[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]
The Ten Commandments (1956): the “painting” of the three suppliants.
Colour became the fundamental element of these last two periods.
Inaugurating the work on colour in 1940 with North West Mounted Police (probably inspired by his 1908 play The Royal Mounted), DeMille took the easy way out, satisfied with stuffing the frame with the largest possible number of soldiers, with their red uniforms against the blue night. It was the easy way out again, though in a less exclusive way, in Unconquered (1946).
But from Reap the Wild Wind (1941) on, there was a new orientation that was unexpected and which is still forgotten in the work of this filmmaker who is often deemed conventional, primitive and barbaric. There is an exquisite preciousness at work here, the work of a minor master, founded not on bright rainbow colours typically harnessed by Natalie Kalmus, the Technicolor consultant of the time, but on almost pastel-like halftones, buttercup orange, Provence yellow, peacock blue, bright blue, crimson, purple and especially mauve. We don’t see Susan Hayward die, but we understand everything the moment we see her red-and-orange shawl saved from the rubble. It was above all the costumes that made this chromatic extravaganza possible, notably in scenes showcasing the lives of the rich in Key West (Florida) and Charleston (South Carolina) around 1830: cabriolet rides and balls, which are nice opportunities to show richly dressed characters moving around, entering or leaving the frame surreptitiously. Colour in movement is what we find in an even more developed state in Samson and Delilah and in The Greatest Show on Earth; the extras count less for what they represent in the story than for the relation between their costumes in the frame: a touch of crimson here, a touch of mauve there to get a shot of a harmonious, original and ravishing composition. It can be useful to let a costumed extra walk across the foreground very fast. One thinks of the Minnelli of Meet Me in St. Louis, of Nicolas Poussin’s and John Sargent’s mauves. The Greatest Show on Earth poses a problem: does the colour composition owe to DeMille and his staff, or were the ballerinas and clowns of the Barnum circus already dressed like that, with their multicoloured props? I noticed that this work on colour is wholly in line with the one in preceding films like Samson or Reap the Wild Wind.
No matter who did what, the main thing is what exists, what DeMille imagined or accepted, with the help of costume designer Edith Head, and that’s the astounding virtuosity of the result.
The visual composition is sometimes extended to the sets—the pink roses of Reap the Wild Wind—and to the exteriors, which are often shot in studio, or completed using transparencies. A recurring set is that of the bath or of washed clothes near a small lake (Unconquered, Samson, The Ten Commandments in the scene with Moses and his wife), a very precious set with a mosaic of halftones complementing the dark blue of the sky… and the water. In his excellent study published in issue no. 5 of Cahiers du cinéma, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze compared this arrangement to Hubert Robert’s Roman landscapes. These discrete compositions offer a respite from the primitive aggressivity of the epics.
Here is a subtle DeMille, far removed from the colossal DeMille often described by the press.
The only real interest of The Ten Commandments (apart from the extreme precision of its framing) is the work on colour and composition, with its skilful mix of very different colours in the same shot, not just mauves, but also many shades of yellows, and vast skies that are very black or very red—compositions that are somewhat undermined by the fixity of the camera and the actors. The best shot is the one borrowed from Géricault’s painting The Raft of Medusa, situated just before the crossing of the Red Sea, where we see three suppliants in inclined and varied positions, their arms wide apart. It’s all the more accomplished as it lasts barely three seconds. For once, DeMille has been able to tap into the power of concision.
The finest sequence owes everything to colour. I’m talking about the ten plagues of Egypt, with its festival of deadly lightnings, where, against all expectations, the Nile gradually turns completely red over the course of a shot. The rapid accumulation of effects is astounding. Note the filmmaking trick: to show that the red of the blood is invading the waters of the Nile, Moses’ staff is placed obliquely in the frame to serve as a marker, a gauge that allows us to clearly see the red colour approaching the staff and then crossing it.
The Seventh Art 