User Reviews

When will Paramount Pictures re-release the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments to movie theaters? I know that the movie is shown on television and is on DVD, but this epic and incredibly successful movie is meant for the theater. Besides having a great cast, the movie tells a great story and tells it well. This movie will resonate with today's audience. Today's audience would enjoy watching Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Yvonne De Carlo, John Derek, Debra Paget, Edward G. Robinson and the others in the cast and would greatly enjoy the finale, including the parting of the Red Sea and the creation of the actual Ten Commandments. Technologically, the movie compares favorably with today's movies. Today's audience would respond favorably to the rich colors by Technicolor and to the music by Elmer Bernstein. In addition, the movie will help educate a new generation about events in history that have had a profound and lasting impact on the world. It will introduce the audience to powerful and memorable characters such as Moses, Ramesses, Sethi, Nefreteri, Bithiah, Aaron and Dathan as well as provide a glimpse of ancient Egypt. The scene where Moses confronts Ramesses and demands, "Let my people go!" is iconic and will definitely make an impression on today's audience. Today's audience will appreciate Anne Baxter's powerful performance. Why keep this movie in DVD land? Let it spread its wings on the wide screen in theaters for all to marvel.

Watched this movie again and again this movie warrants only superlatives. GREAT story, GREAT cast, GREAT acting, GREAT special effects, GREAT costumes, GREAT EVERYTHING. This movie is one of the greatest epics ever produced by Hollywood. The scenes with Yul Brynner and E. G. Robinson and Charlton Heston are iconic; the scenes between Mr. Heston and the beautiful Anne Baxter are cinematic gems. Moreover the story is told in a straightforward way giving the movie the continuity it requires to stay on track, which is essential for a movie that is almost four hours long. Moses was a hero, Rameses his nemesis and Nefeteri the woman who had and then lost the man she loved, a Hebrew man named Moses.

The acting is stagy, but the story is great, and Charlton Heston IS Moses. This is Charton Heston's greatest role. He is what makes this movie work. Heston gives one of the greatest performances in the history of Hollywood. Whether as the prince of Egypt, or as a slave, or as a shepherd, or as a leader and a prophet, Charlton Heston is the central player in this story. Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, E. G. Robinson, etc., are great in their supporting roles too, but this is Charlton Heston's movie. This movie conveys the intensity of a time when a people held in cruel bondage were soon to be freed and were soon to be led by someone whose emergence onto the scene is so improbable as to confound everyone around him. For who was Moses? Was he an Egyptian posing as a slave? Was he a Hebrew masquerading as an Egyptian prince? Was he a prophet? Or was he an opportunist, using the plight of the Hebrews to gain a following and thereby confront and defeat his rival Rameses? The movie raises these questions. Now the movie may not be historically accurate, but that's not important. What IS important is the story this movie tells, which is about a man who is on a mission to liberate an entire people from the shackles of slavery and sacrifices everything - wealth, power, the love of Pharoah's daughter - to accomplish what he sets out to do - and does it.

There are some critics who make fun of this movie for its stagy acting and stodgy story. Well, this is complete balderdash. Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston were never better and Anne Baxter is positively beautiful. The movie is a story about liberation, redemption and hope. It's about people who were led from the house of bondage and became a nation, guided by the great and profound prophet, Moses. That this movie is remembered over fifty years after its release is proof enough of its timelessness.

To mount an epic movie based on the story of Moses delivering the slaves out of Egypt is an ambitious and logistically challenging task at the best of times. To have done this in 1956, without the aid of computer-enhanced effects for believable crowd scenes or real-looking historical sets, is more remarkable still. When our screen is filled with tens of thousands of soldiers or slaves, stretching right to the horizon, what you see on the screen really was in front of the camera. That level of resourcefulness and organisation is staggering to think about, and makes The Ten Commandments an admirable achievement by any standards. Having said that, there are moments when you might find that the epic proportions of what is before your eyes creates a stronger impression than the "divinely inspired story" (as Cecil B. DeMille calls it in his introductory speech).

It is prophesised in Ancient Egypt that a Hebrew slave will be born who will one day deliver the other slaves from a life in chains and lead them to freedom. Jittery, the pharaoh demands that all first-born Hebrew babies must be slain to prevent the prophecy from coming true. One Hebrew family put their baby son into a basket and cast him onto the Nile, hoping that he will somehow reach safety from this awful fate. Instead, the baby floats right into the gardens of a royal palace, where he is found by Bithiah (Nina Foch) She takes the baby as her own and names him Moses. Years later, Moses has grown up within the Egyptian royal family and is revered as a noble, wise and resourceful Prince of Egypt. One day he may even become the next pharaoh, much to the envy of the existing pharoah's birth son Ramases (Yul Brynner). Moses and Ramases are also locked in a battle for the affections – and eventual hand in marriage – of the beautiful Nefertiri (Anne Baxter). Ramases spends most of his time plotting a way to discredit Moses so that he might beat him in their mutual race for the throne and the woman of their desires. Then, unexpectedly, Moses learns about his true ancestry. When he discovers that he is, in fact, of Hebrew birth parents he forsakes his royal status and becomes a slave. After many years of hardship - including a long period of being banished into the wilderness - Moses learns from God that he has been chosen to deliver the slaves from their appalling existence in captivity. He returns to Egypt and leads his people to freedom.

Cecil B. DeMille had already made this film, under the same title, in 1923. This lavish and expensive remake is a better film though. Heston is excellent as Moses – the role requires tremendous presence, and he provides it in abundance. Brynner is also very good as Ramases, etching a character whose burning envy towards his rival is convincing and memorable. At times, the dialogue is a little stilted and lofty; at other times it is actually quite eloquent (the parts narrated by De Mille himself are especially articulate). Elmer Bernstein's score is appropriately stirring, and the cinematography by Loyal Griggs is truly outstanding (hard to accept that Griggs lost out in the Oscars that year to Lionel Lindon's work in Around The World In 80 Days!!) The Ten Commandments features some fabulous cinematic highlights – the 10th plague, the parting of the sea, and the writing of the commandments are a few that spring to mind. In between the highlights the film has its lulls, but even at an elephantine 220 minutes it never lapses into total boredom, and is well worth catching if you're a fan of biblical epics or old-style Hollywood pageants.

Like a handful of reviewers here, I first encountered "The Ten Commandments" in the theater on a parochial school class trip to the movies. As a Catholic, we had already been instructed on the life of Moses and how he rose to prominence to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and slavery. As a kid, I would have been eight or nine years old at the time, and was looking forward to seeing how the baby Moses was found floating in the river, and how the adult Moses turned his staff into a snake. It goes without saying that the burning bush scene and parting of the Red Sea had to be in the picture as well. I recall some disappointment that there were no plagues of frogs or locusts on screen, but after all, the film ran over three and a half hours as it is.

Watching the movie the other night brought back a lot of those reminiscences, and I was pretty amazed at how colorful and full of pageantry the picture was. The cast of thousands was indeed a cast of thousands, epic in scope of course, and one of those reminders that 'they just don't make 'em like that any more'. But with an adult eye, some of the film's glaring downsides are more than noticeable. Like the stilted dialog that hearkens all the way back to the birth of talkie films, and the wooden performances of characters portrayed by the likes of John Derek (Joshua), Vincent Price (Baka) and John Carradine (Aaron). I also had to laugh during that scene when Sephora (Yvonne De Carlo) and her sisters met Moses (Charlton Heston) for the first time. The goo-goo eyes directed at Heston were embarrassingly anachronistic even for the 1950's; why director Cecil B. DeMille allowed that to stand I'll never know.

But the story pretty much kept faith with the Biblical version of Moses, and gives a good accounting of his break with the Pharaoh and the wandering in the desert on the way to Sinai. Upon studying the opening credits, I had my eyes open for appearances of unlikely actors like Mike (Touch) Connors and Clint Walker but they apparently weren't sharp enough. It's my understanding that Walker got his 'Cheyenne' gig on the basis of his appearance in this film. It was easy to catch Woodrow 'Woody' Strode though as the Ethiopian King bearing gifts for Rameses I (Cedric Hardwicke). And what can you say about Edward G. Robinson? On paper, his casting in a Biblical epic seems rather mindless, but by the time Moses' followers languished in the desert, he really hit stride trying to undermine the whole enterprise.

And for cinema fans, the coup de grace of course is the parting of The Red Sea in all it's pre-CGI glory. I read about how DeMille did it once, using combined footage of the Red Sea with scenes from the Paramount backlot using a huge water tank split by a U-shaped trough. It was the most difficult special effect ever to be attempted at that time, and to it's credit, is still impressive to watch today. It's got 'how did they do that' written all over it.

It is interesting to see the ways in which the morally questionable stories in "Exodus" are modified in this movie to make them more suitable for a modern audience. For example, the God of "The Old Testament" is the God of the Hebrews, who are his chosen people, while the Moses of the movie has a Universalist attitude, saying God is for everyone. Also, there is no indication that the Hebrews were opposed to slavery per se, but only that they did not like being slaves themselves, whereas the Moses of the movie talks as though slavery is intrinsically wrong.

And then there is the recurring, exasperating aspect in which the Pharaoh is just about to agree to let the Hebrews go, but then God hardens his heart. Thanks to the addition of Nefretiri, however, the movie is able to blame the woman for hardening Rameses' heart, although Moses does throw in a quick line about how God will work his will through her. But mostly, the movie wants us to blame her. The reason given in "Exodus" as to why God kept hardening the heart of the Pharaoh is to make a point:

"14:4 And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, that he shall follow after them; and I will be honoured upon Pharaoh, and upon all his host; that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD."

That seems to be acceptable as long as God is just making the lives of the Egyptians miserable, but we start feeling a little queasy when God decides to make his point by killing all of the Egyptians' first born. To render God's behavior more morally acceptable for a modern audience, the movie has Rameses decide to kill all the first born of the Hebrews to show them what's what. In point of fact, there is nothing of that in the "Bible." It is God who simply decides to kill all the firstborn Egyptians to really make the point that he is the Lord. But in the movie, once Rameses orders the killing of all the firstborn of the Hebrews, Moses talks as though this has set in motion an opposite process, the killing of all the firstborn Egyptians, almost as if there is a kind of supernatural mechanism that brings this result about automatically.

After the death of Rameses' firstborn son, he tells Moses that he and his people can go, taking their belongings and livestock with them. Fine. But then Rameses tosses in a remark from out of left field: "Take what spoils from Egypt you will, but go." That's a little bizarre. It is not as though Moses had made that demand previously, as in, "Let our people go, and throw in all your gold and silver too, or get ready for some plagues." But having Rameses say this makes it looks as though he offered to let the Hebrews take the gold and silver, that it was decreed by him, rather than the way the "Bible" tells it, that the Hebrews accumulated the gold and silver by way of individuals borrowing jewelry in bad faith. It is not enough, however, to have the Hebrews come into possession of the Egyptian gold and silver merely as an instance of "To the victor belong the spoils." Rather, the spoils are justified as reparations for slavery.

Just as Nefretiri takes the blame for hardening the Pharaoh's heart, Dathan also become the heavy that instigates the building of the Golden Calf. When the Hebrews make it to Mount Sinai, Moses climbs the mountain to talk to God. While he is away, the people begin to think he is never coming back. In "Exodus 32," the people ask Aaron, brother of Moses, to make gods for them, and he complies. He even has all the people get naked and dance around. In the movie, it is Dathan that inspires the people to demand a Golden Calf. Aaron opposes the idea and later protests that the people made him do it. So, the movie eliminates Aaron's complicity.

In the category of scenes-we'd-like-to-see, "Exodus" tells of how Moses gathered the Levites around them and ordered them slaughter kith and kin:

"32:27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.

"32:28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."

Ah, what a great spectacle that would have been. But alas, we are unlikely ever to a movie with that scene in it.

When we reach the end of the movie, Moses knows he will soon die and that he will not be able to cross the Jordan. Sephora, referred to as "Zipporah" in the "Bible," is with him, and this seems strange, because the "Bible" seems to say that Moses sent Zipporah and her two sons back home to her father ("Exodus 18"), and that he eventually married an Ethiopian woman ("Numbers 12"). In fact, early in the movie, Moses brings a beautiful Ethiopian princess to Egypt and presents her to the Pharaoh, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to be the one that Moses eventually married. But this second wife has been expunged from the film.

On the other hand, some say that Moses had only one wife, that Zipporah was the Ethiopian woman. But that would mean that Zipporah had been black all along, and not just slightly brown. But then, notwithstanding the movie's progressive declaration that all slavery is wrong and that slaves deserve reparations, I suppose depicting Moses as being married to a black woman in 1956 would have been a little too much for the times.