- Feb 5, 2002
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Reflections on a Very Oscar movie from a very different Oscar age.
Before watching it, in stages, with my kids last week — mostly for the sake of an Egypt-obsessed five-year-old, who got a bit more than he bargained for — I would have told you that I had seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as a kid. But I’m not quite sure that’s true. I had seen pieces of the movie, scattered sections and scenes and set-pieces in the days when it played on television every Easter weekend. But the whole thing, all two hundred and twenty minutes from start to finish? No, I doubt it: I probably “saw” the movie the way I “read” Ulysses in college, as a piecemeal experience rather than a sustained engagement with the text.
And what a text! The Ten Commandments is a fascinating watch on many levels, but especially against the backdrop of the Oscars’ slow declineinto a festival of the small and worthy and little-seen, because it embodies an era of the opposite extreme: A time when the Academy Awards tended to reward movies for their teeming bigness, their cast-of-thousands technicolor glory, their heaving melodrama, sometimes without much regard to script or quality at all.
Indeed if you were going to pick a polar-opposite Oscar year to the 2020 Oscars, 1956, the year of DeMille’s Exodus epic, wouldn’t be a bad choice. (So would 1952, when DeMille won Best Picture for The Greatest Show On Earth, which wasn’t.) The Ten Commandments earned seven Oscar nominations but it didn’t win Best Picture in ‘56; that honor went to Around the World in 80 Days, an endless travelogue in which basically every movie star of the era has a cameo. Meanwhile the other nominees were historical melodramas of one sort or another: The aptly-named Giant, the Quakers-in-the-Civil-War drama Friendly Persuasion, and The King and I, for which Yul Brynner won Best Actor; sadly he wasn’t nominated for his turn as Ramses in The Ten Commandments, so he didn’t get to compete against himself.
Continued below.
The Ten Commandments Experience
Before watching it, in stages, with my kids last week — mostly for the sake of an Egypt-obsessed five-year-old, who got a bit more than he bargained for — I would have told you that I had seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as a kid. But I’m not quite sure that’s true. I had seen pieces of the movie, scattered sections and scenes and set-pieces in the days when it played on television every Easter weekend. But the whole thing, all two hundred and twenty minutes from start to finish? No, I doubt it: I probably “saw” the movie the way I “read” Ulysses in college, as a piecemeal experience rather than a sustained engagement with the text.
And what a text! The Ten Commandments is a fascinating watch on many levels, but especially against the backdrop of the Oscars’ slow declineinto a festival of the small and worthy and little-seen, because it embodies an era of the opposite extreme: A time when the Academy Awards tended to reward movies for their teeming bigness, their cast-of-thousands technicolor glory, their heaving melodrama, sometimes without much regard to script or quality at all.
Indeed if you were going to pick a polar-opposite Oscar year to the 2020 Oscars, 1956, the year of DeMille’s Exodus epic, wouldn’t be a bad choice. (So would 1952, when DeMille won Best Picture for The Greatest Show On Earth, which wasn’t.) The Ten Commandments earned seven Oscar nominations but it didn’t win Best Picture in ‘56; that honor went to Around the World in 80 Days, an endless travelogue in which basically every movie star of the era has a cameo. Meanwhile the other nominees were historical melodramas of one sort or another: The aptly-named Giant, the Quakers-in-the-Civil-War drama Friendly Persuasion, and The King and I, for which Yul Brynner won Best Actor; sadly he wasn’t nominated for his turn as Ramses in The Ten Commandments, so he didn’t get to compete against himself.
Continued below.
The Ten Commandments Experience
