vouches for the holy truth and historic truth of what's to follow.
"Naturally Mr. DeMille liked to have the historians on his side," Koury writes, "and usually they were." But DeMille also "claimed he was making history," and when Noerdlinger's tireless research contradicted his vision, he would fall on a single, often vague historical reference as justification. Thus, according to "research," Delilah in "Samson and Delilah" (1949) could wear a crowd-pleasing bra.
