Whether as Moshe, Moussa or Moïse, one will certainly hold Moses in the highest regards if he belongs to one of the three one-God religions though several aspects of Moses' accomplishments won't leave non-believers indifferent (not every year in mankind history one man singlehandedly freed a whole people from whip-slashing tyranny and set the universal template of human laws). If none of that hits the right chord, then the movie fan will certainly be mind-blown by the way "The Ten Commandments" ticks every box of cinematic grandeur.
Yet the film didn't even earn a Best Director nomination for Cecil B. DeMille: a man who had the humility to remake his own 1923 version that he retrospectively judged imperfect and incomplete and who'd suffered a stroke during the shooting and yet kept on filming, reducing his life expectancy. To add insult to injury, Elmer Bernstein was also snubbed for a score that defines today the peplum genre, and the Best picture award went to "Around the World in 80 Days". I call "The Ten Commandments" the Rodney Dangerfield of classic films: it got no respect. (And in 2008, the AFI compiled the ten best epic films of all-time and I'm still puzzled that it ended in tenth position... or was it a numerical tribute?)
But time did justice to the film's legacy and even today's auteur dogmatic or superhero fans won't deny that the film features one of the most spectacular climax with no less than three iconic sequences one after the other, the parting of the Red Sea, the Mount Sinai tablet scene and perhaps the most iconic instance of party-pooping ever featured on screen, a thrilling and visually rewarding payback to a a three-hour buildup. Naturally, you shouldn't watch this film if you have a tight schedule, but it doesn't feel as long as it is: every scene builds to another, and chapters keep swelling up until the whole film literally splashes its splendor into our eyes like the Red Sea on Pharaoh's army.
I can hear a few skeptical minds criticizing the formalism of the more static moments, but such flaws are dwarfed by the cinematic wonders from the costume details to the architectural prowesses. Indeed, any glimpse at any panoramic scene shot in VisioRama, tells you that this is a director's movie, from the man who gave his name to a Directing achievement award, at a time where imagery was generated by practical effects, miniatures, matte painting backdrops and last resort: animation. De Mille was one of these pioneers who magnified 'directing', the man with plus-fours and megaphone sitting on the top of his chair ad yelling his instructions to hundreds of extras, the man Norma Desmond gave her greatest closeup to.
Before Spielberg, De Mille became a brandname for a certain vision of Cinema, a collective art, a commercial art to the degree that pleasing the audience was the one slavery he could accept even if a five-minute scene could mean months of preparations. Still, the film isn't there to show off its production value, there's a good deal of human drama in Moses' discovery of his own background and ensuing family dilemmas. There are quiet, cute, jolly moments relieving us from the whole heaviness of the project and emphasizing the human aspect in case we thought the film was just a matter of costumes, props, settings "Thou" this or "Shall" that. And so the success of the "Ten Commandments" is also the success of a casting.
De Mille, a true Renaissance Man, noticed Heston's strange resemblance to Michelangelo's Moses statue, that look of alpha-male majesty graved in his face and oozing from his proud gaze at his triumphant return from Ethiopian, we see a prince, a true royal and progressively, the solemnity of his endeavor growing until it culminated in the figure of the bearded wise old-man à la Gandalf. As his fraternal nemesis, Rameses II played by Yul Brynner is a young man consumed by power and ambition, and translating his hubris with hypnotic death glares. Cedric Hardwicke is the benevolent Pharaoh Sethi, Martha Scott plays Moses' mother and as Nefethiri, Anne Baxter gives the most divisive performance as the slightly over-the-top but sneakily seductive woman who only cares for one thing: getting Moses. She still have the most memorable line of all :"Oh Moses you stubborn, adorable fool". Judith Anderson plays the stern Memeth who triggers the plot. John Derek is the brave Joshue, and the greedy and treacherous Dathan's part was offered to Edward G. Robinson, a thankless role that he pulled off wonderfully.
So even the little pictures within the big picture offer full satisfaction, though we all know what parts earned the film its ticket to immortality. And so there's a reason why this is the scene was replicated, in "The Simpsons", "Mel Brooks" or "Bruce Almighty", standing out from a year that featuredmany three-hour long movies. But the 50s audiences didn't really care: interrogating Charlton Heston as a mystery guest in "What's My Line", panelist Bennet Cerf said: "Are you a star in one of these endurance-contest pictures" he rephrased himself and called them "four-hour jobs, super colossal spectacles", thinking of "War and Peace" or "Giant" or the year's Best Picture winner. See, that's how the film was regarded, one blockbuster among many others. And since De Mille won the Best Picture for the lesser "Greatest Show on Earth", the Academy didn't think he was due a second tribute.
But those considerations hardly matter as the film became the highest-grossing of all time, before "Ben-Hur", consecrating De Mille a cinematic film-Maker. And like the Makers addressing his followers, De Mille prepares us to his creation right before the credits roll. Interesting that Hitchcock did that the same year with "The Wrong Man", that was a time where directing meant something, where drama could be found in the Holy Scriptures and prophets were the actual super-men. Today, we have comics superheroes. O tempora, o mores...
Yet the film didn't even earn a Best Director nomination for Cecil B. DeMille: a man who had the humility to remake his own 1923 version that he retrospectively judged imperfect and incomplete and who'd suffered a stroke during the shooting and yet kept on filming, reducing his life expectancy. To add insult to injury, Elmer Bernstein was also snubbed for a score that defines today the peplum genre, and the Best picture award went to "Around the World in 80 Days". I call "The Ten Commandments" the Rodney Dangerfield of classic films: it got no respect. (And in 2008, the AFI compiled the ten best epic films of all-time and I'm still puzzled that it ended in tenth position... or was it a numerical tribute?)
But time did justice to the film's legacy and even today's auteur dogmatic or superhero fans won't deny that the film features one of the most spectacular climax with no less than three iconic sequences one after the other, the parting of the Red Sea, the Mount Sinai tablet scene and perhaps the most iconic instance of party-pooping ever featured on screen, a thrilling and visually rewarding payback to a a three-hour buildup. Naturally, you shouldn't watch this film if you have a tight schedule, but it doesn't feel as long as it is: every scene builds to another, and chapters keep swelling up until the whole film literally splashes its splendor into our eyes like the Red Sea on Pharaoh's army.
I can hear a few skeptical minds criticizing the formalism of the more static moments, but such flaws are dwarfed by the cinematic wonders from the costume details to the architectural prowesses. Indeed, any glimpse at any panoramic scene shot in VisioRama, tells you that this is a director's movie, from the man who gave his name to a Directing achievement award, at a time where imagery was generated by practical effects, miniatures, matte painting backdrops and last resort: animation. De Mille was one of these pioneers who magnified 'directing', the man with plus-fours and megaphone sitting on the top of his chair ad yelling his instructions to hundreds of extras, the man Norma Desmond gave her greatest closeup to.
Before Spielberg, De Mille became a brandname for a certain vision of Cinema, a collective art, a commercial art to the degree that pleasing the audience was the one slavery he could accept even if a five-minute scene could mean months of preparations. Still, the film isn't there to show off its production value, there's a good deal of human drama in Moses' discovery of his own background and ensuing family dilemmas. There are quiet, cute, jolly moments relieving us from the whole heaviness of the project and emphasizing the human aspect in case we thought the film was just a matter of costumes, props, settings "Thou" this or "Shall" that. And so the success of the "Ten Commandments" is also the success of a casting.
De Mille, a true Renaissance Man, noticed Heston's strange resemblance to Michelangelo's Moses statue, that look of alpha-male majesty graved in his face and oozing from his proud gaze at his triumphant return from Ethiopian, we see a prince, a true royal and progressively, the solemnity of his endeavor growing until it culminated in the figure of the bearded wise old-man à la Gandalf. As his fraternal nemesis, Rameses II played by Yul Brynner is a young man consumed by power and ambition, and translating his hubris with hypnotic death glares. Cedric Hardwicke is the benevolent Pharaoh Sethi, Martha Scott plays Moses' mother and as Nefethiri, Anne Baxter gives the most divisive performance as the slightly over-the-top but sneakily seductive woman who only cares for one thing: getting Moses. She still have the most memorable line of all :"Oh Moses you stubborn, adorable fool". Judith Anderson plays the stern Memeth who triggers the plot. John Derek is the brave Joshue, and the greedy and treacherous Dathan's part was offered to Edward G. Robinson, a thankless role that he pulled off wonderfully.
So even the little pictures within the big picture offer full satisfaction, though we all know what parts earned the film its ticket to immortality. And so there's a reason why this is the scene was replicated, in "The Simpsons", "Mel Brooks" or "Bruce Almighty", standing out from a year that featuredmany three-hour long movies. But the 50s audiences didn't really care: interrogating Charlton Heston as a mystery guest in "What's My Line", panelist Bennet Cerf said: "Are you a star in one of these endurance-contest pictures" he rephrased himself and called them "four-hour jobs, super colossal spectacles", thinking of "War and Peace" or "Giant" or the year's Best Picture winner. See, that's how the film was regarded, one blockbuster among many others. And since De Mille won the Best Picture for the lesser "Greatest Show on Earth", the Academy didn't think he was due a second tribute.
But those considerations hardly matter as the film became the highest-grossing of all time, before "Ben-Hur", consecrating De Mille a cinematic film-Maker. And like the Makers addressing his followers, De Mille prepares us to his creation right before the credits roll. Interesting that Hitchcock did that the same year with "The Wrong Man", that was a time where directing meant something, where drama could be found in the Holy Scriptures and prophets were the actual super-men. Today, we have comics superheroes. O tempora, o mores...