In Honour Of Easter Holy Week & Passover:

Both great movies.

It would be impossible to overestimate the risibility of Charlton Heston’s screamingly funny performance in “The Ten Commandments.” Heston could give a restrained performance is he really wanted to or if he had a director who could tone him down. See “Will Penny” (1967). Also, Heston’s Player King in Kenneth Branaugh’s “Hamlet” is surprisingly, shockingly good. But, for the most part, he mugged and growled and hammed it up and got paid handsomely for it.



Also, just being in the production of “The Ten Commandments” brought out the worst in everybody. Anne Baxter never needed anyone to tell her to “give it more” so she matches Heston in silly lines. And poor Eddie G. Robinson, one of my favorite actors, just about sank a 30 year career as the ranting Dathan. How Yul Brynner escaped this debacle with his dignity still intact is a wonder. But, then, he was always a rebel. He plays his scenes as if he had actually come up with a character to play and was trying to breathe life into a human being. That was all wrong for “The Ten Commandments.” One decent performance among the cast of thousands would really seem out of place. Shame on Brynner for ruining it for everybody else by being a good actor.



As for a Christian, or even vaguely religious, message – well, there is none. No message, Christian or otherwise. It is a wide-screen, all-your-favorite-stars-committing-all-your-favorite-sins, kitsch-o-rama whose only purpose was to get people out from in front of those new-fangled TV sets and back into movie theaters before all the traditional studios went under. “The Ten Commandments” is a crassly commercial movie designed to sucker the more naïve audiences of the late 1950s. Among those suckers were my parents – and me. They took me – a sixth grader – to see the first run of “The Ten Commandments” in a big city downtown theater built in the early 1930s with the ornate lobby, huge lower floor auditorium, double balcony and stars in the ceiling. It is one of the greatest movie going experiences of my childhood. It was about 10 years later, toward the end of my undergraduate college years, that I saw it again. I was embarrassed, mortified, that even as a 10 year old I had been so knocked out by it. I have not changed my perception since then. It is a terrible movie. Charlton Heston (and the rest of the cast except for Yul) is terrible in it.



I would not go see “The Passion of the Christ” even for money. If someone held a gun on me to force me to go, I would invite them to shoot. The film represents everything that is bad, awful, and not good in fundamentalist Christian theology. Mel Gibson may be a good film stylist but that is not nearly enough to lure me in. I have to give the production company credit, however, for inventing a new successful way to get large audiences to come to their terrible movies: they marketed them straight to fundie churches and even encouraged the churches to load their parishioners onto busses and bring them to the theater – which the churches did. Later films also scored big by following that model.