he also had a brother whose name and face have been etched off of every momument and wall. Historically, Ramses built elaborate moments and cities with much slave labor. DeMille chose Rameses because of scant archeological Exodus that shows that Israel existed as a nation during his reign. the Bible laves the pharaoh of the Exodus unnamed.
Josephus and DeMille paint their Moses with similar brushes.ĭeMille sets his movie during the reign of Rameses. Moses' Ethiopian wife is present in the scene. He enters the Egyptian throne room and presents Pharoph with the spoils of the Ethiopian conquest. The war is referenced in the movie when the Adult Moses makes his first appearance. Jospehus also describes Moses winning a war in Ethiopia and taking an Ethiopian wife. Instead, Josephus writes that when Moses spoke, it was as if God Himself spoke. He makes no mention of Moses' speech impediment, which he has in the Bible. Josephus wrote, among other things, a history of the Jewish people for a Roman audience.
One interesting thing the movie does reference the works of Jospehus-a famous Jewish historian who lived about 60 years after Jesus. It's stuff like this that gave DeMille the ability to sell his Bible movies to both sides of the isle. This gives DeMille free reign to put a lovely woman in dipterous gowns and have her spout declarations of love. DeMille invents a love story between Moses, Pharaoh, and an Egyptian princess named Nephritri who makes no appearance in the Bible. He was really doing what he had to do to make it into a sexy melodrama.
DeMille claimed he was following ancient sources. The movie deviates largely from the Bible.
Is it overly long? I once printed out the screenplay, and it was thicker than the actual Bible!īut I want to shift gears and talk about how to movie deals with the "history" of Moses. Is it obsessed with its own importance? Yep.
Which brings me to his Moses flick that is shown on TV every Easter/Passover. When the Catholic Church reviewed the movie, they called it schizophrenic. DeMille reportedly showed as much of her breasts as he could without showing the nipples. The big scene that was promoted was when Claudette Colbert bathed naked in goat milk. The other half shows the revelry of Rome. Haf of the movie shows the piety of the stoic Christian martyrs. One of his movies- The Sign of the Cross-was about Christian persecution at the hands of the Romans. Several times DeMille made movies based off of biblical themes, and he always inserted sex into them-as much as he could get away with. DeMille knew that audiences love sex (or rather, the suggestion of sex), so he bathed his movies in it. DeMille was criticized in his day for being too bombastic and vulgar with his films, but that's what sold them. Intellectualism and subtlety? Not so much.
It's got drama, spectacle, and sensationalism. DeMille's The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses.