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

Reap the Wild Wind (1941).

A film by Cecil DeMille is first of all a well-rounded story. We don’t necessarily notice it today because it has more or less become commonplace. But in the years 1915-1925, it wasn’t all that common. It could even be said that DeMille is a kind of forerunner in this respect.

Some of his films, especially those with an unusual runtime—from two to three hours—contain very complex, nested plots, such as those in The Whispering Chorus (1918), The Golden Bed (1924), The Road to Yesterday (1925) and Wassell (1943). And in the end, we manage to understand everything. The Road to Yesterday was perhaps a bit harder for viewers at the time, but today, with a little attention, we are easily able to. At the end of the film, we are proud of ourselves for having managed to get everything.  

The complexity often has to do with the multiplicity of characters, whose comings-and-goings are made less difficult by the casting of well-known actors or those with remarkable faces or costumes.

And also by their well-spaced entries in the plot. In Reap the Wild Wind (1941), Paulette Goddard appears at the fifth minute, John Wayne after eleven minutes and Ray Milland at the twenty-third minute. Information should always be spread out. Two divers get into a fight, and their harnesses make it difficult to identify who is who, but John Wayne has a big nose that is very different from Ray Milland’s, and that’s enough.

Another variation: different members of a family are individualized one by one (Male and Female), with a brief pause between each new approach, because we follow a wholly secondary character, an imp seemingly from Lubitsch’s films, who places shoes at the door of every bedroom: shots of each pair of obviously different shoes, and of each character with an emblematic attitude and costume.

A device that is typical of such complex construction is the use of a second flashback within a first flashback. It’s a very rare effect in cinema (I can think of Passage to Marseille, a Curtiz film from 1944, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made by Buñuel in 1972, but that was a double dream). That is the case in The Road to Yesterday, when we return to 1625 to Malena the gypsy woman, who recounts an even more distant past.

The differences in place and time are made more evident with the help of different colour tints: red, green, yellowish, blueish. The problem is that one film reel runs for about thirteen minutes, which may not necessarily be the length of the sequence to be tinted. And we are also helped by intertitles introducing characters and actors, which takes advantage of the occasion to hypocritically move the plot forward.

It’s only in the silent version of The Ten Commandments that it derails a little. The allusion to the pretty girl who suddenly comes out of a jute bag is too (in)explicit, probably owing to the deletion of a sequence during editing.