The Ten Commandments Experience
Reflections on a Very Oscar movie from a very different Oscar age.
Before watching it, in stages, with my kids last week — mostly for the sake of an Egypt-obsessed five-year-old, who got a bit more than he bargained for — I would have told you that I had seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as a kid. But I’m not quite sure that’s true. I had seen pieces of the movie, scattered sections and scenes and set-pieces in the days when it played on television every Easter weekend. But the whole thing, all two hundred and twenty minutes from start to finish? No, I doubt it: I probably “saw” the movie the way I “read” Ulysses in college, as a piecemeal experience rather than a sustained engagement with the text.
And what a text! The Ten Commandments is a fascinating watch on many levels, but especially against the backdrop of the Oscars’ slow decline into a festival of the small and worthy and little-seen, because it embodies an era of the opposite extreme: A time when the Academy Awards tended to reward movies for their teeming bigness, their cast-of-thousands technicolor glory, their heaving melodrama, sometimes without much regard to script or quality at all.
Indeed if you were going to pick a polar-opposite Oscar year to the 2020 Oscars, 1956, the year of DeMille’s Exodus epic, wouldn’t be a bad choice. (So would 1952, when DeMille won Best Picture for The Greatest Show On Earth, which wasn’t.) The Ten Commandments earned seven Oscar nominations but it didn’t win Best Picture in ‘56; that honor went to Around the World in 80 Days, an endless travelogue in which basically every movie star of the era has a cameo. Meanwhile the other nominees were historical melodramas of one sort or another: The aptly-named Giant, the Quakers-in-the-Civil-War drama Friendly Persuasion, and The King and I, for which Yul Brynner won Best Actor; sadly he wasn’t nominated for his turn as Ramses in The Ten Commandments, so he didn’t get to compete against himself.
Hollywood back then was on the cusp of a golden period for Best Picture winners: Between 1960 and 1965 the successive victors were The Apartment, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and A Man for All Seasons. But in the later 1950s both the winners and the nominees were more of a mixed bag, the industry was caught somewhat between cultural moments, and you ended up with a lot of nominees and winners that were very very “Oscar” without being particularly good.
Is The Ten Commandments itself good? I’m not quite sure how to answer that. It has a definite between-times quality: Its making included an on-location shoot that anticipated the greater realism of later historical epics, but mostly its Egypt has the feel of a lavish but palpably-artificial studio set. The acting style, stentorian and bombastic and declamatory, goes back to De Mille’s silent-movie roots; at the same time, the pioneering special-effects look forward to, well, our own era, with every Avengers super-battle anticipated in the parting of the Red Sea:
Some of the old-timey aspects of the movie will make you appreciate the subsequent turns toward greater naturalism in acting and greater realism in historical re-creation. Or, maybe more aptly, toward greater pseudo-realism, since the use of sets and scripts and costumes and accents in, say, a Ridley Scott historical epic doesn’t necessarily get you that much closer to the reality of the past than the stage-y declamations, warring accents and conspicuous Eisenhower-era vibes in The Ten Commandments. But still there is a ridiculousness to some of the anachronisms on display that yanks you out of the story, and even if the reconstruction of the past in Braveheart or Amadeus or Gladiator or Unforgiven is artificial in its own way, those movies have a more convincing artificiality, whereas what DeMille is doing can feel much more like a stage production, and not a particularly subtle one at that.
On the other hand, there are sequences in The Ten Commandments that have a power that you almost never get from the way that epics are filmed today. When the Hebrews finally leave Egypt, for instance, it’s the kind of scene that in the modern special-effects movie would inevitably pull up to a God’s-eye view, with computer-generated caravans as far as the eye can see, punctuated maybe by a close-up of our stars and a couple of cute-kid shots. Deprived of that soaring FX option, in DeMille you get a much more wide ranging human-scale perspective: He’s assembled his crowd of extras, and he’s going to keep the camera moving through the crowd for as long as daylight lasts and union rules permit, giving us the Exodus as a democratic experience, not just a matter for gods and kings and prophets:
As for what hasn’t changed much at all between the old epics and the new — well, politics, for one thing: The ideology has changed but Hollywood has always been politically didactic, and if you don’t like modern politics woven into your Biblical epics, you won’t care for The Ten Commandments. Like a current historical drama channeling woke ideas, it reimagines Exodus as a text for Cold War liberals, with critiques of absolute state power (Pharaoh was the first Stalinist, apparently) and racial discrimination threaded through its respectful Judeo-Christian piety.
At the same time if you only like respectful Judeo-Christian piety The Ten Commandments is also not for you, because until its burning-bush midpoint this is mostly a movie about political ambition and sexual desire, with the throne of Egypt and the body of Moses — the sinewy and mostly-shirtless body of Charlton Heston, that is — as its two versions of the promised land.
The dominant character in that first drama is neither Moses himself, played by Heston before his conversion with a golden smugness, nor Brynner’s resentful prince. It’s Anne Baxter as Princess Nefertari, in a performance so ripe and rich and lustful that it both justifies the entire movie and also bends and warps and subverts its official pious story.
Baxter, aka Eve Harrington from All About Eve, isn’t particularly plausible as an Egyptian princess circa 1200 B.C., but because the movie is too old-fashioned to conjure up a pseudo-realistic ancient Egypt that deficiency doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is that DeMille is selling outsize human drama, extremes of passion and ambition and desire, and Baxter delivers the whole melodramatic gamut, from the pridefully coquettish early going …
… to the embittered, savage end:
The performance casts such a spell that she doesn’t just dominate the Egyptian game of thrones. Baxter also creates a kind of secular, critical commentary on the religious goings-on thereafter — one accentuated by the way Heston plays the older Moses as a sternly inhuman figure (which is not exactly the way he comes across in the biblical text), a beyond-all-natural-emotion vessel for divine purposes. In the movie the under-Sinai Hebrew rebellion against YHWH, the orgy and the Golden Calf, just seems moronic (if entertaining): The God of Moses literally just parted the Red Sea for you and you’re pining for Egypt and throwing trinkets to a statue? But earlier, between Heston’s stony man-of-destiny performance while Nefertari pleads for her son’s life and the (highly-effective) horror-movie effects as the Angel of Death prowls Egypt, you have the makings of a Hitchens-esque or Marcionite moral case against the Old Testament God … with Baxter as the sympathetic rebel, all raw human emotion and passion and desire, against the inhuman, North-Korean-dictator punishments dealt out by the divine.
Of course step back and you’re still in a story where Egypt is the actual North Korean slave state, Nefertari is its spoiled and ruthless slavemistress, and her passions are precisely what goad Brynner’s Pharaoh into refusing to free the Hebrews despite being warned about the awful price.
So I’m not suggesting that DeMille was really of the devil’s party, or that The Ten Commandments in its totality inspires sympathy for Egypt. I’m just marveling at what Baxter does with her part and with the story’s unabashed melodrama — and at how much power there can be, when you give yourself over to it, in a certain kind of ripe theatricality that would be snickered off the screen today.