For the past half century and more, it has been generally taken for granted that the director of a film is to be considered its “author,” the individual who is primarily responsible for the film’s total effect, even when the weight of factual evidence pertaining to a specific film clearly indicates otherwise. Yet it remains unusual for the average American filmgoer to be able to name the directors of more than a handful of his favorite movies, and prior to the 50s, when the “auteur theory” became fashionable, it was far less common. For years, the only Hollywood directors widely known by name were those who, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, also starred in the films they directed—and a mostly forgotten man named Cecil B. DeMille.
DeMille, who died in 1959, is now mainly remembered for The Ten Commandments (1956), the last of his 70-odd films and the fifth-highest-grossing movie (adjusted for inflation) of all time.* But for most of his 45-year-long career, from the silent era onward, he was without question the most famous of all film directors—and was legendarily given credit for founding the Hollywood film industry, because he directed the first major hit shot there, The Squaw Man, in 1913. A specialist in big-budget costume melodramas that were liberally (if decorously) spiced with sex, he learned early on the secret of mass appeal and never swerved from supplying it. By the 1930s, he had established a brand identity for his pictures that was so clear and coherent that they all but sold themselves. The only present-day film director to have had comparable success in achieving a similar goal is Steven Spielberg, whose filmmaking style (as he unhesitatingly acknowledges) has been strongly influenced by that of DeMille.
DeMille himself was the originating model of the omnipotent Hollywood director-mogul. “As a director on the set,” Welles said, “he had the greatest act that’s ever been seen.” Angela Lansbury, who appeared in his Samson and Delilah in 1949, recalled some of the gaudier tricks that DeMille used to bolster his image:
He demanded absolute attention, and he ruled the set with an iron hand, and an iron voice, I might add. He carried a microphone man with him all the time, and he simply put his hand behind him and took the microphone and spoke to the entire assembled group of people on the set…. He also had a man who was always there with a chair, and when he wanted to sit down he simply kind of glanced over his left shoulder, and the man shoved the chair under his bottom.
DeMille’s later films—among them Cleopatra (1934), The Plainsman (1936), Union Pacific (1939), Samson and Delilah, and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)—were enormously successful at the box office. But that doesn’t explain the degree of his popular fame. After all, some of his contemporaries had equally long runs and comparable success, among them John Ford. In part, DeMille was famous because he worked hard at being so. For nine years, from 1936 to 1945, DeMille hosted a network radio series, Lux Radio Theater, that presented hour-long dramatic adaptations of Hollywood films. The series, which aired for 45 weeks each year, required a considerable expenditure of time and energy on his part, but he stuck with it for nine seasons because it helped to raise his personal profile far above those of his fellow directors.
Yet for all the care with which he tended his reputation, DeMille’s fame rested primarily on his ability to give the public what it wanted. And what was that exactly? Scott Eyman, a veteran biographer, has just published Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille.* Fully sourced and written in a workmanlike but lively style, Empire of Dreams is as good a biography of DeMille as we are likely to get. Without making any unsustainable claims for the artistic merits of DeMille’s films, Eyman succeeds in putting them in historical perspective, and to read his book is to understand why they spoke so powerfully to moviegoers of a more innocent age.
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Empire of Dreams is at its best when it explores the theatrical roots of DeMille’s flamboyant style, which Eyman aptly describes as “a Victorian child’s idea of the American West or Roman times or biblical days—larger than life, with heroic heroes and dastardly villains.” Even The Greatest Show on Earth, the only one of DeMille’s later films with a modern setting, uses the same good-guy-bad-guy approach in showing how the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus put its shows on the road.
The key to understanding this style is to be found in DeMille’s artistic pedigree. Born in 1881, he was the son of a playwright who collaborated closely with David Belasco, one of the most celebrated American dramatists of the Vicwardian era. Though his work is now forgotten save for two plays, Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Girl of the Golden West (1905), which were later used as source material for Puccini operas, Belasco specialized in spectacular melodramas whose elaborate sets and décor set the visual tone for American theater throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Stage-struck from childhood onward, DeMille became an actor in 1900, later branching out into directing and producing. His goal was to emulate Belasco, but no sooner did he see his first motion picture than he sensed the nascent medium’s unprecedented potential for mounting spectacles of which turn-of-the-century stage directors and designers could only dream:
When a big effect is necessary, such as the burning of a ship, the blowing up of a mine, the wrecking of a train, we do not have to trick the effect with lights and scenery, we DO it…. No height limit, no close-fitting exits, no conserving of stage space, just the whole world open to you as a stage.
Accordingly, DeMille moved to Hollywood in 1913 and shot The Squaw Man. By the end of 1914, he had become one of the film industry’s most prolific “picturizers” (as he was billed in the credits of his earliest films).
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DeMille’s style was slow to take definitive shape, and Eyman devotes one of the most interesting chapters of Empire of Dreams to a discussion of the farce-like marital comedies that he made in the years immediately following World War I. But it was the epic strain in DeMille that won out, and he gave it full rein in his two most ambitious silent films, The Ten Commandments (his first version, in 1923) and The King of Kings (1927). Though he continued to make other kinds of pictures, these biblical melodramas engaged his sensibility on the deepest level, and with the coming of sound, DeMille devoted himself almost exclusively to the making of historical pictures that brought his innate grandiosity to the fore.
The scripts of these pictures invariably consisted of simple plots on which DeMille strung eye-popping “stage pictures.” “Do you know what I mean by just an idea?” he told one of his screenwriters. “It is a story told in ONE line. THAT is your situation upon which you build your story.” It stood to reason that the centerpiece of The Ten Commandments should have been Charlton Heston’s Moses parting the Red Sea, a signature image that might have been conceived specifically for DeMille to film, just as Belasco would surely have put it on stage had such a thing then been technically possible.
Yet it is not enough to say, as Eyman does, that DeMille merely translated Victorian stage technique to the screen. Another clue to the origins of his cinematic style can be found in a letter that he sent to the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1952. The two men had just filmed Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, and DeMille wrote to tell them how much he enjoyed the results:
From my earliest theater[-]going days I have been a lover of Grand Opera. The physical drawbacks of the average operatic presentation have often bothered me—in fact it is hard for me to remember a production which did not make heavy demands on the imagination…. I thank you for your outstanding courage and artistry in bringing to us Grand Opera as it existed until now only in the minds of those who created it.
This revelatory letter says everything about DeMille’s own aesthetic. As early as 1915, he had hired Geraldine Farrar, the great American operatic soprano, to star in a silent version of Carmen, and 34 years later he filmed Samson and Delilah in a style as closely related to 19th-century grand opera as it was to Belasco’s Broadway spectacles. Everyone who worked with him agreed that he was better at directing chorus-like groups than individual actors—no film director has ever staged more-vivid crowd scenes—and that, conversely, he was all but indifferent to the quality of the dialogue his actors spoke. “At times he would put his fingers in his ears so he wouldn’t be able to hear what [the actors] were saying and just look at them to see if the pantomime was strong enough to carry the action,” one of his cameramen recalled. It was almost as though he imagined their lines being sung rather than spoken, perhaps in some other language.
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What staggered the moviegoers of DeMille’s own day, alas, now looks and sounds cartoonish and overblown. Just as his once-revolutionary special effects have been rendered obsolete by the introduction of computer-generated imagery, so do today’s audiences prefer profanity-laced, pseudo-naturalistic dialogue to the stilted, stagy oratory of The Ten Commandments (“Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”).
Above all, it is DeMille’s total lack of irony that sets him apart from modern filmmakers. While shooting the crucifixion scene of The King of Kings, he instructed his cast and crew to “take five minutes—five minutes—for you to just think about what you have seen tonight—and to remember that what we’ve seen tonight is the filming of something that truly happened.” At the very end of his life, DeMille told an old friend that “I know they call The Ten Commandments the Sexodus and what have you…. But my ministry was making religious movies and getting more people to read the Bible than anyone else ever has.” (At the same time, DeMille—who kept three mistresses on his payroll simultaneously—went out of his way to infuse even the most religiose of his films with gaudy touches of concupiscence.)
It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary critics should dismiss DeMille’s films as quaint and that only two of them, The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth, are still shown regularly on TV. Yet the underlying appeal of his special brand of melodramatic spectacle remains as strong as ever. Steven Spielberg, for instance, says that it was The Greatest Show on Earth, the first movie he ever
saw, that inspired him to become a filmmaker:
I remember the spectacle before I remember the personalities, which for a child is normal. But perhaps it is [also] a clue to the kinds of movies I’ve been making like Jaws and Close Encounters as opposed to the kinds of films that I might make a couple of years from now.
Building on the older director’s techniques, Spielberg forged the language of the blockbuster film, an image-driven, straightforwardly plotted spectacle whose pasteboard characters rarely utter anything more memorable than a catchphrase (“We’re gonna need a bigger boat”) and in which the performances of individual actors are subordinate in effect to the brilliantly executed crowd scenes that are its raison d’être. From Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) to James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), American filmmaking, instead of moving in the more sophisticated directions to which 70s Hollywood films such as Chinatown, Network, and Taxi Driver had pointed, has come to be dominated by an updated version of DeMille’s grand-opera style.
What is nowhere to be found in these films, however, is DeMille’s explicit religiosity, though it was as much a part of his mass appeal as was his unrivaled flair for directing crowd scenes. Yet even under the aspect of postmodern secularism, America has remained, in G.K. Chesterton’s phrase, a nation with the soul of a church, and so DeMille’s successors have been forced to concoct quasi-religious substitutes (such as the “force” that protects the characters in Star Wars) for the faith in God and greatness that drove his epic style.
It is this uncomplicated faith that undoubtedly explains why ABC has telecast The Ten Commandments each Easter weekend since 1973, a piece of programming that presumably outrages both the tastes and the ideological inclinations of every network executive who has ever been called upon to approve it. The world has changed greatly since 1956, but at a time where little else is certain, it seems that there will always be a place in the hearts of ordinary Americans for the Technicolor pieties of Cecil B. DeMille.
