DVDs

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS DIRECTED BY CECIL B. DEMILLE PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO

LIKE a dry run for Best Picture winner Ben-Hur, which came out three years later, Cecil B. DeMille's biblical extravaganza also features Charlton Heston as an enslaved Jewish prince who fights his Gentile oppressors for the right to Jewish self-determination. DeMille's interpretation of the biblical exodus from Egypt is profoundly silly, yet as the last gasp of a dying Hollywood, its cast-of-thousands gigantism casts a campy spell. Taking place in an Egypt of palm trees imported from Beverly Hills, The Ten Commandments is a triumph of terrific production design (Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira, Walter Tyler) and gorgeous costumes (Edith Head and others) over hammy acting and an indifferent script.

Moses (Heston) is an Egyptian prince who discovers that he is actually the son of Hebrew slaves. Leaving the bosom of his voluptuous lady friend Nefertiti (Anne Baxter), Moses becomes a slave himself, leaving his brother-rival Rameses (Yul Brynner, looking like The Rock gone cold turkey on 'roids) to become the next pharaoh. Baxter, delivering her lines here like she's auditioning for that long-awaited sequel to All About Eve, is sultry and flirty, but cannot convince Moses to turn his back on his newly adopted people, and she is left with Rameses as a distinctly inferior consolation prize. Rameses turns out to be a despot of the distinctly unenlightened kind, and Moses demands the Hebrews' freedom, unleashing those 10 nasty plagues when denied.

The Ten Commandments takes some major liberties with the biblical narrative, choosing to focus on Moses' lost years as a prince because that's where all the glamour and glitz reside. Featuring gorgeous Nile-side sets and artful special effects, this is a one-size-fits-all epic, taking the rather harsh Old Testament story and souping it up with some intrigue and a healthy dollop of violence. Once God enters the picture, The Ten Commandments grows weighty, and a bit boring, even with the still-impressive splitting of the Red Sea.

Coming out in 1956, the story of the tyrannical Egyptians enslaving other peoples in their quest for global domination begged a contemporary interpretation; in fact, DeMille begins the film with a spoken introduction that makes the reference to Stalin and Mao all but explicit. In the overthrowing of Pharaoh's authority, the Hebrews are fulfilling what the people of Hungary that same fall of 1956 were stopped from doing: the toppling of a brutally indifferent, criminal dictatorship imposed from the outside. Even in the silliest movies, there is sometimes the germ of a deeper truth, struggling to find its freedom.