I was watching TV last night when the announcer said something along the lines of regular programming being suspended for a special presentation… of Cecil B De Mille’s “Ten Commandments”. Originally made in 1956, that thing is now damn near 70 years old (I looked that up later – I knew it was the 1950s or early 1960s but wasn’t completely certain – the phrase that stuck when I did look it up was ” The daddy of all contemporary religious instruction, 1956’s “The Ten Commandments” is blockbuster spiritual entertainment in every way, shape and form” and there’s so much in there that needs unpacking… the whole idea of creative patriarchy (the “daddy” of it all)… the idea of “blockbuster spiritual entertainment”…) and just a rough scan of the actors in the starring roles confirms that they’re all pushing up daisies now and even those in the bit parts that are still alive have got to be in their nineties today.Can I just say that it kind of had a special place in my own core family because my mother was a schoolgirl-giggly fangirl of Charlton Heston (I once had occasion to engineer her meeting the man, at a book signing, and I swear, she *simpered*).
The entire thing is very much a product of its time, a proverbial time capsule, but as soon as I heard the title spoken on the TV… I saw most of the movie unspool in the back of my head. I first saw it oh so many years ago, and then probably re-saw it once or twice since, but i’s WEIRD how it “stuck”. I could pretty much quite entire scenes from memory.
So,curious to see how it held up over those seven decades, I stayed put in my armchair with both cats snoozing quite happily draped over whatever part of me they could reach, and I watched. The. Whole. Damn,. Thing. All the four-plus hours of it. I actually ended up going to bed well past midnight. Was the experiment worth it? well… almost. It was a touchstone to Mom, after all, if nothing else. Was I entertained? Well… yeah, I was. But like I said, product of its time.
Here are a few random thoughts on the matter.
The SFX. Yes, the parting of the Red Sea (and its consequent re-formation on top of the Egyptian charioteers) was something that I remembered vividly from my original viewing(s) . But the whole sonorous “I AM GOD” episodes and the Burning Bush that wasn’t so much burning as giving out an orange glow and that Voice declaiming rather peevishly “thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s” – well – it’s kind of funny today. The green miasma that comes falling out of the sky to creep around Egyptian streets plucking out the first-borns is straight out of one of those period British horror movies. Turning the Nile into blood is fine but what the movie actually showed was dyeing the river red – it still behaved and sloshed as water behaves and sloshes, not like the much more viscous blood would have done. But okay, they did what they could with what they had. I’m sure that it all must have been absolutely flooring to audiences at the time. I’m of the generation that has seen entire planets blow up on screen (good bye, Alderaan…) and just a pillar of fire or a disembodied voice kind of stuck up there on Mount Sinai carry considerably less weight than they used to. C’mon, an all powerful god can do better than THAT… also, as a side note, after all this time I remembered that Golden Calf, like, perfectly. What dark magic was worked to sear that image into my brain??
The characters and the worldbuilding. Look, Yul Brynner can’t help being a brooding he-man with a snarl engraved on his face. One plays to one’s strengths, and his was just that. His role in this movie was The Bad Guy, really, right down to downright threatening in so many words the upcoming and ongoing rape of his wife-to-be. But something occurred to me during this viewing that I hadn’t even really thought about before – ALL EGYPT’S FIRST-BORN were slated to die on that awful night – and that included Rameses’s own son – but was not Rameses himself in fact a first-born, if he were the heir to Pharaoh? And if he was then how come HE didn’t keel over too when that green mist of doom came curling in? It doesn’t matter that he was a man grown – other adults died, if first born in their own right, as exemplified by one of his own soldiers who dropped dead right in front of him and was acknowledged as a first-born son by his father who was also on that rooftop. So if the mist was up there killing first-born sons…why was Rameses still standing? And if he had older brothers, how come he had been the kingdom’s heir, how come he became Pharaoh? In other words, plothole alert, he could have just been erased by Moses’s god’s plague, and that would have been enough to end things right there. So, yeah. That. As for Moses himself I think that by the end of this movie Charlton Heston probably believed he WAS Moses, at least his reincarnation. Sorry, Mama, but the man could ham it up theatrically and the sheer messianic intensity that radiates off of him in this movie must have burned up some celluloid back when it was first shot. Also, I could buy his transformation to the wild hair and the beard after his first visit with God on Mount SInai, but I’m sorry, that fake Santa Claus white beard they stuck on him in the final scene of the movie just made me laugh out loud which sort of wrecked the drama of it all. (also, yeah, the stale old joke of the Israelites wandering around for 40 years in the wilderness because Moses was a man and simply could not ask for directions did meander into my back brain…) Nefertiri was portrayed as basically a spoiled royal bitch (which was probably closer to the truth than it needed to be…) and as for Jethro’s daughters… let me just say that one of the main reasons I remember this movie with a sort of helpless hysterical laughter was the gaggle of daughters – complete with coiffed hair, manicured hands, and accents straight out of a sorority house from some small regional mid-west American college, crowding around the sleeping Moses exclaiming “Oh! Look! A MAN!” For a clutch of itinerant nomadic shepherdesses, they looked remarakably soignee, and also, their clothes – I would love to know from what natural dye easily obtainable to these people those vivid oranges and pinks and scarlet reds and deep blues and near-purples came from, every single daughter’s veil and skirts a different rich colour, in their dance scene in Jethro’s tent. And the eldest sister, the one Moses married, often referred to as Zipporah but in this movie as Sephora (and oh by the way isn’t it rich that one of the world’s most famous make-up and cosmetics brands bears the same name, after Nefertiri disparages her as “smelling of garlic” and mocking the rough skin of her working hands and desert-scoured body) is such a complete antithesis to Nefertiri in every way – serene, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, philosophical, wise, modest, god-fearing, calm, obedient. And yet still gobsmackingly gorgeous, beautiful enough to stand beside the Egyptian queen and not be eclipsed by her. How lucky can a guy get? And also, at a slightly different tangent, how come Joshua always looked so OILED in every scene? It’s like he took twice-daily baths in extra-virgin olive oil. And let’s just say that okay I am in no way an expert on the matter at all – but the Israelites leaving Egypt on the basis of “Let my people go” and then doing so accompanied by flocks and herds – by sheep, by goats, by camels, by mules, by ducks and geese for the love of god (how were the fowl supposed to be herded out on the out-of-Egypt trail?) – and carrying enough “spoils of Egypt” to make a golden calf out of (what did you leave behind, so that you could cart a golden vase the size of the one depicted in the GOlden Calf orgy with you? And for what purpose did you intend that golden urn to be put once you arrived?) – and also carrying enough “party clothes” to put on their glad rags during the party party party scene of the making of the GOlden Calf – I mean, as portrayed in most of the movie these were people who lived in hovels, who were worked to the bone into ripe old age, who could not (until Moses came and decreed a day of rest for them every so often) even be sure that they could take a good night’s sleep or get a square meal… these were slaves, well below the bottom-most social rung in a society of that nature – how would people like that have even owned any lifestock? How would they have fed such livestock? Where would they have kept them? And if they didn’t own these animals – where on earth did that swell of braying honking grunting squawking animal accompaniment come from, as they all swept out of Egypt into exile? (and yes yes I know – god, and all that – but such a magnitude of animal accompaniment would have needed a helluvalot of feed on the way, not to mention an urgent need of A LOT of water – camels can endure a prolonged desert sojourn but horses cannot without being watered and there didn’t, ahem, seem to be all that much water in evidence where they were going – or did Moses just stamp the ground with that magic staff of his and create a lake every time they stopped moving for the night and set up camp? (yes yes I know. I am trying to apply logic to a legend of faith. but I am a writer. That is how my brain is wired)
Societal context. Look I know it was the times – and even such utterly (otherwise) wholesome movies like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” falls foul of that – but there is such a… rapey… undercurrent to something like this. Lilia who submits to rape because she’s saving Joshua. The almost light-hearted threats of Rameses to Nerfertiri (“I will have all of you. and I will enjoy it. And I suspect you will too.”) The underlying covert and every now and then very overt hints of what was going on around the Golden Calf during the bacchanale as portrayed; and the absolute conviction of men like Dathan that they were OWED female flesh on demand. It is impossible to watch it today without being aware of that, and it IS there. In that era, nudity was less prevalent on screen but the female form was often portrayed as wrapped in such a way to ensure that nudity was hinted at very strongly and, well, a lot can be implied by a camera’s lingering loving look at a woman’s arched bare foot and lissom naked ankle and a flash of pale thigh revealed by a conveniently slit or ripped costume. We won’t even talk about the male beefcake on display here (man, did Heston show a lot of CHEST and MANLY LEGS in this movie, above and below loinclothy strategic coverings for his middle…) Also, the stern context of this entire movie – which is often delivered by clue-by-fours in the script – even the words “Holy Scriptures” as shown in the credits had their own personal private and very specific font to ensure that everyone watching this KNEW that they watching the Word of God rendered unto Hollywood…) – this was aimed at a specific audience, the kind that went to tidy little churches every Sunday with the women wearing modest skirts and sensible shoes and hats and white gloves and the men leading families in like a little patriarch of their own. Although this is the literal story of Passover and of one of Judaism’s greatest heroes, it was probably not specifically aimed at Jews themselves. This is the Christian God looking back with nostalgia at his Old Testament roots, and the worshippers of that Christian God giving themselves pats on the back about how deep their own faith goes (even if it happens to be rooted in another faith entirely, but we won’t dig too deep into that…).
So, anyway. I watched “The Ten Commandments”.
It is probably for the last time. It was an interesting experiment, spending those four hours immersed in this thing – they don’t make movies like this any more – but I’ve archived it now. I remember most of it well enough not to need to see it on-screen again (the Bedouin sorority’s “oh, look, A MAN” is going to live with me till the day I die I suspect).
Go down, Moses. Go on, cross into the Promised Land already. Farewell to an epic film which I will never watch again.