with extreme taste

MINISTER: Who plays Christ?

EDDIE: A kid we’re all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, in a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly, and with extreme taste….

We saw in a previous post how earnest Cecil B. deMille was about his religious beliefs. But in Hollywood, then and now, DeMille is the great showman, the great manipulator, the master of the cheap thrill. Through the first half of his career, DeMille may have put more nearly-naked women on screen than any other filmmaker.

In The Sign of the Cross (1932), DeMille’s first biblical film of the sound era, Claudette Colbert’s milk bath, in which she is obviously naked, may be the most pornographic scene of its era — unless it’s the one in which the Roman official Marcus Superbus, unsuccessful in seducing the virginal Christian girl Mercia, gets Ancaria, “the wickedest woman in all of Rome,” to perform the “Dance of the Naked Moon” around her to “warm her into life.” Ancaria slithers around the ramrod-straight Mercia, kissing and caressing her, but of course cannot compromise Mercia’s virtue. Not for lack of trying. More could be said about the extravagances of this movie, including the semi-naked Christian women being exposed to gorillas and fed to crocodiles, plus prosthesic-Roman-nosed Charles Laughton flouncing about as the campiest Nero imaginable, but I think the general outlines are clear.

The Hays Code — more formally, the Motion Picture Production Code — was introduced in 1934 as a way for American film studios to self-police their moral boundaries, in order to avoid becoming the subject of legislation. More and more Americans had been complaining that the movies were corrupting the country’s morals, and Congressmen were feeling the heat. Thanks to the Hays Code, American films would have thirty-four years in which actresses dressed decorously, husbands and wives slept in separate beds, and no murderer ever escaped a film unpunished. It has been said that The Sign of the Cross was more responsible for the introduction of the Hays Code than any other other single film.

But in response to any moralistic criticism DeMille always had a strong card to play. He could say, “I’m just showing you what terrible temptations and assaults the early Christians were faced with” — as he could say, in his biblical films, “I’m just being faithful to the biblical text.” (There is more skin in the second Ten Commandments than any non-biblical movie of the time could have gotten away with. Anne Baxter’s breasts thrust, Yul Brynner’s thighs flex, half-naked women of Israel lasciviously dance around the Golden Calf. It’s a lot.) He may have been earnest, but he was also very, very shrewd.

The Sign of the Cross is of course post-biblical, but its whole visual world is inspired by the biblical narrative. There’s something about biblical spectacle in particular that encourages “extreme taste,” not in Eddie Mannix’s sense but in the sense of beng utterly tasteless. And whenever people question this tastelessness, the reply is always available: “Hey, it’s in the Bible.” Or suggested by the Bible anyway.

It’s interesting to reflect on the conflicted motives, feelings, and experiences of moviegoers, who are probably like Cecil B. DeMille in wanting the spiritual credit of encountering the biblical story while also delighting in the sex and violence. It’s interesting also to consider how such experiences at the movies map onto experiences in church, whether in the praise-band setting of contemporary big-box evangelicals, the dramatic manifestations of the power of the Spirit in charismatic/Pentecostal circles, or even the recently-renewed interest in the very different but equally theatrical styles of Latin Mass Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

By contrast, the actual practical difficulties of the religious life have rarely been the subject of popular movies. And yet … we have seen, in the last few decades, a series of in-depth, subtle, and emotionally rich portrayals of Christian faith in extremis. This may have begun with The Mission (1986), a film that was nominated for several Academy Awards, winning in one category, but also went on to become staple viewing in Christian homes throughout America for several decades. Later films to explore these themes are sometimes historical like The Mission — Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2017) being the most noteworthy example — but can also have contemporary or near-contemporary settings, as in some of the films of Paul Schrader and Terrence Malick. But the stories with contemporary settings tend to have smaller audiences than the ones that link historical religious experiences with great spectacle. Why might that be?