Thanks to Coronavirus, I’m shut-in more than I usually am, which means more watching TV.  I was flipping around when I realized that ABC is STILL showing The Ten Commandments around Passover, so I decided to watch it start to finish (with a long break at the intermission).  There were two films that used to get annual showings on TV, The Wizard of Oz and The Ten Commandments.  Both were events for Generation X kids.  Unfortunately, even if network TV is still carrying this tradition forward, it doesn’t matter to most.  Times have changed too much.  There are too many entertainment choices.  But it’s significant enough for me to be motivated to write about it here.

I don’t know the last time I saw this movie.  It was probably the early 90s.  But this was the first time I’ve seen it on HD.  The last remaster of the movie happened fairly recently, back in 2010, and judged purely on the look and nothing else, it was a revelation.  It’s remarkable what modern digital restoration techniques can do with increasingly old and fragile movies.  This movie does NOT look its age.  I could not see a single scratch or dust spec on it.  The picture was rock solid and very little visual film grain. Given that visual spectacle is the main attraction, this significantly enhanced the entertainment experience compared to my old recollections.

In addition to this, I’m sure I could google and find out, but what I remember being a feature of The Ten Commandments back in the day were these dissolves that seemed to prematurely end some talky scenes.  I got the sense that these edits were part of the original cut, and perhaps they were if there was a shorter theatrical version.  But the version I saw wasn’t technically ABC but a rip of the blu-ray (since I had tuned into the broadcast late) and I noticed none of these scene transition dissolves.  This may have made the movie longer, but it looked far more polished.

That being said, the worst technical aspect of the movie is how much bluescreen is utilized.  Back in the day if you shot in a soundstage you could use rear projection or a backdrop painting but rarely would you resort to a bluescreen.  Here, though, bluescreen is used a lot and you wind up with a lot of black fringing and when they dolly or zoom in, the background doesn’t change with it, so it has a look almost like the evening weatherman.  This is a shame because there is so much location photography intermingled as well as several high-budget FX sequences, most famously the parting of the red sea which was held up as one of the best special effects shots of all time, and for good reason.

I can’t claim to be an aficionado on the movie or how it was made, though.  It’s more of me offering the thoughts I had watching it based on my memories and contrasting then vs. now.

As Generation X I set at almost a perfect midpoint between the 1950s and today.  This movie was as old to me then as movies from the 80s are now.  One key difference culturally then vs. now is how older material is judged.  There was an almost universal reverence for “classic” movies back in the 80s.  Today with all of the rebooting and remixing there is a strong desire to bash the past, to use old entertainment as a sign of how far we’ve come.  And I’m sure there’s plenty of ammo to cause outrage, cringe, and laughter here.  But I’m not going to be one of them.

Now, for the record, Charlton Heston was in two key biblical epics, this one and Ben-Hur.  Ben-Hur is the better overall movie, but The Ten Commandments has more guts to it in being that much MORE pretentious.  I mean, Ben-Hur himself was ultimately a fictional bit-player in the course of history, whereas The Ten Commandments is about Moses himself.  The only modern analog I can think of is Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, as far as asking the audience to sit down and treat what they are about to see as “serious business”.  This is increasingly hard to do thanks to the snickering and deconstructing impulses of the distracted generation.  But I made it a point to watch this in two uninterrupted sessions.  To the film’s credit, I can say that at no point did it ever really drag.  There is a LOT of narrative territory to cover, but there is something going on worth my attention at all times.  That’s not an easy feat over this long of a runtime.

It helps to have good source material to work from.  The Moses story, whether you treat it as history or fiction, is a classic monomyth, and you can see echoes of it in lots of places.  The two that come to mind the most are Superman, The Lion King, and the nu-Planet of the Apes films with Caesar.  It also made me think a bit more about the choice of Zack Snyder to portray Krypton as an evil empire rather than the original concept of it being a utopia.  It seems that MAY have been intended to drive home the Moses connection a bit more.  Not that I liked Man of Steel because I am ultimately a Superman purist, but maybe that choice makes more sense if that’s the rationale.  There is also the comparison with different tellings of the same tale, like the earlier silent version (which I haven’t seen) and Prince of Egypt (which I have, back in 1998, hence memories are hazy).

The reason The Ten Commandments works is that it is surprisingly grounded and human.  It sets up multiple dilemmas which are not always so clear-cut.  The push-pull of these dilemmas is what drives the narrative.  The first half of the movie works better because characters are riding on such a knife’s edge of competing loyalties.  Once the battle-lines are clearly drawn then there’s less for Moses to do other than fulfill his destiny one step at a time, with a couple major speedbumps to overcome.

The first film I covered in this blog is Cult of the Cobra.  I have a particular fascination with morally ambiguous characters, especially ones classified as antagonists who exhibit a guilty conscience.  I like redemption stories like Vader in Return of the Jedi but there’s something about remorse or stepping away from the abyss that fascinates me.  Jules in Pulp Fiction (a movie I haven’t watched in ages) is a good literal example.  He gets “out” of the system and Travolta’s character does not.  In The Ten Commandments, Moses and Ramesses start out in exactly the same place and you can watch each of them make decisions that lead them, step by step, to their ultimate fate.  So I found the Ramesses story more interesting insofar as he passed by opportunity after opportunity to do the right thing, and he didn’t.  But it’s not quite that simple.  The right thing is not the easy thing.  Concience bumps up against tradition and popular support in the streets.  You are expected to hold up the status quo, whether it’s moral or not.  Upsetting the applecart is dangerous even if your conscience wanted to, and in Ramesses case it did not.

That brings me to my biggest disappointment with the film.  By starting Ramesses off jealous of his brother, it made him too much of a one-note villain.  If they had made him more sympathetic and less superficial, then you could see him buckle and wither in response to fear, obligation, and ambition, rather than for him to already be driven by negative emotions.  Yul Brynner makes an awesome heavy but he would probably have struggled to portray a more sympathetic Ramesses in the early scenes, but it is what it is.

The brotherly conflict is amplified by Anne Baxter, notable if nothing else for a famous wardrobe malfunction that’s easier to make out in a still than in motion.

This looked like more of a bra seam when I was watching it.

Nefertiri acts as a wondeful femme fatale and love-triangle.  Watching it now rather than as a kid and having experienced more of life I can appreciate Nefertiri’s motivations more.  Like Mirage in The Incredibles, she’s attracted to power.  Nevertheless, she prefers Moses even though Ramesses ascends to Pharaoh.  Why?  It doesn’t seem to be because of the goodness of his heart.  In fact, it just seems like she just has some sort of chemical attraction to him, that he’s her “type”.  Only at the very end when she’s lost her son does she come to hate Moses, but as they say, hate isn’t the opposite of love.  Indifference is.

For a G-rated movie, this film skirts the line in ways I wasn’t quite aware of back in the day.  It just does so in coded, almost poetic language.  For instance, at one point Ramesses asks her if she fantasizes about Moses when he’s having sex with her.   Then there’s this:

You will come to me whenever I call, and I will enjoy it very much, whether you enjoy it or not is your own affair…but I think you will.

Then you have the #MeToo subplot involving Vincent Price and then Edward G Robinson.  And then in the Golden Calf sequence the people engage in what is supposed to be implied as an orgy but it comes across as more of a choreographed dance rave.

Compare that indirect approach to the direct, crude, graphic approach of Game of Thrones:

Have things really improved?  Just because you can go there doesn’t mean you should.

The women in the film, most notably Anne Baxter and Yvonne DeCarlo (long before becoming Lily Munster) glide and prance around the screen, often in elaborate Edith Head (also in The Incredibles, sortof) outfits and are just the epitome of glamour.  The staging of scenes, perhaps due to Cecil B Demille’s background, is just that, stagey.  Closeups are few and far between.  Characters stare slightly off-camera when they would normally be face to face.  It is, if nothing else, stylized, and that’s OK.  There’s not a single handheld shaky-cam shot to be found.  It is everything that modern films are not, and that’s a feature, not a flaw.

The 50s really were the peak of the golden age of cinema, or at least the last hurrah, as these kinds of movies were made in order to compete with television.  If there’s a clear connection-point between then and now it’s that.  Movies are that much MORE threatened by TV now than then, hence the continual upping of the ante on spectacle.  I’ve been critical of this many times in this blog, but there’s enough going on here that the spectacle alone isn’t the only draw.  The same can’t be said of, let’s say, Valerian.

Spectacle in the context of this time period was part and parcel of making movie worlds seem larger than life.  And it just seemed like the entire package that was presented did a better job of it then than now, especially when it comes to the actors as stars.  Much has been said about the end of celebrity as American royalty, like the backlash stars have received for how they’ve handled the Coronavirus lockdown.  Back in the 1950s stars had carefully curated images, both public and private.  Sure, it was a concoction, but that was the whole IDEA.  That’s what we WANTED.  We wanted larger-than-life and that’s what we got.  Today, we know far too much about celebrities, too many things to turn us off, outrage us, disgust us.  And when they play a role, they are really inhabiting IP rather than being the main draw, as is the case with comic book movies.  It’s very hard to think of actors as stars anymore.  But back then, they were stars.

When I first got into film and TV I put actors on a pedestal.  It wasn’t until a bad experience I had with William Shatner that my bubble started the burst.  But a big part of enjoying entertainment, and music too, was seeing these people as larger than life and blurring the line between the roles they played and who they may have been in reality.  I guess it was inevitable as I get older it would be harder to maintain that illusion but everything about modern entertainment makes it that much harder to do.

I guess you could say Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was musing on that topic, or long before that, Sunset Boulevard, but I think that it takes either a lot of naivete or a lot of courage to make films the old fashioned way, presenting a highly stylized, idealized filter upon reality.  It’s just been so long since things became more realistic, darker, grittier, that a lot of people feel that’s the way everything should be and if it’s not, well, it’s outdated, obsolete, or even offensive.  It’s just…in 2020, with the world as messed up as it is, I really want my entertainment as detached from it as possible.  No tats, piercings, F-bombs, lens-flare, shaky-cams, none of the stuff that was recently shoved into things like Star Trek: Picard as if it’s a necessary improvement.  I want escapism, and it looks like the only sure-fire way to do that is to reach back into entertainment’s past.

So thanks, Cecil B Demille.  Your work is still worth watching after all this time, at least to this old fossil.

–othreviewer