Run-of-De Mille Pictures

Run-of-De Mille Pictures
Sohrab Ardeshir

Film-going audiences through the ages have always been fascinated with ‘‘the Spectacle’’. There is something vastly appealing, albeit ghoulish, in seeing hundreds of extras being thrown to the lions in an arena, frying on the top floor of a blazing skyscraper or plunging to their doom in a disabled aircraft.

Hollywood, ever-ready to give the public what is wanted, obliging churned out large numbers of big-screen epics, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.The more classical ones, like Spartacus, El Cid and Lawrence of Arabia, succeeded in achieving a certain dignity and grandeur. But in the 70’s, when spectacles started losing their appeal for the increasingly youthful film audiences, producers began churning out large-scale ‘disaster’ films, like Airport, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure with impressive visuals, but inane stories.

A rare exception was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which managed to impress the highbrows and the masses. Within a few years, sci-fi spectacles had become the rage. From the ’70s onwards, films like the Star Wars trilogy, Alien and the Terminator series broke all box-office records.

Initially, dialogue was something of a problem for Hollywood’s epic-makers. What kind of voice did an ancient Pharaoh have? What kind of English sounded convincing coming from the mouth of Cleopatra, Samson or Noah? Some producers settled for mock-serious conversations in their films, which ranged from tongue-in-cheek to outright absurd.

‘‘It’s strange to see you working,’’ Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) tells Caesar (Warren Williams) in De Mille’s 1934 epic about the Queen of the Nile. ‘‘I’ve always figured you either fighting... or loving.’’ ‘‘I’ve had experience with fighting,’’ says Caesar coyly. ‘‘But not with loving?’’ asks Cleopatra. ‘‘Not with pretty little Queens!’’ Caesar tells her. In The Ten Commandments (1956), Anne Baxter exclaims: ‘‘Oh Moses, you splendid, stubborn, adorable fool!’’

However, some Hollywood spectacle makers took quite seriously the challenge of making heroic figures talk nobly, but naturally, in their films. They came to the conclusion that, on the whole, British performers did better hoity-toity talk than their home-grown performers. An exception was Charlton Heston, who handled epic talk with ease and confidence. Directors soon learnt that the trick was to keep conversation to a minimum in films about the ancient world. In epic movies it was dramatic action, and not dialogue, that counted.

The name most commonly associated with epic films is perhaps Cecil B De Mille. The public adored his films, and the critics panned them. They acknowledged that his biblical spectacles did famously at the box-office, but they deplored his poor taste and blatant sexploitation. Accused of making money out of nudity, especially in his biblical films, he would say, ‘‘I didn’t write the Bible and I didn’t create sin.’’

In 1922, De Mille offered $1000 for the best idea for his next picture. He received thousands of letters from around the world, but liked best a short note that read: ‘‘You cannot break the Ten Commandments they will break you.’’ He settled on The Ten Commandments as the title of his next film.

In one of the film’s most important scenes, Moses descends from Mount Sinai with the sacred tablets and the Israelis gathered at the base of the mountain look at him with awe and reverence. De Mille shot the scene several times, but was so disappointed with the expressions on their faces that he finally called a break. Suddenly a bell in a nearby church started tolling. De Mille quickly gathered the cast together and announced that a cast member had died, leaving behind a widow and a eight children. He asked for two minutes’ silence. As everyone stood there, shocked and saddened, the cameras began grinding away. It was a complete hoax, but the resulting scene was considered one of the film’s high points.

De Mille hired lions for The Sign of the Cross. In one scene they were to run up some stairs and attack the Christian martyrs. When the time came to film the scene, the lions lazily lay down near the steps instead of running up them. De Mille, unsatisfied with the trainers’ unsuccessful attempts to rouse the lions, himself grabbed a chair in one hand and a stick in the other, and continued to lunge at the lions till they reluctantly performed. According to De Mille’s grandson, if you listen closely to the film’s soundtrack, you can hear his grandfather in the background yelling, ‘‘Damn it, get going!’’

The lions got going all right, but they got even too. In the arena sequence, when the trainers were goading them into action, several young males casually left their mark on some of the players. ‘‘This is an outrage!’’ thundered De Mille. ‘‘Those goddamned lions of yours are urinating on my Christian martyrs!’’

Sohrab Ardeshir is a theatre actor, (sardeshir@yahoo.com)