(Part of the genius of De Mille professing to have done his homework in the opening minutes is that in so doing he extracts our consent to tell an improbably commercial rendition of the Moses legend.) The Ten Commandments '23 features a bifurcated narrative that depicts the Book of Exodus as prelude to the tale of two brothers, one who slavishly adheres to the Ten Commandments and one who vows to break every one of them in turn. A story, in other words, about a Jesus Who Fucks. The Ten Commandments is about Moses's journey from Hebrew foundling to prince of Egypt to desert exile to deliverer of Israel, during which he comes to embrace his transformation from beefcake agitator into silver-fox lawgiver meet the dapper prophet who's got Yahweh's number! The 220-minute film, a remake and expansion of De Mille's 1923 silent version, behaves like a surrogate Jesus epic, a way to bypass blasphemy while telling a story that could compete with the lurid sudsers sweeping the nation, one-up the glut of religious epics that tended to be long on scenery but short on sorcery, and appease the Christian audience for these things. Well, not all of the gaps: kid Moses and teen Moses, who was surely elected Prom King in De Mille's imagination, still get the short-shrift. (To my recollection, curtains went the way of the dodo in the late-'80s, when they were deemed impractical by the new cookie-cutter multiplexes that would drive the traditional movie palace to extinction.) De Mille, then a name synonymous with "director" to the American public, proceeds to all but invent William Castle as he introduces The Gimmick: What you are about to see will fill in all the gaps in the biblical account of Moses, thanks to an investigative technique seldom used in Hollywood known as research. Back then, this would've had an uncanny effect on filmgoers, who were used to seeing curtains shield the silver screen from view until the lights went down. De Mille himself emerges from behind them and steps up to a microphone. De Mille's 1956 The Ten Commandments begins with a pair of ornate drapes. Frank, in accordance with the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash, and the Holy Scripturesīy Bill Chambers A harbinger of the pageantry to come, Cecil B. Starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G Robinson Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
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