Moses and Multiculturalism

9. Moses, the Movie

89 C h a P t e r n i n e Moses, the Movie I. Cecil B. DeMille produced two versions of the Moses story, both called The Ten Commandments: a silent film in 1926 and the classic starring Charlton Heston in 1956. These two films are in many ways very different. The earlier film is a morality tale showing the relevance of the commandments to modern life, and the second is a Hollywood blockbuster. The silent movie is presented with a musical accompaniment: gongs for majesty, faster music for egyptian chariots and orgies. The silent movie has clear roots in melodrama: indeed, when the medium must resort to written captions to make the story intelligible, it is easier if it is clear what is good and what is evil. The written panels are sometimes biblical quotations and sometimes only made to sound biblical. In any case, the writing echoes the commandments given to Moses: the writing seems like the voice of God. Moses always looks like an old man: neither the burning bush nor the first nine plagues are shown. Pharaoh is always rameses, when he lords it over the Hebrew slaves and when he confronts Moses. The huge wheel of his royal display vehicle runs over a slave who is fallen. egypt is colossal buildings , statues, and machines. There is no killing of the overseer, no Midian. everything is reduced to the death of the egyptian firstborn, the exodus, the parting of the red sea, the Golden Calf, and the Ten Commandments. 90 / Moses, the Movie Moses is a kind of tableau vivant with his arms raised—either to channel God or to display anger. Pharaoh puts his dead son in the arms of a statue of an egyptian god and goes after the escaping Hebrews in revenge for the fact that the god cannot restore life to him. There are two spectacular crowd scenes—the exodus and the revelry around the Golden Calf—and several divine interventions. Within the multitudes escaping from egypt, DeMille shows beasts, children, and baby animals : everything is made to present daily life on a human scale. The camera also zooms in on individuals in the crowd: Miriam and Dathan and Aaron. Miriam is at first a suffering water carrier; later the chief reveler around the Golden Calf. God produces the commandments in the air like volcanic explosions; Moses struggles to chisel them in stone. Moses, seeing the calf, breaks the tables, and then we fade to a family scene in which a pious mother is reading the Bible to her two sons—one good, one evil—and in the end the commandments are upheld by their fates. like rameses, the bad (and successful) son is a builder; like rameses, everything he has built crumbles around him. II. DeMille’s second Moses film is a classic: it has the dubious distinction of being repeated at easter, like It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street at Christmas time. It presents itself with much more élan than the silent movie; it comes with all the trappings of a stage play or opera. It begins with a musical “overture,” and DeMille himself steps out of curtains to announce the movie’s universal theme: man’s struggle for freedom under God’s law. Derived from the written captions, a voice-over booms out with thunderous authority the first acts of God’s creation story. We recognize Genesis, and all the subsequent voice-over glosses, whether from the Bible or not, have the same authority: somewhere between God and DeMille. All the more because the movie is serious about citing its sources: Philo, Josephus, and of course “The Holy scriptures,” which lead to the quotation from Genesis. The “Holy scriptures” is meant to be ecumenical: it is not the “Torah” or Moses, the Movie / 91 the “old Testament” but the word of a vague kind of universal monotheistic God—the same one who appears on U.s. coins in the expression “in God we trust” or in the “under God” added to the pledge of allegiance to the United states, added at about the same time as the date of the movie. What is different about this movie is the role of female attractiveness in it. sometimes it involves dancing—displays before Pharaoh or before the sheiks in Jethro’s tent. each main character is provided with a love interest: nefertiri for...