[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Unconquered (1946), Gary Cooper’s supernatural entrance.

We have seen, with Feet of Clay and The Road to Yesterday, how much DeMille was fascinated by the idea of reincarnation. In her memoirs, Gloria Swanson writes that DeMille was a firm believer in it. It is indeed the only problem for very rich people who have achieved everything in life. Walt Disney even had his body preserved in optimal conditions so that he could be brought back to life the day science would allow it. The problem is certainly less distressing for a Christian like DeMille, who believed in paradise (Paradise was incidentally the name of his pleasure house). But it does exist.

Whence this taste for back-and-forth journeys to the heaven (cf. the unfinished project The Sorrows of Satan and Feet of Clay).

But this motif can be found more discreetly in many of Cecil DeMille’s works, beginning with a play he co-wrote in 1913 called The Return of Peter Grimm. The list is long: the accountant in The Whispering Chorus who was thought dead and who reappears suddenly, just like the “KIA” husband of For Better, for Worse, or the hero of The Plainsman, who miraculously survives all the Indian arrows. In The Story of Dr. Wassell, Gary Cooper believes that his dear Madeline has disappeared forever from his life, that she is even dead, but in the end, we learn that it’s not so. And the same Cooper (Unconquered), decidedly in charge of immortality, plunges with his frail skiff into the furious waters of a frightening Niagara, but miraculously comes out by grasping on to a providential branch (an unbelievable moment, but it is a playful film). He emerges, like a ghost, from a smoke cloud behind an Indian encampment. Victory is then achieved because the English place the bodies of all their dead soldiers in wagons, seated and not lying down, to make the attackers believe that they are outnumbered. A theoretical resurrection which makes them winners.

DeMille wasn’t an exception. Reincarnation—or resurrection—was a frequent motif among great American filmmakers (cf. all of Frank Borzage’s work, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Alan Rudolph’s Made in Heaven, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Frank Capra’s Lost Horizons and It’s a Wonderful Life, James Cameron’s The Abyss, even Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Otto Preminger’s Laura).

“Reincarnation” means “victory over death”, with which one man can help: the doctor.

More than the priest, who is somewhat forgotten in the work of this great Christian, the doctor is very present in For Better, for Worse, throughout Feet of Clay, a little in The Road to Yesterday, and much more in Wassell and The Greatest Show on Earth.

The doctor doesn’t intervene without reason. That’s why there are many cripples, disabled children (For Better, for Worse), blind people (The Ten Commandments, Wassell, Samson, Fool’s Paradise, Something to Think About) with a subjective shot of the person who loses or regains sight, mute persons (The Sign of the Cross, The Ten Commandments of 1956), people who can no longer use their arms or hands (The Road to Yesterday, Wassell, The Greatest Show on Earth), and disfigured heroes (The Whispering Chorus, For Better, for Worse, Fool’s Paradise). Handicaps typical of melodramas.