21: The TEN COMMANDMENTS
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(Year refers to British release)
Running Time: 222 minutes
Colour: Technicolor
Estimated Attendance: 15 million
What they said at the time...
Synopsis
Adopted as a child and given Egyptian nationality by the Princess Bithiah, the Hebrew Moses is the favourite and apparent heir of the Pharaoh Sethi. Moses' love for the hereditary Princess Nefretiti antagonises Sethi's son, the powerful Prince Rameses. He is betrayed by Dathan, a court official, who reveals the secret of his origins, and asserts that Moses plans to lead his people out of Egyptian bondage. Disowned by Sethi, Moses is exiled to the desert, to be eventually rescued by Jethro, Sheik of Midian. He learns from Jethro's daughter Sephora (whom he subsequently marries) of the mysterious Mount Sinai. Here the voice of God from a burning bush commands Moses to return to Egypt and free the enslaved Hebrew peoples.
Rameses, now Pharaoh and married to Nefretiti, refuses Moses' entreaties; whereupon a disastrous series of plagues descends on the land. Rameses relents; Moses leads the slaves, and Dathan, his prisoner, out of Egypt. A miracle enables them to cross the Red Sea, while Rameses' pursuing army is drowned. Reaching Mount Sinai, Moses hears the voice of God and receives the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile Dathan has led the people into idolatry and revolt. When Moses confronts them with the tablets, however, the earth opens up and swallows up the unrepentant. After forty years of expiation, spent wandering in the wilderness, an aged Moses leads his faithful survivors to the promised land.
Review
This enormous film (it is not, in fact, a remake of de Mille's own 1923 The Ten Commandments) is less of a brash, pseudo-Biblical charade than one might at first have expected. The quartet of script-writers (depending for their material on the Book of Exodus, "the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, and the Midrash, and … the books Prince of Egypt by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Pillar of Fire by Rev. J. H. Ingraham, On Eagles Wings by Rev. A. E. Southon") adopt an air of heavy reverence towards their central character. What is missing, though, despite the magnificent costumes and the lavish pictorial values, is any evidence of even an elementary historical sense. (This despite acknowledged intentions to the contrary; there are copious acknowledgements to scholarly authorities besides a fulsome and earnest introduction by de Mille himself). It is all presented like a Drury Lane spectacle of 1900.
Most unsatisfactory of all is the film's totally inadequate approach to character. Moses is a beef-and-brawn comic strip hero; Yul Brynner's Rameses has stature but no novelty; Edward G. Robinson makes Dathan heavily theatrical; Anne Baxter is a glacial, intermittently fiery Nefretiti. And so on.
Save for the sequences involving Jethro's man-hungry daughters and the protracted orgy of the Golden Calf, de Mille's characteristic preoccupations are restrained. The worst moments of The Robe are recalled, though, in the scenes of the burning bush and the giving of the Ten Commandments - a melodramatic pot pourri of portentous voices, sepulchral music and lightning flashes. In contrast, the exodus and the parting of the Red Sea are well staged - two episodes which give temporary impetus and drama to a film which is for the most part lacking in both these qualities.
Synopsis and Review from Monthly Film Bulletin Vol.25 No.288 January 1958 p.4
The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the BFI between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was incoporated into Sight and Sound magazine.
