The Ten Commandments

Cecil B. deMille's motion picture The Ten Commandments is disgusting. It is disgusting not so much because it is-mostly-bad drama, nor even because it serves as one of the decade's most elaborate monuments to the union between God and Mammon, but because it is dishonest and almost immoral. After Mr. de Mille and his publicity men have swathed the picture in clouds of religious ballyhoo by such stunts as the incredible full-page ad in the New York Times citing the laudatory comments of a number of religious leaders, he reneges and will not have it so. In a sugary little speech flashed on the screen before the picture opens, the producer-director declares that his moral is the birth of freedom; "Moses freed mankind for the first time to live under law, not by submission to some individual." The statement is not only inaccurate; in effect, it throws a sop to everybody-atheists and agnostics, as well as Protestants, Catholics and Jews. They can all pay their $2.75 and watch his monstrosity with a clear conscience.

After effectively banishing God from the story of Moses, deMille fills His place with all manner of things. Foremost among them is the much-vaunted deMille "magnificence." To be sure, much of the spectacle, including the reconstruction of an entire Egyptian city and sweeping shots of the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea between towering walls of water, is quite impressive. But spectacle of this kind is a species of theatrical trickery that, on the whole, detracts from what the picture ought to be doing-exploring a peoples' relationship with their God. And then, too, it expresses the childish assumption that anything big and shiny is somehow meaningful.

As a further substitute for God, we are given sex, largely in the form of a wholly fictional love-affair between Moses and a princess of Egypt. Even if such an interpolation into the Biblical story were entirely in good taste-which is open to question-the fact remains that it is dramatically unsound. While Charlton Heston, who plays Moses, and Anne Baxter, the princess, unquestionably make a handsome couple, their embraces shed no light on the problem of how Moses, portrayed as on the threshold of the Egyptian throne, becomes a prophet and the deliverer of an enslaved race. Like the spectacle, the romance only obscures the central problem of the story.

The acting in these romantic scenes as well as in the rest of the film is very difficult to evaluate. Beside the two principals, the picture displays some actors who have in the past shown much competence, including Yul Brynner as the villainous Pharaoh, Sir Cedric Hardwicke as his urbane father, Judith Anderson as a sinister royal servant, and John Derek as Joshua. But their performances here are hampered by the dialogue, a cheap sort of rhetoric that is meant to be elevated and "Biblical," but sounds only like ridiculous affectation. Nor does deMille's work as a director help the actors. While he is unquestionably a fine director of crowds of extras and cattle and sheep, he is not very good with actors. His direction is incredibly static-the actors usually strike various postures within a group and step out of line only for a moment to deliver their oration. If deMille had permitted them to move and speak at a more natural rate, at least a quarter of the picture's excessive length would have been cut away.

But the technical faults are insignificant beside the dishonesty of the whole show. DeMille, instead of the magnificently human Moses of the Bible who, about to die, exhorts his people with the words, "Your enemies shall come fawning to you, and you shall tread upon their high places," gives us only a lily-livered little liberal who orates vaguely about freedom; instead of God, only an off-screen voice; instead of religious fervor, only sentimentality.