The Ten Commandments (1956)
Cecil B. DeMille's 50's epic retelling, with some significant liberties, of the biblical story of Moses and the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt.
After watching Ben Hur last year on Easter I decided to watch Ten Commandments this year, both fixtures in the television rotation this time of the year to the point I've regularly seen individual scenes of both of them but never sat down to watch the entire 4 hour bricks at once.
It feels weird to talk critically about big, lavish "event movies" that were, originally, shown off in road shows with life orchestra's and, from a modern standpoint, hopelessly self indulgent performative flourishes like orchestral overtures and intermissions and, frankly, comically verbose narration which are all so overly showy that even Zack Snyder stops short of going all the way with them. These are not movies that you dit down and watch, they're movies you put on tv as background noise while occasionally glancing at them and telling your younger family members how they "don't make them like this anymore".
But I'm not here to poke fun at the movie. Listen, I'm a simple man. I see thousands of extras and hundreds of horses performing meticulously choreographed setpieces in front of monumental, city sized, pseudohistorical sets while hammy old Hollywood actors recite comically overwrought lines at each other in a stentorian tone, I soyface. Ten Commandments sure has a lot of that and it is an enjoyable watch for that alone. Again, I don't mean to sound smarmy, I do find it interesting and compelling to see how far film making can go in terms of pure scale.
Which is really the ironic part about it, you know. Something like Ten Commandments or Ben Hur is film making at its most elaborate and also at its most populist. These movies are old and long and expensive but they're not demanding cinema, they're actually quite easy to sit through if you have the time for them. Which I did, so let's talk about Ten Commandments not as a monument of film making based on one of the most important texts of abrahamitic belief, but as an actual work of narrative fiction, shall we?
So, I take it most people will be familiar with the broad strokes of this story. Moses, here played by Chuck Heston, is the son of Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt left to float down the Nile after the pharaoh decides to purge the first born sons of all Hebrew slaves, gets adopted by the pharaoh's family, aspires to liberate the slaves, gets banished, talks to God and does finally return to liberate the enslaved Hebrews with God's help after which he leads them to safety and receives the titular ten commandments. It's basic. Archetypal, really. What this telling of it adds is some human drama between Moses's adopted brother Ramses (Yul Brynner of "show with everything but" fame) and love interest Nefretiri played by Anne Baxter (probably the most interesting character arc in the movie) that reads as somewhat extraneous but perfectly enjoyable cinematic embellishment.
I just don't think that taken on its own this story makes for a particularly good movie. It's in the nature of myths to become both exaggerated and simplified with time and a lot of this story just feels arbitrary if you treat it as is. See, I have a very ambivalent relationship to religion. I neither particularly believe in God nor in the absence of God, my stance is that I don't know and I distrust everyone who'd try to convince me they know. I do think that there is a great amount of wisdom to be found in religious scriptures but a movie like this doesn't serve as a very good medium for that because it boils down something very universal and applicable to something very literal. There is so much in there that clearly conveys a message on a symbolic level. Moses declining to rule and instead choosing to put himself in service of a greater purpose. The way the Hebrew people lost their way after Moses left to speak to God and had to be resigned back in by his commandments. I get it, there are very universal messages to all that and they're still intelligible but I don't think it makes for a great movie.
There's little wrong with it, execution wise. The costumes are gorgeous, if not very historically accurate (although the amount of Make-up on some of the women was comical). The sets, the direction, the dialogue, the acting it's all film making on a very high level. Gotta give Chuck Heston some credit here too. I mentioned when I wrote about Ben Hur that he looks nothing like a middle easterner, no one in this does. But you have got to respect that he actually manages to look like a holy man in the rather sketchy looking wig and fake beard he dons in the final act of the movie, rather than like a bad mall Santa.
I enjoyed it a good bit less than Ben Hur, that I'll also say. Ben Hur was a much more dynamic and for lack of a better word, "fun" movie to watch. More cinematic. More emotionally engaging. This is... an impressive effort. But it's much more impressive than it is actually enjoyable. It never quite taps into the emotional universality at the core of this story. I know this is going to sound like an empty criticism but this feels much more like a monument to a biblical tale than a retelling of it that can stand on its own merits. It's not that the scale and ambition of a movie like this is lost on me but I simply don't think it's a great or even particularly good movie.
