I don't remember anything about it, though we must have been taken: a brother was inspired to play Moses and the idols, and broke a bust of Sappho.
Well, I wouldn't call her a graven image, but she has received a fair amount of worship over the years.
I am not sure what you would think of the movie now. I didn't find that it rose (or sank) to the point of risibility anywhere other than the proto-Seder, but between the script's determination to cram in every possible incident in Moses' life from birth to death plus every possible facet of melodrama inherent or graftable into the story plus DeMille's directorial style which was only one level of naturalism up from a silent film with a dialogue track, I'm not sure it's possible to watch it with a perfect or even a moderate suspension of disbelief. I liked it best when it was being either human-driven (Pharaoh Sethi and his two heirs, the late-life meeting of Moses' two mothers, the hell that is the mutually Moses-obsessed marriage of Rameses and Nefretiri), numinous in a matter-of-fact way (the aforementioned first and tenth plagues, the rain of hail-fire which occurs while Rameses is reading a letter outdoors; he steels himself conspicuously to ignore the ice falling from a clear sky until it begins to burn like naphtha along the tiles and walls), or totally batshit insane (the Golden Calf, which you should imagine as a hammered-gold Apis bull before which Edward G. Robinson in a smirk and a leopardskin is leading the abandoned people of Israel in a vortex of lurid torchlight and just-deniable orgiastic writhing, drinking, and playing of tambourines and horns while wreaths of blood-red flowers are flung spinning across its horns and the half-naked unwilling sacrifice played by Debra Paget weeps at its gilt-shod hooves). Everything that fell between these modes was either tableaux vivants or really expensive cheesecake or just didn't work for me. The burning bush, for example, is done with a kind of overlaid golden glowing rather than actual flames, which is an interesting effect, but I found it much less visually or emotionally powerful than if they had used a practical effect or even the flickering double-exposed fires of the seventh plague—and then it speaks in a deep, stately masculine voice which I was later informed was Heston's own and while I like the concept (also employed in The Prince of Egypt) of the prophet hearing God as if he spoke to himself, it also knocks another level of reality off the scene because it is such a specific and to me now antiquated idea of the voice of God, the basso profundo beard in the sky. Nefretiri has lines like "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!" I appreciate the nod toward inclusiveness when Bithiah's Ethiopian bearers are included under the safety of Miriam and Aaron's roof and when Nubians join the Hebrews in their exodus from Egyptian slavery, but of the main cast nobody is Egyptian or even handwavily Arabic and the only Jewish actors I could identify are Edward G. Robinson (Dathan, the traitorous overseer of his fellow Hebrews who sleazes his way to the governship of Goshen; he's reprehensibly great), Olive Deering (Miriam, who doesn't even get to sing the "Song of the Sea" in this version; John Carradine's Aaron is also sidelined except in the staffs-into-serpents episode and the making of the Golden Calf, which is a waste of John Carradine if you ask me), and slightly and ancestrally Yul Brynner, which makes the whole thing look again a lot more like a Midwestern church pageant than, you know, Nineteenth-Dynasty Egypt. Which is not surprising in a Biblical epic in 1956, but still: because it's what I expect from the time doesn't mean it doesn't still stick out like a sore thumb, especially when the script keeps thumping on freedom and equality and humanity and God, who if he is really God, cannot be the God of Israel alone, but the God of all men, dwelling like a light of truth and goodness in every heart and soul. Like, can we just get out of Egypt before we start with the supersessionism? The fact that I enjoyed this movie at all has to be a tribute to DeMille's powers as an entertainer (and Yul Brynner), but I really am not sure I need to do it to myself again.
no subject
Well, I wouldn't call her a graven image, but she has received a fair amount of worship over the years.
I am not sure what you would think of the movie now. I didn't find that it rose (or sank) to the point of risibility anywhere other than the proto-Seder, but between the script's determination to cram in every possible incident in Moses' life from birth to death plus every possible facet of melodrama inherent or graftable into the story plus DeMille's directorial style which was only one level of naturalism up from a silent film with a dialogue track, I'm not sure it's possible to watch it with a perfect or even a moderate suspension of disbelief. I liked it best when it was being either human-driven (Pharaoh Sethi and his two heirs, the late-life meeting of Moses' two mothers, the hell that is the mutually Moses-obsessed marriage of Rameses and Nefretiri), numinous in a matter-of-fact way (the aforementioned first and tenth plagues, the rain of hail-fire which occurs while Rameses is reading a letter outdoors; he steels himself conspicuously to ignore the ice falling from a clear sky until it begins to burn like naphtha along the tiles and walls), or totally batshit insane (the Golden Calf, which you should imagine as a hammered-gold Apis bull before which Edward G. Robinson in a smirk and a leopardskin is leading the abandoned people of Israel in a vortex of lurid torchlight and just-deniable orgiastic writhing, drinking, and playing of tambourines and horns while wreaths of blood-red flowers are flung spinning across its horns and the half-naked unwilling sacrifice played by Debra Paget weeps at its gilt-shod hooves). Everything that fell between these modes was either tableaux vivants or really expensive cheesecake or just didn't work for me. The burning bush, for example, is done with a kind of overlaid golden glowing rather than actual flames, which is an interesting effect, but I found it much less visually or emotionally powerful than if they had used a practical effect or even the flickering double-exposed fires of the seventh plague—and then it speaks in a deep, stately masculine voice which I was later informed was Heston's own and while I like the concept (also employed in The Prince of Egypt) of the prophet hearing God as if he spoke to himself, it also knocks another level of reality off the scene because it is such a specific and to me now antiquated idea of the voice of God, the basso profundo beard in the sky. Nefretiri has lines like "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!" I appreciate the nod toward inclusiveness when Bithiah's Ethiopian bearers are included under the safety of Miriam and Aaron's roof and when Nubians join the Hebrews in their exodus from Egyptian slavery, but of the main cast nobody is Egyptian or even handwavily Arabic and the only Jewish actors I could identify are Edward G. Robinson (Dathan, the traitorous overseer of his fellow Hebrews who sleazes his way to the governship of Goshen; he's reprehensibly great), Olive Deering (Miriam, who doesn't even get to sing the "Song of the Sea" in this version; John Carradine's Aaron is also sidelined except in the staffs-into-serpents episode and the making of the Golden Calf, which is a waste of John Carradine if you ask me), and slightly and ancestrally Yul Brynner, which makes the whole thing look again a lot more like a Midwestern church pageant than, you know, Nineteenth-Dynasty Egypt. Which is not surprising in a Biblical epic in 1956, but still: because it's what I expect from the time doesn't mean it doesn't still stick out like a sore thumb, especially when the script keeps thumping on freedom and equality and humanity and God, who if he is really God, cannot be the God of Israel alone, but the God of all men, dwelling like a light of truth and goodness in every heart and soul. Like, can we just get out of Egypt before we start with the supersessionism? The fact that I enjoyed this movie at all has to be a tribute to DeMille's powers as an entertainer (and Yul Brynner), but I really am not sure I need to do it to myself again.