May 8, 2021

Everything Is Theatre

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

Joan the Woman (1916): Joan (Geraldine Farrar) on the stake, first attempt at colour for DeMille.

DeMille was seen as a tyrannical and domineering filmmaker, as affirmed by the choice of his favourite costume (jodhpurs in particular) which contributed to making him the perfect macho.

At the same time, one notices that he was someone who thought a lot about the interests of his collaborators and was very faithful to them: no other filmmaker can boast of having made their first forty-four feature films with the same cinematographer, Alvin Wyckoff in this case. Jeanie MacPherson was his go-to screenwriter from 1915 to 1937 and was instrumental in developing the couple conflicts in his high-society films. From 1919 to 1956, he had no other editor than Anne Bauchens. In almost all his films between 1918 and 1956, he cast his ex-girlfriend Julia Faye, even if she had lost some of her appeal with age. It is quite moving to find the same names in the credits of both the 1956 and the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, not just Bauchens and Faye, but also cameraman Peverell Marley.

It is clear that he acted like the head of a theatre company, obliging Paramount to put some of his collaborators on permanent contracts, even if they didn’t work every year on his films. He got angry with the company, which wanted to break with this principle.

He produced fifty-two films between 1926 and 1928, sometimes on dense and unusual melodramatic subjects. It was an opportunity for him to hire most of his favourite actors and technicians, who would have otherwise been shown the door at Paramount.

I can think only of Chabrol who could assemble a veritable family of collaborators over a very long period of time. This is very different from the method of a creator like Maurice Pialat, who changed technicians from one film to another, or even during the shoot.

It was typical of a theatre director to sometimes give each of his favourite actors very different roles (Theodore Roberts labelled a crooked old billionaire or a wheezy grandfather, and suddenly turning into Moses, Raymond Hatton, the handsome Frenchman of The Little American transformed into a small-time accountant in The Whispering Chorus) that didn’t always suit them exactly. It could work very well in the theatre because of the audience’s distance from the actor. It sometimes becomes risky in cinema, with its tighter shots. Look at this thirty-four-year-old actress who plays Joan of Arc.

In Why Change Your Wife and Madam Satan, the hero doesn’t recognize his wife, who is dressed and made up differently. In The Whispering Chorus, it is the other way around. It’s an accepted convention in the theatre, which doesn’t work in cinema, where you feel, in the tighter shots, that the husband is very close to the wife and cannot fail to recognize her.

Two devices, frequent in DeMille’s work, derive from the theatre: the use of a small window in the background (The Squaw Man, The Ten Commandments, Union Pacific) and the use of a curtain (The Road to Yesterday, Samson) which opens and closes at will onto another set. A pure filmmaker would have moved from one set to another, with camera movement or scene changes.

A man of the theatre: this is obvious, since in his early days, he adapted several plays and tried to hire the best actors from Broadway. He favours static shots, such as the brilliant 1:42 minute shot in Union Pacific where he follows the evolution of a courtship. And he made films in every genre, like a theatre director who can tackle Scapin the Schemer as well as Phèdre.

In cinema, the director is generally more pigeonholed. Look at Hitchcock or Chabrol (crime films), Leone and Joseph Kane (Westerns), Capra or Edwards (comedies), Craven or Romero (horror films).

 

May 5, 2021

Epics and Religion

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

The Story of Dr. Wassel (1943): Gary Cooper prays to Buddha for help… and Buddha obliges.

It’s this aspect that C.B. DeMille is often limited to by dictionaries and common mortals.

Yet, if we look at things in more detail, we notice that he has made, counting generously, no more than eight epics out of the seventy films that comprise his work. In chronological order of the beginning of the story, they are:

1260 BC: The Ten Commandments (1956 version)

1230 BC: the first third of the Ten Commandments (1923 version)

1200 BC: Samson and Delilah

49 AD: Cleopatra (a film with no connection to Christianity)

33 AD: The King of Kings

65 AD: The Sign of the Cross

1189: The Crusades

1429: Joan the Woman

The remaining sixty-two films unfold in a more modern setting, almost all of them between 1815 and 1950. Sixty-two against eight.

There is hence a clear predominance of modern times. What is then the reason for this misleading brand image?

Above all, the much higher cost of ancient films, and as a corollary, the much larger number of their viewers (even if The Crusades was a flop) and the existence of classic scenes (re-enactment of the crossing of the Red Sea).

Then there is the fact that most of these epics are talkies (and not silent) and more recent.

This brand image places DeMille at a disadvantage today, because it is clear that his best work isn’t set in ancient times.

Besides, the idea of DeMille as a Biblical or religious filmmaker is questionable: none of the first forty-four films by our auteur, with the exception of Joan the Woman and, at a push, Something to Think About, deals with a theme of that kind.

It would seem that the reference to Christianity isn’t the decisive element of these films.

As early as 1914, DeMille was a fan of the Italian film Cabiria, a blockbuster about the war between Rome and Carthage, from 218 BC to 202 BC, which was built around the movement of crowds and the grandiose character of Carthaginian architecture, born partly of religious fervour, but a fervour that had nothing to do with Christianity. Similarly, one could consider The Woman God Forgot (1917) as an evocation of Aztec civilization and religion, and appreciate a certain form of respect towards Buddhism in The Story of Dr. Wassell (1943). It’s Gary Cooper’s prayer which, in the course of a magnificent scene, seems to trigger the arrival of British rescue troops. Cleopatra and the unfinished Helen of Troy project have nothing to with the Christian God. Religion certainly interests DeMille, but it’s a general, almost ecumenical idea of religion whose chief merit is having given birth to grandiose and spectacular architectures.

So there was a displacement that took place: for DeMille, who always considered Cabiria to be the greatest film of all time (a rather surprising reaction for an American given all his colleagues praise films from their own country first and foremost), the great pagan spectacle constitutes the chief interest of these “Christian” films (Samson and Delilah, The Sign of the Cross, The Ten Commandments). DeMille bases his art on the fascinating architecture imagined by these Barbarians, these rebels opposed to the true God, all the while extolling the exploits of the true believers who fought them and tried to destroy the monuments erected by the “heretics”. There are few references in DeMille’s work to Christian art, which is less spectacular and original than the art of the so-called barbarians.

There are some in Joan the Woman and The Road to Yesterday, but very few. An ambiguous position: DeMille made all this money thanks to the art of the enemies of these Christians whose tireless missionary he was. The same is true of Antonioni, Fuller and Buñuel. They vilified the world of concrete, war and Christianity, which nonetheless made their best effects possible.

It is true, however, that DeMille sometimes makes fun of this barbaric art by revealing all its extravagances, especially in Samson and Delilah. Be that as it may, if they are ridiculous—it’s the reign of kitsch—this ridiculousness is terribly impressive.

To better understand this late intrusion of Christianity in DeMille’s work, in the forty-fifth film (discounting the very negative image of the gluttonous, chain-smoking reverend in Don’t Change Your Husband), two facts must be taken into account:

The first is that DeMille, born in the most Protestant, Puritan state in America, i.e., Massachusetts, was brought up in an environment deeply marked by religion, thanks in particular to the influence of his father who had studied for a while to become a priest. A traditional religious fervour, which was innate and self-evident, without any particular anxieties or crises, and which remains anchored in the childhood years that produced it.

We will see later that this belief remains very childlike, even childish, which makes for its charm.

The second is that, just before The Ten Commandments of 1923, Hollywood was experiencing a period of turmoil: the drug-induced death of one of C.B.’s favourite actors, Wallace Reid, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, who was something of a libertine, the suspicious death of a guest on the yacht of comic actor Fatty, the scandal surrounding Chaplin and his first wife, Mildred Harris.

And DeMille was likely to be the next on the blacklist, since he threw very lavish parties every weekend, in the absence of his wife, in his sumptuous country villa, named Paradise, with masked balls and a bordello-like atmosphere. So it was only natural that he should make the first move in imagining an inexistent public referendum, which voted overwhelmingly in favour of a future film on religion. With The Ten Commandments, he became Hollywood’s Mr. Religion, so he became almost untouchable. He was later even named Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.

The reverend (Theodore Roberts) in Don’t Change Your Husband (1918): you’d think Buñuel…

The religious meaning of The Ten Commandments of 1923 doesn’t lie as much in the Egyptian prologue evoking the Exodus as in the modern segment, which takes up two-thirds of the film. Here we have a sanctimonious old mother, slightly mocked for her excessive rigidity (in the first cut, she was even more ridiculous, but it is said that DeMille cut out a lot to smoothen the rough edges), and her two sons, one who does everything by the book and the other who behaves like an aggressive capitalist parvenu: a real-estate developer stealing from his client, he uses poor quality cement for his new building which collapses, killing his mother in the process and violating three commandments—”thou shalt not kill”, “thou shalt not steal” and “honour thy father and thy mother”—and cheats on his wife with a schemer (“thou shalt not commit adultery”) etc. Like the army of Ramses II, he ends up in the waters of the Red Sea, but at the wheel of his posh and powerful speedboat.

A schematic, caricatural and second-hand message that makes the film rather ridiculous, with an excess that is nevertheless (unintentionally) amusing in an ironic way.

Perhaps the best part is this family scene where the good brother, with his girlfriend and the little dog, goes to eat… hot dogs at a corner shop. It’s a pleasant surprise to find such a scene in a film called The Ten Commandments.

And then, there is this other magnificent, very kitschy scene where the evil hero, who is blackmailed by his wily Chinese mistress, finds no other solution than to kill her.

The Ten Commandments of 1956 stretches what was narrated in one hour in the original silent version over three hours and forty minutes. Nine months of shooting, a revenue of $90 million (against a cost of $13 million), thanks to the excessive hype particularly around the famous special effect: the waves that part in the Red Sea to let the people of Israel pass and fall back again to drown the Pharaoh’s army. It’s a special effect done with the help of gelatine masses that swell and spill out under the pressure of gases sent through fine tubes and with the help of the film strip running in reverse. An effect that is in theory better than the one in the silent version: the corridor in the sea is now rectilinear, and not curved, which makes it look much deeper. But the abstraction of black-and-white in the first film was more effective than the essential realism of colour, which here only brings out the artifice even more. This long-awaited and disappointing episode is followed by a sequence which crudely lingers on the arrival of ten consecutive fireballs that engrave the ten commandments on a stone thanks to rather futurist, comic-book-styled effects repeated ten times over. All this ridiculous ceremonial for sometimes highly obsolete messages such as “thou shalt have no other gods before me”—while ecumenism is de rigueur today among Christians, with a kind of inter-union of religions—or somewhat outdated or futile ones such as “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”[1] or “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”.

This effect, too, gives the impression of artifice. That is the paradox of Cecil DeMille’s religious films: all the special effects, which express miracles born of divine will, are very proper, very clean, a bit Ikea-like, hypermodern and futurist even when they are all set in a distant past. The same was true with the angels appearing in The Whispering Chorus and Joan the Woman, which were made forty years earlier and are more striking.

The worst thing is the declamatory quality of the dialogue. I understood everything without ever looking at the subtitles. I was flattered, because I got the impression of understanding English perfectly. But I later realized that this was one of the characteristics of turkeys, and that in great films, like those by John Cassavetes or Woody Allen, it is very hard to understand everything, because there is real work done there, a search for natural speech. I think it was Christopher Fry, the writer-scriptwriter, who noted the particularity of epics: everyone speaks very slowly. Epics marshal very famous, high-profile characters: Moses, Ramses, and it would seem impossible not to bestow them with an authority, dignity and self-assurance worthy of their rank. This is even more noticeable in Cleopatra, where Julius Caesar and Mark Antony also appear. Conclusion: we understand everything, but the diction is monotonous, Oxfordian, and unintentionally comic. These illustrious characters lose all humanity and naturalness. They become reciters, robots without depth. And it’s hard to tolerate this for close to four hours.

Talking pictures didn’t always serve DeMille well, whose art was located at a level of abstraction to which the realism of speech couldn’t adapt. A talking version of The Road to Yesterday would have been ridiculous. Samson and Delilah is above all an adventure film, set incidentally in a Biblical backdrop, where everything is done, like in The Ten Commandments, to introduce Hollywood’s boy-meets-girl and vaudeville’s triangle formulas. DeMille hit back at his detractors: “If you don’t like my films, you don’t like the Bible”. The Bible was very laconic about these episodes from the past. DeMille may not have betrayed it, but he added a whole lot of things he liked and which were likely to appeal to the American public.

The King of Kings, the story of the Passion of Christ, is disappointing in the sense that it remains a stilted, nervous film. DeMille is visibly afraid of making mistakes. It’s religious kitsch par excellence, which benefits from a magnificent work by cameraman Peverell Marley and set designers Mitchell Leisen and Wilfred Buckland. It’s a very sober work, quite opposite to DeMille’s customary style, based on extravagance. There are highly calculated gradations of whites and especially blacks here. The visual ambience of the Passion brings out the gloomy content of this key episode of spiritual life. It is interesting to note that most films or film projects on the Passion, like those of Duvivier, Stevens and Dreyer (which was unfinished), take the sober direction inaugurated by DeMille and by paintings of the previous centuries: the ideal thing, for a subject like this, is to shoot black-and-white in colour.

Understatement reigns supreme: the flagellation of Christ is only shown in silhouette. During the ascent to Calvary, the camera frames the Cross, not Christ.

All this deserves respect, but this humility isn’t exactly C.B. DeMille’s strength, and the viewer is terribly bored over a runtime of close to three hours. The only really interesting moments are the brief stretches where we see the sinner Mary Magdalene in her luxurious chariot drawn by five zebras, recalling the eccentricities of The Golden Bed or Madam Satan.

The King of Kings (1927): the sinner Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) on her chariot drawn by five zebras.

The Sign of the Cross ends with this implausible episode where Marcus, the head of Nero’s guard, who had hitherto been totally insensitive to the Christian faith, is determined to share the fate of his beloved in the lion’s den. It takes all the talent of our filmmaker to get the public to accept this. Here is a challenge often found in DeMille’s work: it’s completely unbelievable, but we are won over by the filmmaker’s ardour in trying to impose such absurdity on us. I don’t know if we believe it, but we admire Cecil DeMille’s obstinacy, his determination in defying all Cartesianism. He subjugates us, he begs us to take part in his project, and we become, with tears in the eyes, his fans, his dutiful slaves: he has dared to, and we respond favourably to his astounding audacity, all the more so because this kind of scene appears at the very end of the film, after a long preparation. We experience the same thing in The Road to Yesterday, The Volga Boatman, The Plainsman and Unconquered.

The final seconds of The Sign of the Cross moreover contain what could be considered the peak of kitsch art: we stay back inside the prison near the arena, after the Christians have left to be devoured by lions. The jail door begins to close. We then see, in the middle of this door, a bright horizontal slot which seems to be the reflection of a window located behind it. But soon after, we also see an identical, vertical white line that combines with this apparently realistic reflection to form a perfect cross. It seems totally natural, stripped of all artifice: at the beginning of the scene, we accepted this horizontal reflection as a reproduction of reality. And this vertical addition seems to be of the same order… DeMille thus succeeds in his trick of making us accept what is obviously the height of artifice as realism.

Let’s pass over The Crusades, both a flop and an artistic failure, where the intrusion of musical form into a pious film is unproductive and where Henry Wilcoxon’s mediocre and declamatory performance destroys all effects.

The choice of making Joan the Woman warrants some explanation. The film evidently takes a direction opposite to those of the aforementioned films, which fashion themselves as champions of Christianity and those who represent it. But let’s not forget that it was the clergymen of England who burnt Joan at the stake and, like many of his countrymen, DeMille felt certain reservations towards this country, which had totally enslaved the American territory. This is very noticeable in many of his films. Moreover, Joan of Arc came before Henry VIII, so she was the victim of English Catholicism. Puritans and Protestants had nothing to do with it. And the Englishmen who burnt Joan redeem themselves, as we shall see, by helping the French in their fight against the Germans in 1917.

Religion reappears in a more precise manner in films that aren’t Biblical epics, but are set in a contemporary milieu, with pullovers and business suits: The Road to Yesterday (1925) and The Godless Girl (1928).

This unexpected intrusion of religion into the modern world is to be related to the fact that the financier of these films, Jeremiah Milbank, was devout. Both films show the conflict between atheists and Christians, a conflict that, for us French, seems somewhat bizarre in the 21st century, especially as it takes on extravagant dimensions here: in the first of these films, Beth, a 100% atheist, falls madly in love with handsome Jack. A wedding is in sight. But—the horror—Jack comes to the following dinner in his pastor attire. No question of marriage whatsoever anymore…

In The Godless Girl, Judy, the head of a group of atheist students at a high-school opposes George, the leader of the Christian students movement. Brawls. One dead.

In all these films, religion seems to be just a pretext. DeMille is closer to Lewis Carroll than to Daniel-Rops. The protagonists are on one side or the other. They don’t express their motivations, their doubts, the deepest reasons for their eventual changeover, if they exist at all. It’s completely the opposite of films by Bergman, Dreyer or Bresson. Everything remains very superficial.

This means that, except in the case of these last two films, which elevate the sudden change of ideals to the level of a surrealist artwork, the choice of making a religious film doesn’t work out in favour of our filmmaker all that much. It even goes against him. Those who follow public opinion and see DeMille above all as the filmmaker of The Ten Commandments and Biblical epics are likely to not appreciate him at all, whereas watching apparently more modest works like Kindling or Saturday Night has the potential to turn them into enthusiastic supporters. The Biblical films work on their form, their style alone, while C.B.’s modern films combine the filmmaker’s art with the power and humour of a sociological study.

 

Footnote:

[1] Note that this second commandment implicitly prohibits cinema.

 

May 2, 2021

The Emperor of Mauve (1949-1956)

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[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.

 

April 28, 2021

More and More (1949-1956)

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

The Ten Commandments (1956): the golden calf sequence with the whole image filled with extras.

In 1949, DeMille was sixty-eight years old. He seems to have been obsessed with the idea of finishing his career on a film that would cost as much as possible, make the most money, be the longest of them all and impose the name of Cecil B. DeMille for all eternity. That is what can be felt at the beginning of Samson and Delilah (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1951) and The Ten Commandments (1956), completed two years before the filmmaker’s death. These three films begin with a preamble which is far above the relative banality of the story that follows: we see the Earth spinning, an emphatic commentary (sometimes read out by the filmmaker) seems to offer a moral, even a metaphysics.

And the films are increasingly long: Samson clocks 128 minutes, the next film 150 minutes and The Ten Commandments runs for 225 minutes, whereas the first version of the latter devoted only one hour to its ancient segment.

The costs (and revenues) went up too: $3,097,000 (Samson), $3,873,000 for The Greatest Show, but The Ten Commandments had the biggest budget of its time: $13,272,000.

To be objective, it must be noted that the budget of Samson, shot in only eleven weeks, was modest: the film cost less than a contemporary comedy like It’s a Wonderful Life. It was probably because Paramount was scared of History, and Antiquity in particular, and wanted to limit the damage after the crushing failure of C.B.’s last American epic, The Crusades, which delayed the production of Samson by thirteen years, and of a British Caesar and Cleopatra. The actors who were cast, Hedy Lamarr as well as Victor Mature, weren’t top-stars at the time, and the film only has one really expensive scene: the last sequence at the temple. So it wasn’t very different from the strategy of the years 1919-1922, with their ancient interludes, which I will talk about later.

Is it this relative lack of money that explains some of the anomalies detrimental to the film?

The fact remains that the choice of Angela Lansbury to play Hedy Lamarr’s elder sister is rather incongruous, since Lamarr was thirteen years older than Lansbury, and it shows. And then, you don’t feel that Samson has lost his hair, which, being brown, remains very visible. Perhaps Victor Mature refused to have his head shaved. Moreover, after the alleged haircut, his hair has contradictory lengths, to say the least [1]. This probably corresponds to a non-chronological shooting schedule.

Except at the end, the action remains quite slow, especially during the episode of Samson’s seduction by Delilah. The characters dwell on their complex and shifting motivations. The tempo here resembles that of an opera, necessarily moderato because it takes longer to sing than to speak. DeMille may have originally wanted to adapt Saint-Saëns’ opera.

But given its consistency, the viewer eventually accepts the principle.

The film tends towards abstraction, Beauty and the Brute, with DeMille embellishing and circling around these basic definitions.

Let us pass over C.B.’s casualness towards the Bible, in which Semadar in not Dalilah’s sister. In any case, these questions about plausibility and fidelity to the Bible are rather ridiculous if we consider that the Old Testament states that Moses, prefiguring Jeanne Calment, died at the age of one hundred and twenty.

The Ten Commandments doesn’t work. Sensing that the film will be his last, DeMille wanted to stuff as many things as possible into it. The result is torn between four contradictory directions:

a distant, frontal, Brechtian presentation;

an accumulation of similar effects, which becomes tiresome over almost four hours;

a rich work on colour range;

an emotional-political plot worthy of a mediocre B-movie (Moses and the Pharaoh as romantic rivals—some cheek).

The Greatest Show on Earth (1951): the circus troupe after the train accident, every man for himself.

On the other hand, The Greatest Show on Earth, which in fact received the only Oscar for Best Picture awarded to DeMille, remains a fascinating work. It revolves around a grand touring circus, Ringling Bros & Barnum, with the different acts of the show being interspersed with criminal and romantic subplots, highlighting the various participants of the circus, thanks to some skilful editing. This alternation avoids any risk of boredom. It isn’t just a question of alternation, since pure spectacle and individual subplots come together in several shots. I’m thinking particularly of the magnificent scenes following the train derailment, where we see animals, elephants, lions and others, walking across the wreck of the train, trucks, iron and woodwork, and circus props, near the injured, those attending to them and those running all over the place to salvage property and worry about the fate of their dear ones. As in The Story of Dr. Wassell, DeMille frames five to ten people in the same shot, people going in different directions, remaining in highly varied positions—lying down, standing up, leaning across, constantly talking at the risk of speaking over each other. This handling of small groups produces results that are ultimately more rewarding than those of shots with massive crowds, with which DeMille is often identified with. Their humanity is much stronger.   

Cinema here becomes a veritable creation of a world, a bit like in The Thing from Another World, made by Hawks the same year. Circus and cinema become one. The slightly pompous statements of the preamble take on an unexpected dimension thanks to simultaneous images showing the preparation of the premises and the raising of the circus tent’s main mast—a moving lyricism, based on great sobriety.

It’s a pity that DeMille didn’t make any other film around the production of a show, a subject that he obviously knew very well after sixty-eight films, and which he had probably tackled in the scenes at the film studio in We Can’t Have Everything (1918), alas lost, and broached in What’s His Name (1914).

We have there the old problem of paying a troupe full time rather than limiting its activity to more profitable one-offs, a problem that had partly justified DeMille’s breakup with Paramount in 1925—the fight against unemployment in Cecil DeMille’s work…

And of course, there is the interference between work and emotions, a bit like in Renoir’s French Cancan, the rivalries between stars…

There is a totalitarian side to the film: DeMille wants to stuff everything in without offending anyone, the Church, the police, the financiers, the frauds, even the audience, and something that really takes the cake considering our filmmaker: the vanity of money (cf. the shot, towards the end, of banknotes lost in the disaster). The only reproach that could be made is that the usual effects—chaos, visual composition, permanent ubiquity, verbal jousts—are repeated, in all their excellence, for two-and-a-half hours here. The actions may be different, but the way they are performed remains the same.

One could balk at it. DeMille’s art isn’t an art of the fugue. But this inventive accumulation amazes, stuns the viewer—a hammer-like aesthetic, with many nails to go with it. We end up accepting even the “Stars and Stripes Forever” aspect of the film.

 

Footnote:

[1] Similarly, in The Road to Yesterday, the dialogue specifies that the shadow moving on the wall is that of Schildkraut, whom we see immobile in the following shot—a continuity error.