Ten Commandments, The (DVD)

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I remember when I first saw "The Ten Commandments" with my parents in 1956, I was more than a little awestruck by the sheer size of the production. I mean, this thing was bigger than "Gone With the Wind," and to a kid, that meant big! Ever since then, "The Ten Commandments" has been my benchmark of comparison for all super spectaculars, even though my DVD viewing of it was the only time I'd seen it in more than forty years.

Director Cecil B. DeMille went out in a blaze of glory with this epic, and, maybe a little surprisingly, it holds up well even by today's high-tech standards. It all seems a bit more hokey now than it did those many years ago, of course, the acting appearing somewhat stilted and the situations melodramatic; but it's still fun and fascinating, and a special treat for the eyes.

Everyone knows the story from having been to the movies or read the Book. It's nothing less than the life of Moses, his rearing as a Prince of Egypt, his leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egyptian bondage, and his receiving the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Charlton Heston plays Moses (or Moses plays Charlton Heston, I can't remember which; Heston played so many bigger-than-life characters in the fifties and sixties, it's hard to know). He's stiff, to be sure, but he invests the character of Moses with an appropriate solemnity, majesty, and humanness.

Yul Brynner plays Moses' nemesis, the stiff-necked Pharaoh Rameses; Anne Baxter and Yvonne DeCarlo are the women in Moses' life, Nefretiri and Sephora; Edward G. Robinson is Dathan, the sniveling, traitorous Hebrew overseer; Debra Paget is Lilia, the beautiful slave girl old Dathan covets; Judith Anderson is the creepy servant (shades of her Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's "Rebecca") who knows all about Moses' secret Hebrew identity; and John Derek is appropriately hairy and heroic as Joshua, the young Hebrew leader. Also in the cast are Nina Foch, Vincent Price, John Carradine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and, in a cameo appearance, H.B. Warner, who played Christ in DeMille's 1927 "King of Kings."

The film is introduced and narrated by DeMille himself. The entire cast perform as though they know this is an "Important Motion Picture," every utterance a solemn pronouncement or proclamation, like a campus production of "King Lear." More posturing and pomposity transpire than we generally tolerate on the screen nowadays, but in spite of this, or maybe even because of its campiness, the film remains enjoyable, delivering plenty of drama and moving forward at a healthy clip.

Much of "The Ten Commandments" was filmed on location in the Middle East, and it is in these scenes that the visuals are most impressive. Big, beautiful panoramas of mountains and desert are quite stunning. In contrast, the studio shots seem all the more stage-bound, but that is a convention of movies we all live with.

Still, it's the big special effects that remain in memory: The glorious city and temple-building scenes, the Burning Bush, the plagues on Egypt, Moses receiving the stone tablets, and, certainly, the parting of the Red Sea, still looking every bit as astonishing today as it did those many years ago.