"Take these two tablets and call me in the morning."
July 8, 2021 8:37 PM Subscribe
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Cecil B. DeMille really chews up his own scenery in this archival film via Periscope Video.
The golden calf scenes always seemed like they'd be more fun. Not really selling it there, Moses.
posted by gimonca at 3:11 AM on July 9, 2021
posted by gimonca at 3:11 AM on July 9, 2021
I saw the movie not long after it came out. I was around 7. It gave me nightmares for weeks.
posted by mareli at 3:56 AM on July 9, 2021
posted by mareli at 3:56 AM on July 9, 2021
Like the way DeMille tries to draw out some vague sense of mystery about the movie with all his questions audiences might ask, even if he spoilers half of them with the clips he provides. Glad he was inspired to flesh out all those bits in the bible that somehow got skipped. I don't know if it was divine inspiration used to fill it out, but, hey, entertaining inspiration works too, and he has lots of books, so I'm sure he got it right. Too bad they ditched the horns though, I would have enjoyed seeming Chuck decked out in antlers.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:27 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 4:27 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
DeMille also did a prologue to the Ten Commandments film itself (I can't recall precisely whether it gets showed with the rest of the film on TV) where he repeats a lot of this stuff and spins it into a whole red-blooded-American thing as well. "Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God?...."
This kind of "preachy" tone spilled over into the film, to my mind, and this was something that turned me off as a kid.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:27 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
This kind of "preachy" tone spilled over into the film, to my mind, and this was something that turned me off as a kid.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:27 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the memories, loquacious.
even if he spoilers half of them with the clips he provides.
at least he doesn't show the actual parting of the Red Sea. You had to go to the theatre for that. Nowadays, there's pretty much zero chance they'd keep the single greatest WOW moment of a movie out of the trailer.
and he has lots of books, so I'm sure he got it right.
pretty sure those are just props. Probably gussied up phoned books.
I saw the movie not long after it came out. I was around 7. It gave me nightmares for weeks.
I was twelve when I saw it, and it was 1972, sixteen years after the fact, a special Easter time re-release, because that's the kind of thing they did in those days way out in outer suburbia. My half-Catholic upbringing required weekly church attendance and a further hour of catechism class, but it was all less than half-hearted. Neither of my parents really believed. But my friend's mom did and she's the one that dragged us out to that theatre. Three Hours and Forty Minutes of ... whatever. I do distinctly recall that later that evening, my friend and I were hanging out down by the railway ravine, smoking cigarettes, getting drunk on red wine he'd stolen from his parents and eventually throwing up.
Is there a commandment against that?
posted by philip-random at 6:59 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
even if he spoilers half of them with the clips he provides.
at least he doesn't show the actual parting of the Red Sea. You had to go to the theatre for that. Nowadays, there's pretty much zero chance they'd keep the single greatest WOW moment of a movie out of the trailer.
and he has lots of books, so I'm sure he got it right.
pretty sure those are just props. Probably gussied up phoned books.
I saw the movie not long after it came out. I was around 7. It gave me nightmares for weeks.
I was twelve when I saw it, and it was 1972, sixteen years after the fact, a special Easter time re-release, because that's the kind of thing they did in those days way out in outer suburbia. My half-Catholic upbringing required weekly church attendance and a further hour of catechism class, but it was all less than half-hearted. Neither of my parents really believed. But my friend's mom did and she's the one that dragged us out to that theatre. Three Hours and Forty Minutes of ... whatever. I do distinctly recall that later that evening, my friend and I were hanging out down by the railway ravine, smoking cigarettes, getting drunk on red wine he'd stolen from his parents and eventually throwing up.
Is there a commandment against that?
posted by philip-random at 6:59 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
pretty sure those are just props. Probably gussied up phoned books.
Sacrilege! DeMille would do no such thing. He was 100% concerned with accuracy. I mean that's the impression he sends, surely he wouldn't lie, not about the bible!
at least he doesn't show the actual parting of the Red Sea. You had to go to the theatre for that.
And I did! After seeing the movie I don't know how many times growing up, I just had to see it when it played in it's rereleased 70MM format at the biggest screen in town. I made sure to sit myself front row center too, so when the Red Sea parted it was like it was parting for me personally!
(Needless to say, perhaps, but I'm a sucker for biblical epics and The Ten Commandments particularly. I used to watch it every Easter and still have a copy on VHS, but, sadly, haven't hooked my VCR up to watch it again in many years now. Feels like I should again sometime soon.)
posted by gusottertrout at 7:26 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
Sacrilege! DeMille would do no such thing. He was 100% concerned with accuracy. I mean that's the impression he sends, surely he wouldn't lie, not about the bible!
at least he doesn't show the actual parting of the Red Sea. You had to go to the theatre for that.
And I did! After seeing the movie I don't know how many times growing up, I just had to see it when it played in it's rereleased 70MM format at the biggest screen in town. I made sure to sit myself front row center too, so when the Red Sea parted it was like it was parting for me personally!
(Needless to say, perhaps, but I'm a sucker for biblical epics and The Ten Commandments particularly. I used to watch it every Easter and still have a copy on VHS, but, sadly, haven't hooked my VCR up to watch it again in many years now. Feels like I should again sometime soon.)
posted by gusottertrout at 7:26 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
^ are you a sucker for St. Patrick's Day epics also? The forced perspective tricks throughout this film, I tells ya.. I'm not endorsing the consumptions of psychoactive mushrooms to watch Darby O'Gill and the Little People, but I am not not endorsing it either.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:50 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by elkevelvet at 7:50 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]
Hah! You'd be hard pressed to have made a more apt guess. I've often defaulted to Darby O'Gill and the Little People as my "favorite" movie when pressed. By which I just mean watching it gives me great pleasure, no matter the faults or any deeper consideration. There are, of course, many other movies I could claim for that position depending on what I'd want to emphasize, but offering Darby is the most fun.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:01 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 8:01 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
"The Lord, the Lord Jehovah, has given unto you these fifteen...Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!"
"The five more Don'ts on the third tablet that Moses accidentally drops, are: Don't impregnate, Don't laugh, Don't buy, and the last one: Don't break."
posted by kirkaracha at 8:50 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]
"The five more Don'ts on the third tablet that Moses accidentally drops, are: Don't impregnate, Don't laugh, Don't buy, and the last one: Don't break."
posted by kirkaracha at 8:50 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]
gusottertrout, not to derail but I have to tell you.. just when the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly went from something on the news happening somewhere else, to a real possibility of total disruption in my world, we were at a St. Paddy's Day party and once the casual party-goers had left a few of us retired to a room and I was introduced to Darby O'Gill and the Little People. I'd had things to drink and I can vividly recall consuming an Irish Car Bomb (apologies, that is what the person called it as they handed it to me) from a previously used glass.. unimaginable today. Then some mushrooms, then that film. Dear lord. The party emptied after the film and I sat at a kitchen table with the host and listened to a lot of Irish music, and he played guitar like a madman and stamped his floor a great deal, then I put on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks for a while, then we sat there and I remember saying: "I think everything changes after this, I just have a feeling" and took a nap on his couch. I woke up to a Gus (son) and crept out in the early morning like a thief, again never forget Gus's face smiling from up the top of the stairs. The Monday we were told not to come into work, went to remote home office that week, and here we are. So Darby O'Gill is indelibly a piece of my life now.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:53 AM on July 9, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by elkevelvet at 9:53 AM on July 9, 2021 [5 favorites]
This kind of "preachy" tone spilled over into the film, to my mind, and this was something that turned me off as a kid.
Yeah, I remember watching The Ten Commandments with my religious family and grandparents and having it be a formative experience away from organized religion because it was impossible for me to reconcile the preachiness and FREEDOM message going on that did not mesh at all with what I knew about the blind obedience of modern organized Christianity in particular.
And then failing to reconcile all of that with how intensely sexualized the film really is, especially the costume design and Golden Age of Hollywood megastars of the day.
posted by loquacious at 10:17 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I remember watching The Ten Commandments with my religious family and grandparents and having it be a formative experience away from organized religion because it was impossible for me to reconcile the preachiness and FREEDOM message going on that did not mesh at all with what I knew about the blind obedience of modern organized Christianity in particular.
And then failing to reconcile all of that with how intensely sexualized the film really is, especially the costume design and Golden Age of Hollywood megastars of the day.
posted by loquacious at 10:17 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
Also, I'm wondering who the actual intended audience is for this short film.
It doesn't seem like it's meant for the general public, and I'm wondering if it was more for the studio and producers to beg for continued support and funding considering how massively overblown his budget was for this production.
He's obviously going for some kind of angle like "There's no bigger drama or story than this right here in the Holy Bible! It has everything! It's going to be HUGE!"
posted by loquacious at 10:28 AM on July 9, 2021
It doesn't seem like it's meant for the general public, and I'm wondering if it was more for the studio and producers to beg for continued support and funding considering how massively overblown his budget was for this production.
He's obviously going for some kind of angle like "There's no bigger drama or story than this right here in the Holy Bible! It has everything! It's going to be HUGE!"
posted by loquacious at 10:28 AM on July 9, 2021
Also, I'm wondering who the actual intended audience is for this short film.
It was for the general audience, and, joking aside, DeMille make a big deal about research for much the same reason. It helps hype the film to the wide audience. Theaters of the sort The Ten Commandments was likely to play in, the biggest screens at an inflated price for the "epic" quality and length, often ran shorts between films as part of a entertainment package. The linked short uses that as an excuse for what is essentially a long trailer, but one with "educational" value. There were also shorts made on Egypt Then and Now and press releases on the historical research being undertaken by DeMille's contact with authors who wrote about the era.
None of that is to say DeMille stuck to the research when push came to shove over the entertainment demands, but he used what he could fit to give the project an aura of seriousness. It helped sell the movie to church organizations and make it acceptable across the country as a movie of "importance", while also allowing him to play with special effects and spectacle like superhero movies do today. Moses is basically a superhero of sorts and the scale of the production made all the associated promotion necessary to sell the movie as a unique event. Things aren't all that different today, there are still all sorts of promotional gimmicks used to hype film events, not as trailers necessarily, but online and on TV and in magazines. The "Bond women" gimmick was used that way for years, glossy spreads of attractive women and speculation on who would be the next "Bond girl", franchise movie histories recounted at length or associated stories around some aspect of a blockbuster or pieces asserting some connection between an upcoming movie and some "science" or "history" are still found, DeMille was just an early exemplar of this technique.
His first Ten Commandments movie back in 1923 played with authority in a different but not unconnected way. That movie was split into two halves, with the first half showing the story of Moses and the flight from Egypt as big spectacle, but every scene was punctuated by quotations from the bible that were "proof" of the validity of what was being shown in lieu of dialogue title cards. The second half of the movie was set in current time where the lessons of the Ten Commandments were dramatized as a story about a pair of brothers, one pious and good, the other a doubter who sets out to show the commandments are a bunch of hooey by purposely violating them on his expected rise to the top. It was a big hit, but people mostly raved about the first half, which taught DeMille he didn't need to push as hard on the lessons and could rely on the spectacle for its own sake if there were sufficient historical excuse.
DeMille would vary the approach over the years, Kings of Kings in 1927 was a big hit in showing the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, with the spectacle coming in the earthquakes and tumult at the moment of death, while 1932's Sign of the Cross went all in on the pageantry with Nero's Rome. There gladiators battles, Christians fed to lions, sexy women sinners and assorted debauchery, provided for purely educational purposes of course, for what the audience shouldn't do. Uh-huh. That movie was marketed in different ways to various groups, some marketing amping up the religious angle of Christian persecution and deliverance, while other material hit on the scale and sights. 1934's Cleopatra did away with the bible part but kept the history and spectacle and still worked, even as the production code was coming into effect. So DeMille went for a different kind of historical epic with The Crusades and then turned to US history with a series of big pictures. He only went back to the bible in 1949 with Samson and Delilah, which wasn't at the same scale as Ten Commandments, more a warm up, but between them he made, appropriately enough, The Greatest Show on Earth an Oscar winning epic about the circus, which is kinda where DeMille's heart has always been.
Still though, he was an interesting director, his movies are sometimes filled with all sorts of objectionable material and are often hypocritical in how their mix of moralism and sensation, but he did have a gift for making them still somehow seem to have a logic of their own that works where many others would fail. He didn't only work in epic form, but even his smaller scale movies had something of a bizarre unreality of grandeur about them in how they were told and performed and some were just downright weird. His filmography isn't something I'd recommend to just anyone for all the really questionable or offensive elements and it isn't a body of work I'd talk about as being great, but there is something fascinating about it that makes DeMille's movies still stand out as something to puzzle and sometimes marvel over.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:00 AM on July 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
It was for the general audience, and, joking aside, DeMille make a big deal about research for much the same reason. It helps hype the film to the wide audience. Theaters of the sort The Ten Commandments was likely to play in, the biggest screens at an inflated price for the "epic" quality and length, often ran shorts between films as part of a entertainment package. The linked short uses that as an excuse for what is essentially a long trailer, but one with "educational" value. There were also shorts made on Egypt Then and Now and press releases on the historical research being undertaken by DeMille's contact with authors who wrote about the era.
None of that is to say DeMille stuck to the research when push came to shove over the entertainment demands, but he used what he could fit to give the project an aura of seriousness. It helped sell the movie to church organizations and make it acceptable across the country as a movie of "importance", while also allowing him to play with special effects and spectacle like superhero movies do today. Moses is basically a superhero of sorts and the scale of the production made all the associated promotion necessary to sell the movie as a unique event. Things aren't all that different today, there are still all sorts of promotional gimmicks used to hype film events, not as trailers necessarily, but online and on TV and in magazines. The "Bond women" gimmick was used that way for years, glossy spreads of attractive women and speculation on who would be the next "Bond girl", franchise movie histories recounted at length or associated stories around some aspect of a blockbuster or pieces asserting some connection between an upcoming movie and some "science" or "history" are still found, DeMille was just an early exemplar of this technique.
His first Ten Commandments movie back in 1923 played with authority in a different but not unconnected way. That movie was split into two halves, with the first half showing the story of Moses and the flight from Egypt as big spectacle, but every scene was punctuated by quotations from the bible that were "proof" of the validity of what was being shown in lieu of dialogue title cards. The second half of the movie was set in current time where the lessons of the Ten Commandments were dramatized as a story about a pair of brothers, one pious and good, the other a doubter who sets out to show the commandments are a bunch of hooey by purposely violating them on his expected rise to the top. It was a big hit, but people mostly raved about the first half, which taught DeMille he didn't need to push as hard on the lessons and could rely on the spectacle for its own sake if there were sufficient historical excuse.
DeMille would vary the approach over the years, Kings of Kings in 1927 was a big hit in showing the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, with the spectacle coming in the earthquakes and tumult at the moment of death, while 1932's Sign of the Cross went all in on the pageantry with Nero's Rome. There gladiators battles, Christians fed to lions, sexy women sinners and assorted debauchery, provided for purely educational purposes of course, for what the audience shouldn't do. Uh-huh. That movie was marketed in different ways to various groups, some marketing amping up the religious angle of Christian persecution and deliverance, while other material hit on the scale and sights. 1934's Cleopatra did away with the bible part but kept the history and spectacle and still worked, even as the production code was coming into effect. So DeMille went for a different kind of historical epic with The Crusades and then turned to US history with a series of big pictures. He only went back to the bible in 1949 with Samson and Delilah, which wasn't at the same scale as Ten Commandments, more a warm up, but between them he made, appropriately enough, The Greatest Show on Earth an Oscar winning epic about the circus, which is kinda where DeMille's heart has always been.
Still though, he was an interesting director, his movies are sometimes filled with all sorts of objectionable material and are often hypocritical in how their mix of moralism and sensation, but he did have a gift for making them still somehow seem to have a logic of their own that works where many others would fail. He didn't only work in epic form, but even his smaller scale movies had something of a bizarre unreality of grandeur about them in how they were told and performed and some were just downright weird. His filmography isn't something I'd recommend to just anyone for all the really questionable or offensive elements and it isn't a body of work I'd talk about as being great, but there is something fascinating about it that makes DeMille's movies still stand out as something to puzzle and sometimes marvel over.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:00 AM on July 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
There's always talk of how bad breaking the 10 commandments is...but you do realize who broke all ten of them first, right?
posted by sexyrobot at 2:34 PM on July 10, 2021
posted by sexyrobot at 2:34 PM on July 10, 2021
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