Nevertheless, the film does a marvelous job evoking (an imaginary Hollywood vision of) Ancient Egypt, especially in its scenes depicting the ancient empire's remarkable feats of engineering. Except for the Exodus sequence (with its curiously underused Gates to the City of Per-Rameses) and scattered establishing/transitional shots and background plates, very little of the film, much less than 5%, was actually filmed in Egypt. Nearly all of this was achieved on Paramount soundstages in Hollywood rather than outdoors on location.

His 'tableaux' compositions, a style common to silent films, work enormously well, with endless shots strikingly composed to resemble something like classical paintings. His style never really changed all that much, which inadvertently becomes an advantage here. DeMille was nearly 75 years old by the time The Ten Commandments was released, made at the end of a long career mostly spent in the silent era. The Ten Commandments is a remarkable piece of entertainment quite unlike anything else in cinema history, though not so much in terms of its spectacle. After marrying sheep herder Sephora (Yvonne De Carlo), Moses is charged by God (voiced by Heston) to return to Egypt to free his people. But Moses survives, and his fall coincides with a religious awakening that all men should be free from bondage. Robinson), uncovers Moses' true origins and banishes him to the desert. Born of Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt, Moses (Charlton Heston) is rescued from death by Princess Bithiah (Nina Foch) and, unbeknownst to Pharaoh Sethi (Cedric Hardwicke), raised as his surrogate son alongside blood heir Rameses (Yul Brynner) and Nefreteri (Anne Baxter), who will marry whomever Sethi names his successor.Īmbitious Rameses, plotting with Chief Hebrew Overseer Dathan (Edward G. The $13 million production is a partial remake of DeMille's 1923 silent film of the same name (more about which later).

That The Ten Commandments has endured where others have dropped off the middle-American radar is all the more surprising when you consider that DeMille's epic story of Moses was, for all its spectacle, extremely old-fashioned even when it new.

It's one of the very tiny handful of pre-1965 movies not made by Disney that mainstream audiences will still unhesitatingly watch, and about the only such film other than The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life that still airs occasionally in prime time on a major television network. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) belongs to an exclusive club.

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