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

The Whispering Chorus (1918): suspense; the woman who expects the worst (Kathlyn Williams) behind the bay window at dawn, with the city in the  background (a setting that inspired Murnau in Nosferatu)

A large number of filmmakers borrowed from DeMille. First of all, Howard Hawks. To be sure, Hawks didn’t care about C.B. For him, he was the model of what not to do. Hawks’ cinema is based on the absence of effects, sobriety and plausibility. And much of C.B.’s work is based on grandiloquence, flashy effects and implausibility.

Hawks began by parodying DeMille in Fig Leaves (1926): the return to antiquity, in certain sequences, takes up the principle dear to DeMille of inserting a sequence set in the past into the continuity of the present. Except that in DeMille, and particularly in Male and Female, which seems to be directly copied by Hawks, the past has a dramatic or emphatic value. For Hawks, the past contains comic virtues.

The character of the quirky zoologist who thinks only of his profession and his brontosaurus skeleton played by Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the obvious replica of Prof. Nathan Reade, played by Elliott Dexter in Adam’s Rib (1923).

The comedy of remarriage, frequently embodied by Cary Grant in the years 1937-1940, and notably in His Girl Friday (1939), evidently derives from the trilogy Don’t Change Your Husband / Why Change Your Wife / Saturday Night filmed twenty years earlier.

At the beginning of Hatari! (Hawks, 1961), a wounded hunter in an isolated terrain urgently needs a blood transfusion. But his blood group is very rare. The only one who can give him his blood is the Frenchy Gérard Blain, who has just had a rather brutal quarrel with the hunting troop. The transfusion takes place in a heated atmosphere: receiving blood from someone you hate…

Well, the same scene, written by other screenwriters, was already there towards the end of The Greatest Show on Earth (1951), played by Charlton Heston and Cornel Wilde. The adaptation rights were presumably bought by Hawks. But probably not, since in America the rights belong to the producer, and Paramount was DeMille’s producer and the distributor of Hawks’ film.

The trickle of blood dripping from the ceiling in Rio Bravo and falling into the beer, I’ve already seen it in an old C.B. western, The Girl of the Golden West, I think.

Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs was shot just before The Ten Commandments. But it is quite obvious that it was with the intention to overtake DeMille, since there was a huge publicity around C.B.’s film well before its release, and it was good to make use of it at no cost. From Samson and Delilah, Hawks borrowed the idea of the final shot, the slow fall of the curtain, as well as the principles of the sexy, treacherous heroine, and the architectural structure as the pivot of the drama.

The ending of A Place in the Sun (Stevens, 1950) seems to be inspired by The Whispering Chorus (1918): in these two films, an innocent death row inmate calmly goes to the electric chair because, although he did not kill anyone, he has committed a serious offence in other respects. There is an echo of this paradox again in Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark (2000).

The borrowing becomes evident when looking at the magnificent opening of Why Change Your Wife (1919), where the husband is shaving in the bathroom when his wife tries to take toiletries from the cupboard in front of him, and they get in each other’s way. The same scene can be found in The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch, 1923). It is noteworthy that Lubitsch conveys the same thing in less time, in a more lively, elegant way. DeMille, for his part, insists, repeats the effects. As if he was afraid that the audience wouldn’t understand, as if he wanted to prolong the humour of the situation indefinitely. It’s true that DeMille is often heavy-handed. But so are Dostoyevsky and Thomas Hardy. It’s part of their personality, their charm. A compelling heavy-handedness.

The tramp is afraid of the operation that will restore his beloved’s eyesight (City Lights) because she has never seen him and will probably find him a bit stupid: the idea comes from Fool’s Paradise. The hooks of the shower curtain falling one by one, pulled by the hand of a Janet Leigh trying to grab onto it after being stabbed to death (Hitchcock’s Psycho) was already there in The Ten Commandments of 1923, where Rod La Rocque kills Nita Naldi.

The architect’s wife’s going up on a freight lift to join her husband at the top of a building in Vidor’s Fountainhead was there a quarter-century earlier in the same The Ten Commandments, albeit with less force, and in the novel of the same name, published in 1943 and written by Ayn Rand, a friend of C.B.’s. The influence of the filmmaker can be seen not only in films, but also in literature.

Cleopatra (1934): the montage sequence; tight shots of armours foreshadowing Alexander Nevsky (1938).

Don’t think that the borrowings exist only in America.

Take Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922): the daybreak in the city of Bremen, visible from the wide windows where the heroine is standing, awaiting a very threatening future, well, it comes from The Whispering Chorus (1918), when Jane Tremble awaits the announcement of her first husband’s execution.

The very oppressive reformatory where Louise Brooks is confined in The Diary of a Lost Girl (G.W. Pabst, 1929) appears to be a copy of the one in The Godless Girl, made the year before.

The atmosphere of the high-society comedies that DeMille shot between 1918 and 1920 served as a model for the Swedish film Erotikon (Stiller, 1920).

The Return of Vasili Bortnikov (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1953) takes up an idea from For Better, for Worse: the supposedly-KIA husband who returns home to find his wife remarried.

The master-servant exchanges, with the barter of clothes and the mistaken victim of shooting, at the end of The Rules of the Game come straight out of The Heart of Nora Flynn (1916), which Renoir must have certainly seen in Paris on one of his furloughs.

I, too, had a variation on the theme of The Whispering Chorus in Death’s Glamour (2005), which also steals a scene from The Golden Bed. My Origins of a Meal (1977) borrows its depiction of can manufacturing from Triumph (1924), and its basic principle from The Sign of the Cross, which shows the entire journey of the donkey’s milk.

Let’s be honest. Borrowings are not a one-way street.

DeMille was inspired by his favourite film, Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914), as evidenced by the overloaded, kitschy Mexican sets of The Woman God Forgot (1917) and those of the Philistines’ Temple in Samson and Delilah (1949).

The ancient interludes in the high-society comedies made between 1919 and 1923 recall the Babylonian sets of Intolerance (Griffith, 1916), whose multi-temporality DeMille tried to reproduce, at least partially, in The Road to Yesterday (1925). From Intolerance, DeMille also borrowed the race between a car and a train at the beginning of Manslaughter.

The Siege of Orleans (Joan the Woman, 1916) is a replica of the Babylonian ramparts from the same Intolerance. This point has been disputed, as Griffith took pains to work in secret, but it was an open secret, especially since DeMille had collaborators who were quite close to Griffith, such as Monte Blue, Tully Marshall and Jeanie Macpherson.

In C.B. DeMille’s films, we find a number of iris-in and iris-out shots, like in Griffith.

The idea of making a film about pharaohs and pyramids (The Ten Commandments) certainly comes from The Loves of Pharaoh (Lubitsch, 1921) and its imposing sets.

The montage sequence of Cleopatra (1934) is inspired by Eisenstein. We find here the visual and framing effects of Time in the Sun, released in 1933, which is a shortened version of Que Viva Mexico! We also notice the syncopated montage of attractions from The General Line and October. On the other hand, it could be argued that the Teutonic Knights of Alexander Nevsky are inspired by the tight shots of helmets in Cleopatra, made four years earlier.

And the shots of Cleopatra on horseback just before the battle are very reminiscent of the Marlene Dietrich of The Scarlet Empress, thanks to the involvement of Travis Banton, the costume designer of both films.

The birdcage in Madam Satan (1930), which symbolises the weight of social conventions, is a response to the famous cage in Greed (Stroheim, 1923).

Stroheim again: In The Greatest Show on Earth (1951), Cornel Wilde, on his return in the circus, amazes with his right arm, which is always hidden by the raincoat he always has on. Charlton Heston snatches his raincoat: Wilde has a prosthesis. It’s a tribute to a famous and identical shot in Foolish Wives (1921). There were a lot of commonalities between DeMille and Stroheim, who were both curiously cast as actors in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. A vision of a decadent world of debauchery and orgies. Stroheim shows it with great crudeness. DeMille reveals it stealthily, with a humour that does not really exist in Stroheim’s films and which softens the harshness of the facts.