disinterested_spectator Early in this movie we learn that Egypt has already been visited by nine plagues, none of which we get to see. "What's the deal?" we ask ourselves. This is especially perplexing considering that the movie is two hours and sixteen minutes long. Even the tenth plague, the one where all of Egypt's firstborn die, is disappointing, for the deaths are only implied: We see the Pharaoh's son alive; later we see him dead. That's the last straw, of course, and so the Pharaoh tells Moses to take his people and get out.As we all know, people pick and choose the parts of the Bible they agree with and ignore the rest. One of the items people usually ignore is the one in Exodus 12:35-36, in which the Jews loot Egypt before they leave, taking the Egyptians' gold and silver jewelry and some nice clothes as well. Force apparently was not used. They simply told the Egyptians they only wanted to borrow the stuff, and the Egyptians fell for it because God put them in a lending mood. The intertitle in the movie says, "And they despoiled the Egyptians of jewels of silver, jewels of gold, and raiment." It was stealing, of course, but that's all right, because they hadn't yet received the Ten Commandments from God, one of which says, "Thou shalt not steal." So, they didn't know any better.It would have been nice if their "borrowing" the gold and silver had been depicted in the movie, but all we get is just one lousy intertitle. Immediately after, all you see is a bunch of people leaving Egypt. It makes you wonder why they even bothered to put it in the movie. It also makes you wonder if that was the real reason the Pharaoh changed his mind and chased after the Jews: "Hey! They borrowed our gold and silver jewelry, and I'll bet they don't intend to return it. Let's go get it back."We finally get some spectacle when the Jews come to the Red Sea. Not bad, considering. Then Moses climbs the mountain to receive the title commandments. While he is away, the Jews begin to party. And now we realize why it was necessary to include the part about the gold and silver. How else would the Jews have been able to make a Golden Calf? But it would have been crude to show the Jews actually stealing the stuff, so we get just enough information in the intertitle so we don't wonder where a bunch of slaves got all the gold to make a great big idol. In other words, an explanation for how the Jews got enough gold to make a Golden Calf was needed, but the embarrassing manner in which they obtained that gold is downplayed.Miriam, Moses's sister, displays much of her body and gets all sensual with the Golden Calf. Dathan, who is no good, starts to make love to her, but then he sees she has leprosy. Now, in the Bible, God does eventually inflict Miriam with leprosy because she objected to Moses marrying a black woman from Ethiopia, "Numbers 12," but in this movie, she gets inflicted with the disease during the Golden Calf party. Moses breaks the tablets in anger, Miriam begs him to heal her, and God lashes out with bolts of lightning, ending the party.It is at this point that we find out why we were shortchanged on the first nine plagues of Egypt. After only fifty minutes of screen time, with almost an hour and a half to go, the movie jumps to the present, and we discover that we have been watching a visualization of the story in "The Book of Exodus" as it was being read by a woman to her two adult sons, Johnny and Dan.At the beginning of the movie, there is a prologue that tells of how belief in God had come to be thought of as a "religious complex," and how people had come to think of the Ten Commandments as old fashioned. But then came the World War. "And now a blood-drenched bitter world—no longer laughing—cries for a way out." That way, of course, is the Ten Commandments, the Law without which men cannot live.The World War must have already worn off on Dan, however, and it isn't long before his mother turns him out of the house for being a no good atheist. What follows is a crazy plot in which Dan marries Mary, the two of them promising to break all ten Commandments.We don't see Dan and Mary making any graven images of God, but other than that, they do presumably break the other nine Commandments, and the juicy ones are actually depicted. Dan cheats on Mary, having an affair with a woman, Sally Lung, a woman half French and half Chinese. As for the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," Dan inadvertently does in his own mother when the cathedral he was building with shoddy cement collapses on her. And it turns out that the ship that brought in the cheap material for making that cement passed by an island that was a leper colony, from which place Sally Lung stowed away. Dan gets the disease, and he ends up giving it to Mary, just before he ends up dying in his effort to escape the law.Mary tries to run away to, possibly planning to kill herself, now that she has leprosy, but Johnny stops her. He reads to her from "The New Testament," telling her about love, and in the morning she is cured of the disease. This squares with the dying words of the mother, who said she was wrong to make religion to be about fear instead of love. But it doesn't exactly square with the prologue, which said the Ten Commandments, not "The New Testament," were what people needed following the World War.

Steffi_P The Ten Commandments marks the beginning of the second wave of the Hollywood epic. Modelled on the contemporary/ancient parallel storytelling of Intolerance – the crowning achievement of the first wave – and its subject matter decided by a poll of cinema-goers, this is among the most significant and typically DeMillean of DeMille's pictures.DeMille had first coupled a historical tale with a modern day framing story in 1916's Joan the Woman, and even during the years when the historical feature was out of fashion (approximately 1918 – 1921) he several times added a little metaphorical foray into the past to his contemporary dramas, such as Male and Female and Manslaughter. Here, it is still the modern day narrative which makes up the bulk of the picture's 130-odd minutes, and yet it is the spectacular biblical prologue that everyone remembers.DeMille had always had a talent for directing crowd scenes, giving inspiring pep talks to the mass whilst giving specific directions to the individuals. Here he works with the biggest group of extras he had ever handled, and yet he has lost none of his touch. He gives character to the multitude by focusing on a number of individuals within it, and yet when he pulls back to show the whole crowd you can still see the attention to detail, with a hundred different things going on. The stupendous sets also make an impact in themselves, but DeMille is shrewd enough to reveal them gradually, and places them squarely in the context of being symbolic of evil. The pharaoh's palace may be impressive, but DeMille ensures that the works of God – the pillar of fire, the parting of the red sea, the lightning on Sinai – are more so. Oddly, he could be accused of doing the opposite in his 1956 remake, in which the Egyptian city is absolutely awe-inspiring, whereas the special effects representing acts of God are somewhat pathetic even for the day, and certainly less effective than those in 1923. But DeMille had changed a lot by that time.In contrast to the prologue, the contemporary story is somewhat lacklustre. It has much in common with other DeMille dramas from around this period, although it is pretty mediocre by that standard. Particularly jarring is the overuse of intertitles. Five years earlier DeMille had been a master of purely visual narrative, and the titles were only there when absolutely necessary. As time went by however, as DeMille had become more pious and his screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson had become more pretentious, so had the photoplays become more wordy. All the better for preaching with, as far as self-appointed messenger-of-God DeMille was concerned, but his pictures began to lack the grace and smoothness they had once had.With scenes fragmented into smaller pieces, and characters unable to open their mouths without a superfluous title spelling their words out to the audience, the acting also suffers. Richard Dix, Rod La Rocque, Leatrice Joy and Nita Naldi are all adequate performers, but none of them really gets time or space to emote as much as they ought to for the story. Nevertheless, DeMille was still a master of the powerful, iconic image, and there are enough memorable shots here to keep things interesting. Among the standouts are Nita Naldi's hands emerging from a tear in a sack, the straight-up shot in the lift as Leatrice Joy ascends and Naldi ripping the curtain off its hooks, nearly forty years before the almost identical shot in Hitchcock's Psycho. It is images like this which reign supreme in DeMille's cinema, and it is from around this point on that they become more important than the credibility of the story or the actors.DeMille's Ten Commandments proved to be highly influential. Other studios got to work on their own superproductions, the western would become epic with The Iron Horse, and even Douglas Fairbanks next picture, The Thief of Bagdad, was steeped in DeMillean grandeur. Further afield, UFA studios in Germany and Abel Gance in France were also working on the principle that big is beautiful. Ten Commandments indicated the future for DeMille himself as well. Not only was it the first of the pictures that would secure his legacy as the ultimate biblical filmmaker, but the fact that the prologue is absolutely breathtaking and the contemporary drama lacks bite, hints towards his eventually becoming a director purely of epics. It's also rather telling that he loved the Old Testament God of plagues and smiting, because that is probably more or less how DeMille saw himself. He hammered home his messages with the spectacular and the incredible. A shock-and-awe filmmaker preaching the word of a shock-and-awe God.

John W Chance The 50th anniversary DVD of the 1956 'The Ten Commandments' includes Cecil B. DeMille's original 1923 version. The restored print of this history making silent film is simply amazing, so sharp and crystal clear with zero flickering. Furthermore, this version is the same, the reverse and also different from the 1956 version.It's the same in that De Mille rebuilt the same set of Ramses' city -- larger than the towers built for D. W. Griffith's 'Intolerance' (1916)-- for the '56 version, used much of the same script, camera angles and other sets. It's the reverse, because as Katherine Orrison notes on the commentary track, if a shot was done from the right side in the '23 version, it was filmed from the left in the '56 version, and vice versa. She kids us not! She's written three books about "C.B." It is different from the '56 version in two major ways. First, the story of Moses begins with him giving the ninth plague (killing the first born), and ends with him hurling the 10 Commandments down at the revellers worshipping the Golden Calf below Mount Sinai. Second, the movie then becomes a second story (the Biblical scenes are called "The Prologue"), taking place in San Francisco."The Modern Story" is about the brothers John, a carpenter (Richard Dix) and Danny, an architect (Rod La Roque) and their struggles with morality. Danny vows to break all ten commandments, and by the end of the movie, he has. Like Ramses drowned in the Red Sea, Danny, escaping to Mexico in his speed boat 'Defiance' also drowns smashed on a large rock that looks suspiciously like Mount Sinai. Note: Before Richard Dix went on to fame and success in sound movies (mostly for RKO), he starred in many other silent films-- check out his great performance in 'The Vanishing American' (1925) as an Indian.Visually interesting throughout, the film even takes place on the construction site of the Catholic cathedral in Washington Square in San Francisco as it was being built. Actually shot in the outside construction elevator on the roof, you get to see a lot of the vista of 1923 San Francisco! Let's all meet at Washington Square for the 100th anniversary of this film! Plus the whole movie really works. What sets and costumes! The parting of the Red Sea in this version is even better than the 1956 one! I give it an 8.

rdjeffers Sunday January 8, 4:00pm The Paramount Theater, SeattleCountless slaves pull a gleaming white sphinx, inch-by-inch, across the desert sands. Brutalized by their cruel Egyptian masters, The Children of Israel toil before the monumental city gates of Pharaoh Rameses II. The opening scenes of Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic "The Ten Commandments" represent the historical spectacle of Hollywood's silent era at its grandest and most expressive. DeMille blended the intensely dramatic performance of his actors with the spectacular architecture of his sets in a way that seemed to bring the past to life for the movie going audience. His exhaustive research and striving for authenticity was limited only by his personal satisfaction. Of the roughly 2500 extras used one tenth were orthodox Jews from Los Angeles, many, recent immigrants who felt they were living the history of their ancestors. The flight from Egypt includes the added surprise of two-color Technicolor while the scenes of decadence as the Golden Calf is worshiped by an undulating mob are as vibrantly electric as any ever filmed. To be fair, it bears pointing out that the forty-five minute Ancient Egypt portion of "The Ten Commandments" is only a prologue to the modern story, which today seems dated and irrelevant. Two brothers, one good and one evil, alternately respect and defy the ancient laws of Moses and live with the consequences. The San Francisco setting may be of interest to anyone with ties to "the city by the bay", specifically the 1920's North Beach neighborhood, Saints Peter and Paul Church and Washington Square Park which are all prominently featured. Sexy Nita Naldi is also delightfully vampish as the heavy-lidded other woman draped in furs. The Jeanie Macpherson screenplay attempts to draw parallels between the story of Exodus and modern life, much more successfully accomplished in Michael Curtiz 1928 epic masterpiece "Noah's Ark", but the jazz age story can't hold a candle to the grandeur of the ancient world. DeMille's original does succeed if compared to the bloated, boringly over-detailed story and hammy acting of his 1956 remake. The 1923 prologue is concise, well paced and beautifully executed. The ancient Babylon of D. W. Griffith's 1916 spectacular "Intolerance" appears staged and remote when compared to a genuine sense of seeing and feeling the "hear and now" conjured up by DeMille's City of the Pharaoh. Hollywood produced progressively greater and more fantastic historical epics as the era drew to a close, including the MGM spectacle "Ben Hur" in 1925 and DeMille's "King of Kings" in 1927." … the spirit of the spectacle, and the joy taken in its own magic, was unique to the silent film." - William K. Everson