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

Old Wives for New, with Sylvia Ashton: bodybuilding in the America of 1918.

We don’t think of DeMille as a maker of comic films. Yet, he often provokes laughter, as much as a Blake Edwards or a Preston Sturges.

Above all in comedies, of course: at one point in The Affairs of Anatol, a furious Elliott Dexter breaks everything in the apartment of his fiancée, Wanda Hawley, when he realizes that she hasn’t given up the easy life set up for her by Theodore Roberts, the rich man who has kept her. It’s a fine destruction scene—within the setting of a modern apartment—comparable to those in regular epic films. At one point, Theodore Roberts makes his job easier by handing him a piece of furniture to destroy, when he should be shocked by this fury directed at the girl he loves. The weight loss cure that Sylvia Ashton (Old Wives for New) undergoes remains an irresistible comic monument, as does the folding bed concealed by a fake piano (Saturday Night). There would be no end in sight if we wanted to draw up an inventory.

But the dramas arouse laughter too: in The Road to Yesterday, the character of Rady, a nerdy runt, is comical from start to finish. I’ll always remember his disgusted reaction, at a corner of the frame, when he sees the two leads kissing, although he is the one who is supposed to marry the pretty heroine.

Another very funny scene: Roland Young parachutes into a den of lions, just before their feeding time (Madam Satan).

North West Mounted Police is supposed to be a serious Western. But the best part of the film is the little game between two privates, the Scotsman McDuff and the Canadian Duroc, who belong to rival armies and play at shooting at each other all through the film, without ever touching each other of course, by aiming at the top of the hat [1] or knicker buttons (hence the shot of Akim Tamiroff… in underwear). And when another soldier notices McDuff’s latest miss and kills Duroc for good, there is a general consternation among the two fake enemies, who first believe that the other has betrayed the secret pact uniting them, before realizing, happy in the face of a death suffered or caused, that it was not so. It’s the duo Akim Tamiroff-Lynne Overman once again, already present in the previous film, Union Pacific. One takes the same and starts over.

 

Footnote:

[1] An idea inaugurated in The Road to Yesterday: the kid who shoots arrows.