![]() Perhaps the most powerful thing about The Ten Commandments, though, is that we keep watching it - and the story keeps being relevant, regardless of the viewer’s religious affiliation. Yul Brynner as Ramses in The Ten Commandments. Clocking in at 220 minutes long - with intermission! - it takes the audience on quite a journey. The screenplay necessarily diverges from what just appears in the biblical text, but the movie was deeply researched, drawing on religious texts, scholarly research, and ancient historians like Josephus to fill in the narrative blanks. It’s a coming-of-age story for Moses, a tale of rivalry between two brothers, and a heroic tale of deliverance all rolled into one. (In the habit of the era, the casting is ludicrously whitewashed.) The Ten Commandments reenacts the events of the biblical book of Exodus, with Yul Brynner as Ramses opposite Heston’s Moses, and Anne Baxter playing Nefertiti, the queen and the third point in the movie’s big love triangle. DeMille took the familiar story and made a big, melodramatic epic that’s more operatic than merely cinematic. It never occurred to me as a kid, but of course The Ten Commandments was airing on Easter because the holiday usually coincides with the celebration of Passover: The story of the children of Israel being led out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom in the Promised Land is celebrated during Passover, and that’s the story of The Ten Commandments. But I’d nestle into the couch and munch on a chocolate bunny while I watched Charlton Heston, playing an impossibly blue-eyed Moses, confront Pharaoh and part the Red Sea. I never got to watch the whole thing, because inevitably I missed the start time. (It’s been airing since 1968, and this year it’s on the night before Easter.) It’s one of my favorite childhood memories: Every year on Easter, after the family festivities were over, I’d go downstairs and turn on our big old TV set, and ABC would be airing The Ten Commandments. The movie of the week for April 15 through 21 is The Ten Commandments, which is available to digitally rent on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, and Vudu. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They’re all fair game. It wasn't (and neither was Planet Of The Apes).Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with current events. Yul Brynner also shot some scenes on location, chasing the Children of Israel to the Red Sea, but clearly not the banishment of Moses into the wilderness, which cross-cuts between Charlton Heston, very obviously alone on location, and Brynner, very obviously in the studio.Īnd you can safely ignore those over-enthusiastic tour guides who claim that The Ten Commandments was filmed at Mount Teide in the Canary Islands. 10,000 Arabs playing the Children of Israel, were drafted in, along with 15,000 camels, water buffaloes, sheep, horses, oxen, goats, duck, geese, pigeons, dogs, donkeys and, of course, many cattle. The Treasure City of Pharaoh Sethi ( Cedric Hardwicke) was built at Beni Youssef near Cairo, which is also where the genuinely moving Exodus scene was staged. The crew stayed at Saint Catherine's Monastery (more properly, The Greek Orthodox Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai) at the foot of the range.įootage was shot for the Burning Bush scene, though the bush itself, with risible cartoon flames, was obviously filmed in the studio. And that’s where DeMille and crew turned up in October 1954. Among these Jebel Must – the Mount of Moses – is the most popular candidate, and is now generally referred to a Sinai. There is, however, in the Sinai massif a cluster of peaks in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, toward Sharm El-Sheik. This epic was shot largely on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, though this time there was some genuine location filming in Egypt.įirst off, where’s Mount Sinai? It didn't used to be on any map. ![]() Over 30 years after his first version, Cecil B DeMille returned to The Ten Commandments, ditching the modern day moralities to produce the peak of Hollywood mega-kitsch, which lurches wildly from hysterical camp to heart-in-mouth drama.
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