The Promised Land
The American Cinematheque (and Cecil B. De Mille) returns
The dialogue-titles, written by frequent De Mille collaborator Jeanie MacPherson, are particularly snappy, lightly catching the buoyancy and bite of ’20s speech. "I’m a little hazy on the golden calf, Mom," says Danny when his mother scolds him for being irreverent. He flips a gold coin from his pocket: "But when the golden eagle on this little 5-dollar sinker flaps his wings, that’s when I kneel down to pray."
As a further joke — and this is a particularly nice bit of jazz-age business, worthy of Fitzgerald himself — Danny builds an impromptu altar on the family mantel, using a spoon and a cigarette as a kind of cross, and making deep clowning salaams to his gold piece. Johnny, smiling tolerantly at his brother’s antics, gives a toss of his head that must’ve marked the 12-year-old Ronald Reagan for life when he saw it: "Laugh at the Ten Commandments all you want, Danny. They pack an awful wallop." (Come to think of it, the whole of Reagan’s mature vernacular may have come from this film.) Later, when Danny is scolded by his mother for dancing on a Sunday, he strides out the door with his girl, bragging as he goes, "We’ll play our Victrola till hell freezes — then we’ll dance on the ice."
There’s also a cook’s tour of some of the era’s less-examined bigotries: a femme fatale who sets her cap for Danny is that bygone movie pariah, a "half-breed," half French, half Chinese and secretly bearing (of all symbolic ailments) leprosy into the picture. There’s a fine burst of bravura moviemaking late in the drama, when a woman — shot to death behind a drapery — clutches the curtain and pulls it down after her, popping the rings one by one as she falls. It’s easy to picture the 24-year-old Alfred Hitchcock seeing this film, and filing this dazzling moment away for the use he made of it four decades later in Psycho — the match is that exact, right to the downward, diagonal angle of the woman’s clutching fingers.
The Ten Commandments is no masterpiece — it never pierces the soul with its silence, the way Murnau’s Sunrise, Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, or anything by Keaton or Chaplin can — but it’s a first-rate curiosity, an easy, exhilarating bit of travel-in-time. It’s also a primitive, inward passion play that gives us the heart of Hollywood’s pre-eminent pioneer, wrestling in all anguish and sincerity with that century of decadence he was convinced his pictures had set in motion.
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