the Bible of course is terrific

EDDIE MANNIX: It’s a swell story – a story told before, yes, but we like to flatter ourselves that it’s never been told with this kind of distinction and panache.

EASTERN ORTHODOX PATRIARCH: Perhaps, sir, you forget its telling in the Holy Bible.

EDDIE: Quite right, Padre. The Bible of course is terrific. But for millions of people, pictures will be their reference point for the story – the story’s embodiment … [groping] the story’s …

PROTESTANT MINISTER: Realization.

EDDIE (approvingly): Realization.

There are three different points at which religion can enter into the movies. One is in the matter of spiritual interiority: personal faith and doubt and struggle, the major impetus of Malick’s The Tree of Life — and, for that matter, The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Then, second, there is the question of religious ethics, which is explored in, for example, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), directed by the same person who directed The Bells of St. Mary’s, a deeply committed Catholic Christian named Leo McCarey. (He also directed the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.) McCarey is as blunt about his moral message as he could be: he prefaces his story with a sentence that fills the screen: HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER. Similarly, in the original silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923), the story of the giving of those commandments on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20) is only the prologue to the story proper, which is set in the present day and features two brothers, one of whom strives to keep all of the commandments and the other of whom breaks them.

And then the third thing is spectacle — especially the more dramatic and supernaturally-saturated episodes of the biblical narrative. And that’s really what the Hollywood treatment of religion specializes in, a condition that we owe largely to the man who directed both versions of The Ten Commandments. That he moved from the ethical treatment of his subject to unprecedentedly vast spectacle is key to the account I am giving.

Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959), the man who did more than anyone else to make Hollywood, California the epicenter of American filmmaking, regularly got annoyed by Jews, especially the Jews who ran the big studios. His niece, the famous dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille, remembered that he would sometimes complain about Hollywood, “I don’t like the Jewish people out here.” He would then add, “Of course, I have to stop and remind myself, I’m one of them.” His father, Henry de Mille — Cecil changed the spelling of the family name because he thought DeMille looked better on a movie screen — was a committed Episcopalian of Dutch descent; his mother, Matilda Beatrice Samuel, was the England-born child of German Jews. Neither the de Milles nor the Samuels supported the marriage, but it seems to have been a largely successful one until Henry De Mille’s death from pneumonia in 1893, when he was only 39 and his son Cecil 11. This led to a long period of financial insecurity for the family that would only end when Cecil became one of the first famous American film directors.

(Scott Eyman’s biography of DeMille, linked above, is magnificent and has taught me almost everything I know about the man.)

Henry de Mille had studied for the ministry before turning to teaching and then to the theater. In very obvious ways Cecil was his son, since he went into the theater and then into movies while retaining a deep religious feeling. But he consistently wrestled with the Jewish half of his familial inheritance as well, and the combination of these forces made for a powerful, and in the long run profoundly influential, artistic sensibility — one perfectly suited to the America of the mid-twentieth century.

DeMille’s views about the relationship between the movies and religion was precisely the same as that of the Coens’ Eddie Mannix. In the first half of his career — which is to say, in the silent era and the first years of the talkies — DeMille made a kind of biblical trilogy: first The Ten Commandments (1923), then the story of Jesus himself in The King of Kings (1928), then the story of Christians in Nero’s Rome in The Sign of the Cross (1932). In these movies he took it upon himself to educate the American people in their religion and in its implications for their lives.

His brother Bill, who also became a film director and who worked with Cecil on many projects, doubted that such cinematic instruction could be done. As they were debating what scenes from the life of Jesus to include in The King of Kings, Bill counseled Cecil not to worry too much about what they did or did not include. The portrayal of the Resurrection was one that Cecil worried over ceaselessly, but Bill said, “I don’t think I would try to prove it. They are not going to believe it anyway just because they see it on the screen.” To which Cecil replied, “Yes they are. If you printed 75 million Bibles, their idea of Jesus Christ is going to be formed by what we give them. This next generation will get its idea of Jesus Christ from this picture.” This is even bolder than the fictional Eddie Mannix, who had merely said that “For millions of people, pictures will be their reference point for the story” and its “realization” — DeMille says it is his movie that will teach an entire generation who Jesus is. He was known to say, later in life, that his “ministry” — that’s how he referred to his filmmaking — “has been to make religious movies and get more people to read the Bible than anyone else ever has.” But even if they didn’t read it, they could receive the soul-saving message through the films.

Billy Graham was one of those who got the message: he once commented that DeMille’s 1927 silent epic The King of Kings “probably taught me more about the life of Christ than did a great deal of the Sunday School training I had as a boy.” DeMille used to hold lunches at the Paramount studio commissary where he led conversations on religion and the Bible, having had Bibles placed at each end of the table so that references might be checked and authenticated. Billy Graham was occasionally a guest at that table, and was sufficiently taken with the Hollywood experience that he produced his own movie, Mr. Texas (1951) — “the first Christian Western,” he called it. Its quality corresponds to the cost of production, which was $35,000. “It’s no DeMille,” Graham admitted, “but then DeMille takes $35,000 to warm up his lights.”

And Graham was not the only one to be awed by DeMille’s movies. The New York Times said simply that The King of Kings is “the most impressive of all motion pictures,” and other reviews were scarcely less adulatory. But no one was more taken by the film, and its implications, than DeMille himself. One evening, when he was still editing the picture, he watched portions of it with one of his advisors, a Roman Catholic priest named Daniel Lord. At one point DeMille leaned over to Lord and whispered, “He’s is great, isn’t he?” Lord said: “Warner?” — that is, H. B. Warner, the actor who played Jesus. But that’s not what DeMille meant. “Jesus,” he corrected. “He’s great.”

He was so convinced of the essential truth and power of his movie that he wanted to share it with others even before the film was completed. He was often called the greatest of Hollywood’s showmen, but he never earned that title more fully than he did on Christmas Eve 1926. On that day (of all days) they had been filming the Crucifixion of Jesus. Work went on; it was after 8pm when they quit for the day. As the cast and crew were preparing to head home to their friends and families, or perhaps to Christmas Eve parties, DeMille’s amplified voice suddenly addressed them:

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d stop for just a moment. I would like you all 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. I want you to think what it has meant to you. I’d like you to take a few minutes of quiet. I’ve asked the orchestra to play some music.

There was an orchestra on the set — something not altogether uncommon in those days — and it began to play a portion of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Someone released a few doves – yes, DeMille had actually arranged for the release of doves in the studio – and the birds, after flying about for a few moments, settled on the three crosses that dominated the set. Some people began quietly to cry. Others, DeMille’s daughter remembered, fell to their knees before the central cross. There was silence in the room. Then DeMille said, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s go home to our families. Have a wonderful Christmas.” And the congregation filed soberly out of the studio.

•

In making his biblical films DeMille sought counsel from rabbis also. (Some years later, rabbis were regularly invited to lunch at his big table in the Paramount commissary.) One of them, Edgar Magnin — the leader of Congregation B’nai B’rith, now the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest and largest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles — sent DeMille a telegram about the success of The King of Kings: “I BELIEVE THIS PICTURE WILL EXERCISE A SPIRITUAL AND WHOLESOME EFFECT UPON ALL WHO WILL HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF WITNESSING IT.” But many other rabbis, and Jewish publications, hated the film: Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent leader of Reform Judaism in New York City, was clearly calling out Magnin when he said that “if any Jew with the stature of a man, I do not mean a Jewish person on the payroll of the producer, but if any Jew with the stature of a man had been in Hollywood when this film was made it could not have been done as it was.” Wise’s condemnation was particularly noteworthy because he himself, two years earlier, had become the subject of great controversy within the Jewish community when he wrote that Jesus, “as a great moral and ethical teacher” is “a Jew of whom [Jews] might be proud because of his teachings.” But now his fury at DeMille was nearly boundless: “The blood of Jews will be upon the heads of the owners of this picture.”

In that last phrase Wise was referring to a notorious passage in the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 27):

Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

In Rabbi Wise’s view, The King of Kings endorses the inference commonly drawn from this passage: that the Jewish people as a whole, past, present, and future, are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and therefore, by implication, deserving of any and every persecution.

But DeMille, as he was making his film, saw this response coming and strove to avert it, at the cost (which he willingly paid) of revising the biblical narrative. For he does not have “all the people,” that is, all the Jews of Jerusalem, constantly seeking the death of Jesus; instead he locates the wickedness in one man, Caiaphas the High Priest. It is Caiaphas who says, “We have no King but Caesar.” It is Caiaphas who, when an earthquake shakes Jerusalem as Jesus dies, cries out, “Lord God Jehovah! Visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel — I alone am guilty.” A shrewd idea, because it at once lays the blame on this one man but also shows him as a noble figure who is willing to pay the price for what he suddenly sees as his error. When DeMille responded to criticism from the Jewish community, he said “The entire blame for any Jewish conspiracy to bring about the crucifixion is placed upon one man, Caiaphas.”

But this is not quite true, and indeed there was only so much that DeMille could do along this line, for America in the mid–1920s still retained a considerable degree of biblical literacy and would have known the Nativity and Passion better than any other parts of the Bible. It was simply impossible to tell the story while implicating only Caiaphas. In the film the High Priest has confederates, as he had to have, and some of them have prominent and even hooked noses. (The actor who played Caiaphas, Rudolph Schildkraut, did not have a stereotypically Jewish face, but he was in fact a Jew, born in Constantinople and raised in Romania.) Those confederates bribe members of the crowd to call for Jesus’s death, but the crowd is very large — DeMille’s crowds are always very large — and they could not all have been bribed. When Pilate asks them whether he should release the murderer Barabbas or Jesus, they shout Barabbas’s name in almost a single voice. And when Pilate asks them what he should do with Jesus, Caiaphas stands at his ear and says, “Crucify him” — but then the whole crowd takes up the cry. Only a few of Jesus’s followers do not.

When the Jewish protests against the film had reached their highest pitch, Rabbi Magnin made a couple of requests of DeMille. First, he asked DeMille to make it clear that he was not on the filmmaker’s payroll; and he asked DeMille to take the “Crucify Him!” title out of the movie. “It would appear to me the action in itself is descriptive enough without the title.” Though Magnin does not say so, I suspect that he was hoping that without the title it would not be clear precisely what the crowd was saying.

One week before Easter Sunday Christians recognize Palm Sunday, so called because of the palm fronds that the people of Jerusalem cast at Jesus’s feet as he rode on a donkey into the city. (DeMille chose not to film this: he said that it would just look silly, which is probably true.) On this day it is habitual for many Christians — including Episcopalians, and DeMille was raised Episcopalian — to read aloud the narrative of the Passion. Different members of the congregation are assigned different parts, but there are two words, and two words only, in the whole reading that everyone in the congregation without exception shouts: “Crucify him!” In this way all Christians take their share of responsibility for the death of their Lord. I do not know whether Rabbi Stephen Wise was aware of this, but if he was he probably thought it irrelevant. He understood as well as the fictional Eddie Mannix, or Cecil B. DeMille, that in his time people did not take their bearings from the written words of the Bible itself, but rather looked to pictures for the story’s embodiment, the story’s … realization.

•

Throughout this controversy DeMille reminded people that his mother was Jewish, and consistently implied that this gave him am empathy for and understanding of Jews. And after all, had he not just a few years earlier built a whole movie around the story of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments — and suggested their direct relevance to people today? Which was true enough; but the fact of the matter is that DeMille had a complex and often uneasy relationship with Judaism, and that eventually came out — especially in his final movie, the 1956 remake, or rather complete re-envisioning, of The Ten Commandments.

DeMille’s 1923 version of the story is structurally complicated, with its long prologue retelling parts of the book of Exodus, followed by a longer modern story. But it is thematically simple: If you break the Ten Commandments you will at first become rich, but then will lose all your money, contract leprosy, and die violently; by contrast, if you strive to keep those commandments, you may not make much money but you will be happy and surrounded by people you love. The opening moments of the movie tell us that the horrors of the Great War — World War One as we now call it, though in 1923 people did not know that a second one was soon coming — should have taught us that neglecting the law of God has tragic consequences. As the key title card tells us:

There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together.

They are not laws — they are the LAW.

In the 1956 version the story is more straightforward — it is a strictly chronological account of the life of Moses — but thematically more complicated. For it is a story about the experience of the children of Israel that wishes to deny the distinctiveness of the experience of the children of Israel — and the distinctiveness of their contributions to the world. The Ten Commandments the second time around is a gigantic fantasia on DeMille’s essential creed, a creed well-crafted for that moment: let’s call it Moralistic Libertarian Universalism. That Creed gives us a Moses for mid-century anti-Communist America, an America learning to speak the language of “Judaeo-Christian values.”

The “moralistic” and “libertarian” themes emerge at the outset of the film — or, more accurately, even before the outset of the film, because the title credits are, in the original version, are preceded by something strange: a microphone stand on a stage, backed by a curtain. The curtain rustles and Cecil B. DeMille emerges. He wants to tell us what his film is all about: “Ladies and gentlemen, young and old, this may seem an unusual procedure, speaking to you before the picture begins, but we have an unusual subject: the story of the birth of freedom — the story of Moses.” Already we may perceive a tension, in that the movie is called The Ten Commandments and yet DeMille says that its “subject” is not law but rather freedom. And as the story develops we can see that he means what he says, because we see the gift of the Law on Mount Sinai only in the last minutes of this three-and-a-half-hour long movie. Everything before that is about the enslavement of the Hebrews and Moses’s role as their deliverer. Back to DeMille’s little speech: “The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator, like Rameses. Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.”

This makes the context explicit: for this was the age of the Red Scare, and DeMille had for the previous decade been a highly active participant in attempts to purge Communism, and those suspected of being Communists, from Hollywood. The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 had decreed that officials of labor unions had to sign a repudiation of Communism — what was widely called a “loyalty oath,” meaning primarily loyalty to the Constitution of the United States — in order to work with the National Labor Relations Board. DeMille thought this was a great idea but also that it did not go far enough. When Joseph Mankiewicz was elected as president of the Screen Directors Guild in 1950, he had to sign the oath, but DeMille thought that every member of the Guild should also have to sign. Mankiewicz knew that not every director would be willing, and did not want see the resisters placed on a blacklist. DeMille placidly replied that no one would be blacklisted, they would only be designated “not in good standing” with the union. This was of course a distinction without a difference, and in any case many in Hollywood concerned about Communism were perfectly happy to call it a blacklist. (The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper even said that those who wouldn’t sign the oath “should be put in concentration camps before it’s too late.”)

For DeMille, Communism is tyranny: to be an American, and especially a Christian American, under communism, is exactly equivalent to being a Hebrew under Rameses. I do not know whether DeMille would have said that Senator Joseph McCarthy was the American Moses, but I suspect that if anyone else said it he wouldn’t have demurred.

In any event, he pressed hard for the loyalty oath to be made mandatory for all members of the Directors Guild, and when Mankiewicz refused to cooperate, DeMille pressed even harder to have him removed as president. The conflict culminated in a dramatic meeting of Guild members on October 22, 1950 — a meeting that Mankiewicz entered expecting to be deposed. He knew how powerful and influential DeMille was — not just in the public, but as a member of the Guild’s Board of Directors — and how hard DeMille had worked to undermine him. But in the event, a great many directors openly disagreed with DeMille, some of whom shared his concerns about Communism but thought he had pursued his vendetta against Mankiewicz in extreme and unethical ways. DeMille responded to this criticism by doubling down on his attacks and accusations — he had a list of 25 members of the Guild whom he especially distrusted, some of whom were cowed and frightened by his charges and some of whom (most notably John Huston and William Wyler) were openly furious. The meeting came to its point of crisis when, around one in the morning, John Ford stood up to speak.

Ford was one of the few directors whose fame rivaled DeMille’s, and his association with John Wayne, Westerns, and war movies aligned him quite clearly with cultural conservatism. And Ford was indeed a cultural and political conservative, though he had not been a part of DeMille’s campaign. He said bluntly, “I would like to say that I have been on Mr. Mankiewicz’s side of the fight all through it … I have been sick and tired and ashamed of the whole goddamn thing.” Ford’s recommendation was this: that, since DeMille and the other members of the Board of Directors obviously did not represent the mind of the Guild as a whole, the Board should be dissolved. This motion was formally proposed, seconded, and passed. So it was not Mankiewicz who was deposed, but rather DeMille. And as DeMille’s biographer Scott Eyman says, “before the October 22 meeting, DeMille was regarded as a principled conservative; afterward, he was regarded as an antidemocratic ideologue and quite possibly a bigot.”

DeMille was crushed: the next day he told a friend, “Last night was one of the worst nights of my entire life.” But he did not think he was wrong in any way; rather, he thought that the resistance to his proposals proved how deeply infected the Guild was by the disease of Communism. “If you don’t think our country is in danger you should have been at last night’s meeting.” And one way to read The Ten Commandments is as a pursuit of his political goals by other means. It is not only a propaganda film; but a propaganda film is one of the things it is.

Bosley Crowther, the lead movie reviewer for the New York Times from 1940 to 1967, was not the sharpest knife in the movie-reviewer drawer, but he saw exactly what DeMille was doing in The Ten Commandments: “It is a moving story of the spirit of freedom rising in a man, under the divine inspiration of his Maker. And, as such, it strikes a ringing note today. But aside from the timely arrival and contemporary context of this film, it is also a rather handsome romance in Mr. De Mille’s best massive style.” But perhaps if DeMille had thought his message so clear he would not have opened the movie by telling us quite explicitly what he means.

So far I have emphasized the libertarian side of his message, but that’s only half of it: the choice we face, he says, is to be ruled by “the state,” by “a dictator,” or to be “free souls under God” — emphasis mine — “ruled by God’s law.”

One of the more interesting characters in The Ten Commandments is Dathan, played by the legendary Edward G. Robinson — and here we should pause to give DeMille credit for that casting, because while Robinson was never formally blacklisted in Hollywood, he had leftish political associations that made him suspicious to many, as a result of which his parts in the Fifties were rarely as significant as his talent and fame would have otherwise indicated. Dathan is a juicy role: an Israelite who collaborates with the Egyptians, participates somewhat reluctantly in the Exodus, then consistently strives to undermine Moses’s leadership. Political power is his sole desire, and he scorns the idea of even deference to, much less worship of, the LORD of Israel. (“Moses has words. Pharaoh has spears.”) His seditious impulses get their full expression when Moses’s extended sojourn with the LORD on Mount Sinai leave the Israelites leaderless and rudderless. It is Dathan who recommends and oversees the building of the Golden Calf and the worship of it, and when Moses belatedly returns, stone tablets of the law in hand, Dathan is undaunted. He faces Moses and declares that this whole business of “God’s law” is merely Moses’s pretext for making himself a king, a new Pharaoh — for subjecting the Hebrews to a new tyranny. Moses furiously retorts that the children of Israel are not to live at the command of a king, but by the law of God — and punctuates his point by shouting “Those who will not live by the Law, shall die by the Law!” Then he throws the tablets at the Golden Calf, which bursts into flame; the ground opens up beneath it, and the Calf and its worshippers, including Dathan, are swallowed up.

As that essential title card in the 1923 version of the story tells us, the Commandments “are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together.” Thus DeMille is drawing for us an elevated road with an abyss on each side: we can fall by accepting the tyranny of the state, and we can fall by denying the authority of God’s law. Only by maintaining freedom from other human beings and absolute obedience to God can we be safe, both individually and collectively. That is why Moses tells Rameses, “Who are you to make their lives bitter in hard bondage? Man shall be ruled by law, not by the will of other men.” This is the sense in which DeMille’s vision is both moralistic and libertarian.

But what about the universalism? A key moment in the movie comes when Moses, having been cast into the desert by Rameses, eventually finds his way to the tents of a man named Jethro. He sits and talk with Jethro’s daughter Sephora, and they look across the valley to Mount Sinai. It should be remembered that, though Moses has discovered that he is a Hebrew, he was raised an Egyptian and has little knowledge of Hebrew ways. When Sephora tells Moses that Sinai is the temple of their God, Mopses replies, “If this god is God, he would live on every mountain, in every valley. He would not be the god of Ishmael or Israel alone, but of all men. It is said he created all men in his image. He would dwell in every heart, every mind, every soul.”

Similarly, at another point an old Israelite named Simon, dying, tells Moses “my days are ended and my prayer unanswered.” when Moses asks him what that prayer is, Simon replies, “That before death closed my eyes, I might behold the deliverer who will lead all men to freedom.” Emphasis mine. DeMille has no time for, and no interest in, the idea of the Israelites as the “Chosen People”; the extensive and complex covenant that the LORD, through Moses, makes with Israel — a covenant the Ten Commandments are but a small part of — goes unmentioned in this movie. They would be a distraction from the simplicity of DeMille’s message — and its universality.

To many Americans — especially the Americans who just a few years later would be known as Goldwater Republicans — this was sweet music: free markets, minimal government, free devotion to God — these are the ingredients of American greatness, and are a kind of of Gospel that Americans are charged with spreading throughout the world. For our anti-statist God would dwell in every heart, every, mind, every soul.

By the time Jesus Christ, Superstar appeared in 1973 — or for that matter Franco Zefferelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (a British/Italian film with some American involvement and a large American audience) the previous year — the relationship between American conservatism and Christianity had begun to look a little different. But that’s a story for another day.