You'll find that pretty creatures can do ugly things to people.

Of all the wonderful artistic imagery captured by cinematographer Freddie Young for David Lean's 1965 production of Doctor Zhivago, there has always been one shot in particular which for me transcends to the level of sheer poetry, and that is this one:

A single smear of blood on snow, from the massacre of the freedom protesters on the very street running before the Gromeko home.  Encapsulated in this one image is the loss of innocence of three main characters in the story: Yuri, who learns firsthand the brutal facts of the world he is living in when he witnesses, to his horror, the ruthlessness of the Czarist police against the common people; Pasha, who loses his political naivete and from that point becomes a hardened, committed Bolshevik; and Lara, who is seduced and deflowered by the villanous Komarovsky.  The blood smear also foreshadows the coming revolution and the White/Red civil war following in its wake.

The anatomy of terror.

Not very long ago, I spotted a discussion on one of the Facebook pages I frequent which asked the question, What horror movie(s) would you pick to introduce to a friend who had never seen one?  A most interesting thread topic indeed, especially as we're now in the very thick of the Halloween season.  The responses were many and varied, with one poster offering that his selections would be for the earliest classics, both silent and sound, to show his genre-virgin friend the origin of modern horror cinema.  Admittedly, screening for a prospective first-time viewer any of the movies which came out from Universal during the reign of the great Carl Lemille would be a winner.  Go a little further back into the silent era and you not only have The Phantom Of The Opera at hand but also three great and truly surreal examples of 1920s German expressionist cinema: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Faust, and of course Nosferatu, featuring Max Schreck's truly disturbing vampire, the Graf Orlock; the basis for Klaus Kinski's version of Count Dracula in the 1979 Werner Herzog production of Nosferatu The Vampyre.

My own choices for a first-time horror viewer would take into account the possibility of said viewer's squeamishness at excessive blood and gore, which seems to be all modern horror films are capable of anymore, and my own view that the finest examples of the genre turned upon literate scripts which play to the psychological dimensions of gothic horror: using tension and misdirection to create terror in the mind of the viewer.  And from my own experience, there are four fine movies which embody these qualities of truly intelligent as well as entertaining genre cinema:

The Masque Of The Red Death (1964) is a prime example.  I have already expounded at length upon the psychological dimensions of this true classic, the finest of the eight Edgar Allen Poe adaptations produced and directed by Roger Corman and most starring Vincent Price, who became a pop-culture icon and an immortal through his transition to science fiction and horror performances.  In this entry and perhaps playing the best role in his career, Price is the suavely evil Prince Prospero, a Satanist who stages his annual bal-masque for his rich and titled friends at his castle.  It is also the time of the Red Death, a virulent plague which periodically ravages the countryside.  Prospero, for the amusement of his guests and, increasingly, to satisfy his own fascination, kidnaps a young and innocent peasant girl, Francesca (Jane Asher), from the nearby village with the aim of seducing and corrupting her into the worship of the Fallen Angel.  But Death (John Westbrook) has marked Prospero and all within his sanctuary for doom.  Despite two gruesome scenes which are over with in less than a minute each, this movie —like the rest of Corman's Poe-cycle films— created horror by suggestion and played with the minds of the audience.  There is almost nothing supernatural in the whole of the movie except for Death himself, and he takes on the aspect of an allegorical character rather than a supernatural agent.  Masque is also one of the most philosophical horror films ever made, examining the nature of man at length in both aspects of good and evil.

House Of Usher (1960) was the first of Corman's Poe-cycle movies and the one which sold the formula for this series: employing tight and well-plotted storytelling, superb acting from a small cast, and the use of at least one hallucinatory dream sequence achieved with rather simple photographic trickery, to convey horror and also make up for very thin budgets (which were never a challenge to the endlessly canny Corman).  In this movie, the house itself is cursed: a repository of all the evil committed by the Usher ancestors —generations of irredeemable villains— until only two remain and the house now crumbling and in danger of imminent collapse.  Vincent Price in this film is Roderick Usher, the last patriarch of the line, who is determined that the Usher family shall become extinct at long last.  Roderick strongly objects to Phillip Winthrop's (Mark Damon) love for his ailing sister Madelyn (Myrna Fahey) and plans to marry her; a prospect which horrifies Roderick as it will inevitably lead to more Ushers in the world to carry the family evil through succeeding generations and prompts him to the most extreme measures to ensure the marriage will never happen.   Roderick is, technically, the villain in this piece due to his adamant opposition to the romantic aspirations of Mr. Winthrop and his sister as well as his obsession for bringing down the end of the Usher line, but he is not the evil one in this story.  His reasons are very real to him, as he tries to explain to the skeptical Winthrop, and in the end he falls victim to the family curse.  Throughout the whole photoplay, the evil of the house is merely suggested both by word and by the steady shifting of the structure upon its increasingly unstable foundations.  The whole Usher legacy is about to be swallowed up forever into the tarn in which it was built, in the middle of poisoned land, and doom overhangs everyone within.

The theme of the cursed house is central to the next two selections and is stated outright in the scripts to be fact: The Haunting (1963) features a group of paranormal investigators who are determined to make contact with the spirits inhabiting Hill House, which has a history of tragedy ever since the wife of Hugh Crain, who built the mansion for her, died in a carriage accident on the grounds of the estate ninety years previous.  Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) leads a group of psychics to the house, with young heir to the estate Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) in tow along with a disturbed, guilt-ridden woman, Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), who experienced poltergeist activity before in her life.  Sanderson is the cynic of the group, dismissing any suggestion of the supernatural, until events lead to the tragic moment when the house "claims" Eleanor as its own.  This brilliant film, produced and directed by Robert Wise and adapted from the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting Of Hill House, again turns wholly upon psychological effect and leaves the issue of supernatural happenings very ambiguous.

Last and certainly not least in this tableaux is 1973's The Legend Of Hell House, a superb British low-budget production adapted from the novel Hell House by veteran genre-author Richard Matheson (who also penned the screenplay for House Of Usher).  An eccentric millionaire who recently bought the infamous Belasko House commissions physicist Lionel Barrett (Clive Reville) to thoroughly investigate the house for any signs of poltergeist activity.  Barrett uses the opportunity to test his theory of an electromagnetic forcefield basis for so-called poltergeist energy and brings up elaborate equipment designed to drain it to nothing.  Leading a team of parapsychologists and mediums, the relentlessly rational Barrett also has in tow his wife and the claravoyant Benjamin Franklin Fischer (Roddy McDowell), the sole survivor of the last expedition to go into Belasko House; now returning to settle an old score with whatever forces inhabit the mansion.

Any one of these films would be a perfect introduction for the unexperienced viewer to what horror cinema at its best is all about.  All were relatively low-budget efforts but stylish, well-acted, well-paced, with cinematography which advances the plot visually and, far more importantly, are literate.  Movies which employ suggestion to create terror through slow-building tension, raising the expectation of something horrible happening with each passing moment.  And in their finer moments, also laying bare the baser human desires and human weaknesses —the wellspring from which true evil arises.

A face like a saint...

"Hey, is that real?  She can't be."

"Ah, nonsense man.  'Tis only a mirage, brought on by your turrible thirst."

Oh, she was indeed for real.  Maureen O'Hara.  Beautiful young ingenue when she had her first major screen role in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939), this fiery Irish lass was just smoking hot in The Quiet Man (1952).  Mary Kate Danaher is my absolute favorite of all Maureen O'Hara's characters.  A force of nature you dare not get on the bad side of, and one you'd die for at the drop of a hat.  Innocent and sensual, and a woman you could trust with your heart and soul.  Little wonder Sean Thornton was lost the moment he set eyes on her.  The Quiet Man is one of my top favorite John Wayne movies because of Maureen O'Hara.  The best of all their screen collaborations in my view because Mary Kate is every bit a match for Sean, scene for scene, line for line, and the tension between the two weaves the rich tapestry of this story into a seamless whole, and all of it flowing from the depths of Maureen's personality.  She is the one truly bringing Mary Kate to life in this movie, far beyond the creation of any screenwriter.  Without her, The Quiet Man fails.  With her, the movie cannot be anything less than a classic.

And now, Maureen is gone.  Like a mirage fading back into the mist.  But she was for real.  Very real indeed.

A dream, to some... A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

Dearest Scottie ... and so you've found me.

Oh dear...

The frame above encapsulates everything that, for me, is wrong with an otherwise brilliant movie: Alfred Hitchchock's 1958 thriller Vertigo.

This one could have been Hitchcock's all-time masterpiece. There is only one flaw: the scene in which Judy is writing the confession of her crime which she will never send. Without that scene, the ongoing obsession of the James Stewart character to transform Judy Barton (Kim Novak) into the woman he loved and lost, a cancerous insanity overtaking him, would have instead set him up for a climax that would have been so much more shocking to him and to the audience.  It could have delivered the same shock as Diabolique (1955), had it not been for that one wholly unnecessary scene blowing the whole scam.

In this scene, we learn very prematurely that the woman Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) had been hired by his old wartime friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), to watch over —supposedly his wife Madeline— was in fact an imposter hired by Elster for the express purpose of using Scottie as a dupe to establish an ironclad alibi for the murder he had planned out.  His plot unfolded a false story of a Madeline Elster obsessed with the portrait of a woman who committed suicide long ago, and so identifying with her that she becomes suicidal herself.  Having used Scottie's crippling acrophobia to his advantage, Elster made the murder look like a suicide dive off the top of a mission church's bell tower and thereby had his own man, a retired police detective and private eye and therefore a wholly credible witness, right there to establish the "fact" of Madeline's suicide at the coroner's jury inquest.  Elster was thus able to get clean away.  The perfect crime.  Except that the imposter decides to hang around in San Francisco because, during the job, she had fallen in love with Scottie, as he had fallen for her.  After recovering from the nervous breakdown he suffered resulting from Madeline's apparent suicide, he runs into the woman, now sans her Madeline disguise.  And noticing the slight resemblance between the girl from Salina, Kansas and his lost love, Scottie forces himself on the seemingly reluctant Judy and commences transforming her into a perfect doppleganger of Madeline.

I ended up getting into a debate on a Facebook classic movies page over the confession scene.  The opposite view was that the scene was necessary because it revealed just how much Judy had really fallen in love with Scottie and that, without the confession, the movie degenerates into a conventional mystery and would have destroyed any sympathy the viewer could have had for Judy as well as degrading the romance between the two characters.

My position, and the one I believe is the valid one and supported by some of the behind-the-scenes wrangling that took place during production, is that Vertigo was in no way a conventional mystery nor a romance.  What has to be remembered is that a Hitchcock movie is always pinned upon one central idea, around which every other device is slaved to its service.  In the case of Vertigo, that main theme is obsession.  The focus is not upon the nominal mystery Scottie was hired to investigate and not upon the Judy/Madeline character and her romantic aspirations, it is rather upon Scottie: his own questionable mental state and emotional ruthlessness in forcing his "new" girlfriend to become somebody different. That is the lever of the plot to Vertigo. Judy/Madeline is not the object of Scottie's quest, she is Hitchcock's primary plot-device in twisting Scottie into knots and driving him twice to the brink of insanity.

It would still not have been like a conventional mystery to have cut the confession scene. Indeed, to have reserved the fact of the murder plot as a shock reveal would have all the more highlighted the manipulation the two characters were practicing upon each other.  The situation in Vertigo would never have been anything akin to a standard mystery in any case. The psychological drama had far outweighed the nominal mystery Scottie was investigating.  And in fact, until he saw the necklace on his "true" love's neck, Scottie really had no clue that he had been the pawn to cover a murder. He had taken Gavin Elster and the situation wholly at face value. So had the audience up until the confession scene. Up to that point, there was no mystery, per-se.   But then, the confession scene is put out there in the open and it not only actually turns the movie into more of a conventional mystery, it gets in the way of the psychological study of this manipulative relationship, because at the back of our minds we're now aware that: a) Scottie was a dupe all along, and b) we're looking for that little slip-up the woman is going to make which blows the caper.  Because we now know it's got to come, that the whole romance is going to crash because it's been telegraphed, in fact shouted out with a bullhorn.  And far from emphasizing the romantic angle, the confession actually destroys it because it is revealed to be as false as the woman who is the object of Scottie's obsession.

Being that it was a sick and debased relationship to begin with, which was so clearly evident by Scottie's manipulative recreation of Judy into Madeline, there was hardly any question that it was doomed.  My opposite in the discussion stated that one purpose of the confession was to generate sympathy for Judy, but I cannot see any room for sympathy here. What Gavin Elster and Judy connived in, and the mental collapse it drove Scottie into, went far beyond the point where sympathy is possible.   Maybe Judy/Madeline believes she loves Scottie or maybe she's trying to attach herself to him for cover and protection, but it hardly makes a difference.  The confession scene serves no real purpose in this film.  Judy protests her love to Scottie during the confrontation at the bell tower so we still know, as far as it is possible to do so, that she "loves" him —which also makes the confession redundant, and the only effect is to drain the energy out of the revealation when Scottie spots the necklace which Judy shouldn't have had, which exposes the crime and the true depth of the evil Scottie had been subjected to by Gavin Elster.

The inclusion of the confession scene was controversial at the time of production.  The revelation of the murder plot did not take place until the denouemont of the novel on which the film was based, The Living And The Dead (D'entre les morts) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.  It was Hitchcock's original idea to include the confession two-thirds of the way through the picture to illustrate Judy's mental dilemma, but after the first preview, he doubted the wisdom of its inclusion and subsequently told associate producer Herbert Coleman to remove it.  But when Paramount boss Barney Balaban got wind of the deletion, he ordered Hitchcock to restore the scene, and so it made it into the final cut.

It was, like many such decisions made by studio bosses, the one that should not have been made.  The punch of the revelation is taken out and, from that point forward, you're only looking for the romance to crash and burn, and a lot of the dramatic tension over Scottie's ongoing manipulation of Judy is negated because now the man is cast solidly into victim territory and this masks the fact that Scottie really is a bit of a bastard in this movie.

Ah well.... It could have been worse.  There was, in fact, an alternative ending, a coda, filmed at the insistence of Geoffrey Shurlock of the U.S. Production Code Administration; in which Scottie and his friend and former fiancee Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) are in her apartment listening to radio reports of the pursuit of Gavin Elster across Europe for the murder he was now known to have committed in the United States.  Shurlock was determined that the movie demonstrate that Elster would be caught and punished for his crime and that right would prevail.  It would only have added a wholly redundant ending on top of the one in which Scottie is looking down from the ledge of the bell tower at the body of the woman he lost twice, with the result of draining away what shock the movie had left to deliver.  Fortunately, Hitchcock succeeded in getting that scene dropped.  It is only a pity that he had failed to get Vertigo's other wholly unnecessary scene cut as well.

Passages...

Having just observed the death of Sir Christopher Lee, this blog sadly must again display mourning black with the news of the death of longtime film composer James Horner, who was killed in an airplane crash just two days previous to this posting.  Horner's cinematic works graced the silver screen in movies such as Titanic, Enemy At The Gates, Apollo 13, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.  Mr. Horner was only 61.  He might otherwise have delighted audiences for another twenty or thirty years with his music, but such is not to be.

Truly, a sad loss for movie culture.

A giant once lived in that body.

No doubt they'll sing in tune after the Revolution.

Arise, ye brothers in starvation, yada yada-da-da-da...

Today being May Day, the international day of the workingman, socialists everywhere the holiday is celebrated sing their anthem, The Internationale, the song of brotherhood and revolution.  The song represents hope for the future as they see it and has rallied activists and revolutionaries for more than a century.  It has been used by Communist regimes in place of religious observance as propaganda to reinforce their ideological control over the people long after corrupting the revolutions that brought them to power.  And in fascistic countries, the song has provoked police terror against the people who dare sing it in public as a means to silence dissent.  The implicit threat of the latter is part of the fabric of a significant scene in David Lean's grand-scale epic of romance amid the chaos of war and Red revolt, Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Unable to get permission to shoot the movie in the Soviet Union since the original Boris Pasternak novel was banned by the Communist authorities, Lean ended up filming in Spain, which had many locations suitable to depict the Russian countryside and mountains.  Sections of Madrid and Canillas stood in for Moscow, as much of the architecture was similar enough to that of the Soviet capital to serve with just a bit of dressing with Russian-language signage and the construction of a ten-acre outdoor Moscow set to complete the illusion.  However, one scene for the movie could have resulted in considerable political and legal troubles for the production crew and many of the Spanish extras taking part in the shoot.

Spain at the time of filming was still very firmly in the grip of the dictator Francisco Franco, who had led a brutal and ultimately successful civil war from 1936 to 1939 to crush the socialist Second Republic and replace it with his authoritarian fascist state.  Marxists and socialists, as well as fellow fascist Falangists, trade unionists, liberal Catholics, intellectuals, Basque and Catalan nationalists, anyone perceived as a threat to Franco's power, were purged and persecuted without mercy for years after the Nationalist victory.  The voice of the Spanish people was totally suppressed in the cultural and political clampdown that persisted almost up to Franco's death in 1975 and no one dared express any idea or sentiment that did not meet with State or Church approval in that era.

Though Spain often welcomed foreign film production for the boost it provided to the country's moribund economy, and Spanish cinematic professionals and actors eagerly participated in international co-production efforts as one of the few avenues of cultural and technical expression available to them, the ever-vigilant eye of Franco's secret police was always omnipresent and everyone knew enough to watch their step.  And it was in this environment that Lean was to shoot the scene in which a large crowd of protesters gather in Tamskaya Avenue to demonstrate peacefully for justice, bread and peace, capping the event with a singing of The Internationale —which was, of course, banned in Spain:

The Internationale  

(Lyrics by Eugene Pottier, music by Pierre Degeyter)

Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

(Refrain):
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.

(Refrain)

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E’er the thieves will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the forge must do their duty
And we’ll strike while the iron is hot.

(Refrain)

The scene was shot at three in the morning and, drawn out by reports that an actual uprising was in progress, police showed up to supervise the proceedings until Lean had finished.  The extras who formed the crowd knew the police were on hand in both uniform and in secret.  So, they deliberately sang the lyrics off-key and muddled the words as if they didn't understand what it was they were singing in hopes of avoiding arrest.  They didn't dare do otherwise in the climate of the time.  The ruse worked, Lean got his scene which helped set up the moment when Pasha and Yuri lost their naive innocence, and the extras got to go home and continue to have jobs in the Spanish film industry.

Behold his mighty hand!

So why exactly does The Ten Commandments (1956) stand out as the one truly great religious epic?

This particular genre of Hollywood filmmaking excess came into huge popularity in the late 1940s.  There had been religious pictures and movies with spiritual themes from the silent era onward, of course.  But from roughly 1948 to 1965, the major studios each cranked out at least one of these grand spectacles to add to the catalog of Inspirational Cinema.  Every one of these big religious epics produced in that period were popular; all guaranteed moneymakers at the box-office.  And just about every one of these pictures are regarded today as laughably hokey relics from a bygone era.  The problem with most of these overblown movies is, in addition to a lot of simply bad scriptwriting, weak thematic construction, overacting or practically non-existent acting, that they tended to get lost in their own piousness.  The Robe (1953), the first movie shot with the Cinemascope widescreen process, is a particular example of this: with characters looking heavenward at their moments of inspiration, the choral singing in the background soundtrack.  The movie just drips with its religiosity while presenting a personal drama which in and of itself is not enough of a story to fill out the scale of the movie in which it's couched.  The Silver Chalice (1954) and many pictures like it are simply risible, trying desperately to be something bigger than the costume spectacles they are, with stilted dialogue, cardboard characters, wooden acting (of which Paul Newman, in his first ever starring role, was guilty and for which he took out a full-page ad in Variety on the night of the film's 1966 TV premier to publicly apologize for), and an especially hammy Jack Palance mugging it up as Simon Magus in this one.  Another example is Samson And Delilah (1949, with Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr), which was also a Cecil B. DeMille picture; doing a more-or-less straight retelling of the biblical story from the Book of Judges.  It wasn't that any one element of this movie or the acting of its cast was in and of itself awful, or the dialogue which was no worse than many of its contemporaries in the genre, but it just doesn't come off as a film that can be taken at all seriously by audiences today because it is so earnest.  That and you really can't take droll George Sanders seriously as the Philistine tyrant.  It's even worse that Samson is so obviously a chump who was dumb enough to walk straight into the trap Delilah laid for him with both eyes wide open.

The large-scale epic motion picture based upon biblical and religious themes also was unique to this particular period of American history, the Cold War.  The threat of Communism was held up as the single greatest danger to the American way of life, and Hollywood was duly enlisted to provide ideological ammunition in the fight against it.  Hence, movies emphasizing spirituality were produced for both entertainment and propaganda purposes.  To be certain, in what was a more religious era, the major studios could count on huge box-office profits from audiences who would readily flock to films that showcased and confirmed the truths of their faiths and bolstered religious morale against Communism's atheistic assault upon Western cultural values.  The parallels between Rameses' (sic) Egypt and the Soviet Union were quite deliberately drawn for the benefit of the audience.  At the time, Egypt was a client state of the Soviets and had recently engaged in war against the Jewish state of Israel, which of course was America's principal ally in the Middle East and the site of the Promised Land of biblical legend.  Like Pharaoh, the Soviet Politburo allegedly regarded its people as "property of the state", and such was the ideological message that was repeatedly broadcast over every American media outlet that could be utilized for the purpose.  Cecil B. DeMille, himself a staunch conservative and committed cold warrior, made it rather plain that his grand remake of The Ten Commandments was part of the overall counterattack upon the alien ideology of Communism and its denial of the principle of men and women living as "free souls under God".

The Ten Commandments is laden with the politics of the period and also many of the other defects of religious movies of the era; doubly so given that Cecil B. DeMille, in the course of a nearly forty year career as a movie director, never changed his moviemaking style all that much from the silent era and for his grandest project of all reverted fully back to that era.  The dialogue is florid and even purplish in certain scenes ("Tears?  When you have been bathed in scented water, when your limbs have been caressed by sweet oils and your hair combed with sandalwood, there will be no time for tears"), characters are posed in tableux displays or strut dramatically, and Anne Baxter (Nefretiri) and Vincent Price (Baka) are shamelessly campy in their performances.  Watching Anne Baxter as the camera tracks backward during her walkthrough in her chambers while dripping in anticipation for the reunion with Prince Moses, her all–conquering hero, you see her performing the same sort of moves Theda Bara might have done in one of her movies.  You're watching a 1920s style movie made with the technology of 1956, without a hint of modern storytelling or cinematic convention having been incorporated into the production at any stage.

And yet, quite counter-intuitively, these elements actually give The Ten Commandments a power which lifts the movie far above its genre.  The 1920s cinematic style and dialogue has the effect of liberating the film from identification with any one time-period; creating an impression of an ancient era.  And while the movie was crafted as an allegory of the Cold War, it is executed in such broad terms that its theme of the fight for liberty transcends time and can be applied to any era in which human beings suffer under the yoke of tyranny and it is thereby possible to read into the movie any political philosophy which engages in such a struggle.  And then, there is the atypically dynamic figure of Moses himself, portrayed with gusto by Charlton Heston, who dominates this movie from the first moment he appears in it, and backed by a cast of powerful supporting actors who are needed just to counterbalance him.

Moses has everything a man of his era and background could want.  Rescued from death and slavery as a baby when plucked from the waters of the Nile by the grieving Princess Bithiah (Nina Foch) and raised in the household of the Pharaoh Sethi (Cedric Hardwicke), he grows into manhood as a prince of the realm.  He has fame, fortune, the clear favor of his adoptive father Sethi, the slavish devotion of the beautiful throne-princess Nefretiri, and is in line to become the next ruler of Egypt even over his half-brother Prince Rameses (Yul Brynner —a man who could strut even while sitting down).  When we first see Moses as a grown man, he is returning in triumph from the wars in Ethopia, and we soon discover that he negotiated an alliance between Ethopia and Egypt, which shows us his wisdom and integrity and only further casts him in Sethi's grace.  Commissioned to finish the great pharoah's treasure-city, Moses —after securing better treatment for the Hebrew slaves on the construction force— accomplishes the project while overcoming the growing hatred and jealousy of Rameses.

But one little accident of fate changes everything: when Nefretiri murders the household slave Memnet (Judith Anderson), who thirty years earlier had witnessed Bithiah's act of mercy toward a Hebrew child, was sworn to secrecy then, and now is threatening to reveal the secret so that no Hebrew should sit upon the throne of Egypt.  Nefretiri, totally in love with her man, silences Memnet.  But the old slave's evidence, a piece of Levite cloth in which the infant Moses was swaddled, lays neglected on the floor of Nefretiri's chambers.  When Moses notices it and starts asking questions, and Nefretiri reveals that she killed Memnet to keep her from going to Rameses with the cloth that would destroy him, the prince demands to know the terrible secret because he must have the truth.  Seeking answers, Moses then confronts Bithiah, and relentlessly interrogates his adoptive mother on the matter.  Bithiah tries desperately but ultimately in vain to deflect her son's curiosity.  His determination is only further fired as now Moses knows he must pursue the truth, no matter the cost

His quest takes him inevitably to Goshen, the province where the Hebrews have been segregated, to the house of the old woman Yochabel.  There, he finds Bithiah attempting to hustle the Levite family out of the country before the "terrible secret" can be revealed and discovers that the old woman was the same one Moses had, days earlier, rescued from being crushed between large stones at the building site.  Confronting the old woman, who had promised Bithiah just moments earlier not to reveal her true identity as Moses' birth-mother and thus take from him everything that Bithiah has provided, the prince is able to pry the truth from her when she can no longer deny him.  And holding the piece of his swaddling cloth, Moses has no doubt about his path from that point forward: "This is the binding tie, and here I will stay.  To find the meaning of what I am, and why a Hebrew, or any man, must be a slave."

So Moses throws away the comfortable, privileged life he has enjoyed and takes up the life of a Hebrew laborer, where he witnesses firsthand the oppression of his people and the cruelties practiced upon them by their Egyptian overlords, and his own sense of justice will not permit him to tolerate it.  After Moses murders Baka to save Joshua, who is being whipped to death by the Egyptian, and is arrested and brought before Pharaoh as a traitor, Sethi, who cannot believe that the son he has so long favored could betray him, asks what evil drove Moses to his rebellion.  To which Moses replies:

"The evil that men should turn their brothers into beasts of burden, to slave and suffer in dumb anguish.  To be stripped of spirit, and hope, and faith, only because they are of another race, or another creed.  If there is a god, he did not mean this to be so.  What I have done, I was compelled to do."

Heston's Moses is unlike every other central character in the religious epics of the period —who are either passive witnesses, passive martyrs, or disciples-in-waiting; all of whom are about as interesting, character-wise, as a bowl of oatmeal.  Moses is not acted upon, he acts.  Even as an agent of Yahweh and in spite of whatever personal doubts he has of his own ability to carry out such a mission, he is the driving force in the fight to liberate the Hebrews just as he was as prince of Egypt.  Moses is self-possessed, confident, decisive, powerful.  He can and will take matters into his own hands as he sees fit —as when he takes on the three marauders at the well of Jethro (Eduard Franz), or ultimately climbing the forbidden holy mountain, where his transformation from prince into the prophet who defeats an empire is completed.

The real secret of the The Ten Commandments as a movie, which really is no secret at all, is that it is only nominally a religious picture and is far more a classic Hollywood drama of the human condition.  It's got romantic triangles, conflict between brothers, jealousy, greed, betrayal, the clear and unambiguous demarcation of good and evil; all playing against the backdrop of grand, sweeping events unfolding behind it.  But perhaps the single most important element in the formula that makes this movie is that of the central character becoming a hero by way of a quest for truth, personal sacrifice, and the sheer force of will needed to shape the destinies of himself and all around him.  Powerful themes and ideas at the core of a fairly well-written script —even for all its purplish character prose— and wedded to a cast of strong actors able to carry them through and drive the picture to its inevitable and very satisfying conclusion.  That and, of course, none of these other pictures had anything even approaching the jaw-dropping spectacle of the parting of the Red Sea.  And there's a formula for success for any movie which no other genre film of the era ever came close to attaining.

Don't grieve, Admiral.

"The ship... Out of danger?"

"Yes."

"Don't grieve... Admiral.  It's logical.  The needs... of the many... outweigh—"

"The needs of the few."

"Or the one.  I never took the Kobayashi Maru test... until now.  What do you think of my solution?"

"Spock..."

"I have been... and always shall be... your friend.  Live long... and prosper."

Remember.

Farewell, the pleaures of the flesh.

My celebration of Mardi Gras includes the smoking of a fine cigar.  It is my one and only indulgence of tobacco in the entire year and one which has a ritualistic character.  In a brief season of indulgence, indeed of wretched excess in taking one's pleasures, my Mardi Gras smoker is a special pleasure I reserve only for this time.  It's inspiration was a scene in Doctor Zhivago (1965) and one which, for me, cohered wonderfully with carnival and its inevitable end at midnight on Shrove Tuesday.

The scene is the dinner Yuri Andrevich is sharing with his wife, Tonya, and his father-in-law Alexander Gromeko (Ralph Richardson, portraying one of the most British Russians to be found in any production), upon Yuri's return from the Ukranian front at the end of Russia's participation in the Great War.  Gromeko, savoring the moment, pulls out a stub, declaring "I am about to light the last half of the last cigar to be found in Moscow".  Some light conversation about the meal follows as the old man lights the cigar, after which he takes a long puff, letting the smoke roll around in his mouth and enjoying the experience for all its worth before wistfully declaring "Farwell, the pleasures of the flesh", and then wondering aloud how the family was going to make it through the winter in the face of the Revolution and the shortages of food and fuel in the city.

Mardi Gras itself is a brief time of gross enjoyment of appetite and sensation just before one is confronted with the harsh realities of Lent, the season of fasting and atonement in the Catholic calendar which begins on Ash Wednesday.  Like Gromeko, I savor my pleasures at length, knowing that they must all too soon come to an end, and that waiting for me is more serious business, deprivation, and sacrifice.  I don't take the ashes of Lent myself, but the burnt remains of my cigar fulfills the same symbolism for me of the season of indulgence which must end with the reminder that, from dust thou came and from dust shalt thou return.

Farewell, the pleasures of the flesh.

The News Parade

A staple feature of the movie experience for audiences in the era before television was the newsreel.  Performing much the same function as the television nightly news, these short-subject films presented a cavalcade of stories on national and world events, sport, and human interest, and themselves were a powerful draw for audiences and a guaranteed revenue stream for theater owners.  Cities even had dedicated newsreel theaters running all the informational shorts produced by Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Pathé, in a daily rotation for eager moviegoers trying to stay caught-up with events.  Most newsreels ran around ten to twelve minutes in length, and featured about six to twenty items per short.  But each story featured in the newsreel had around ten minutes or so of footage shot for it so as to provide editors with their choice of prime clips for each spot in the production, which means most of the material ended up on the cutting room floor.  Some companies archived the unused footage —which could be recycled for movie productions as stock filler— while others simply threw away the discards to save storage space in their vaults.

The reason for this particular blog entry however is not to go into a rambling history of the newsreel and its eventual demise as television steadily supplanted its function.  As I write, it is Mardi Gras back home in New Orleans.  By chance while doing a Google search, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of nine minutes of unused footage from British Pathé of the 1947 Rex parade which did not make the final cut for the short which went out about that time of year then.  Given the day, it is altogether appropriate to link the page so readers can enjoy a look into carnival past which was rescued from the cutting room floor and preserved for posterity, and is now available for online viewing thanks to the whole British Pathé library being made available to the worldwide web.  So draw up your chair, sit down with chips, popcorn, or if you have it —king cake, and enjoy: