Anyone not like the great director? I’m watching the 1927 version of King of Kings and loving every minute of it.
I’ve loved ever DeMille film with the exception of the far too slow Sign of the Cross.
Your comments on DeMille and his greatness?
He was wonderful in Sunset Blvd.
I actually rather liked Sign of the Cross. It went against my expectations. I kept waiting for a conventional ending, you know, noble deaths in the arena, but the good guy and good girl(Marcus and Mercia) would somehow be saved.
Didn’t happen. Not only were they sent to their death, but Nero and his wife didn’t even get any comeuppance for their wickedness( not in the movie anyway!)
Ooh, me! Me!
IMO, he was the Steven Spielberg of his day: all show, no substance.
Plus he was a pretty vicious redbaiter and thinly veiled anti-semite: he headed an effort to require all members of the Directors’ Guild to sign a loyalty oath. Most of the directors whom DeMille accused were Jewish, and in putting forth his position, he very pointedly pronounced their names as “Germanically” as possible: *Villie Vyler * for William Wyler, etc. It was only the fact that John Ford, who “outranked” him in reputation and stature, decided to speak out against this effort that defeated it:
[cite; Google produces several]
My favorite of his movies, however, is Reap the Wild Wind, a delirious and silly technicolor sea story, with John Wayne in mutton chop whiskers.
Interesting you should mention Spielberg. Charlton Heston, who worked in a couple movies for DeMille, said in his own autobiography that DeMille “was the Steven Spielberg of his day. He had his finger on the pulse of what Americans would want to see at the movies.”
Heston goes on to say that he never did a film directed by Spielberg. But he tells the tale of how, in 1966, when he was on location in California filming The War Lord, a young teenager kept sneaking onto the set and getting thrown out, until finally the director let him stay. The sixteen year old kid was Spielberg.
The two DeMille movies I can remember from my childhood were, at that time, the most memorable ones I had seen, (and that remained the case until High Noon, Shane or Stalag 17), were Samson and Delilah and The Greatest Show On Earth. The DeMille stamp was on both of them pretty heavy, but for me (at the time) that was a good thing.
By the time The Ten Commandments came out and the remake of The Buccaneer, the magic had worn off. Somehow, in the brief span of time, less than five years, between 1952 and 1956, my tastes changed enough that DeMille was just too self-important to suit me.
I should note that the only director to please me on a consistent level in those days was Hitchcock. Even John Ford, William Wyler and George Stevens managed to be spotty in their achievements. DeMille belonged to an earlier era, as far as I was concerned, and he didn’t manage to keep up with the major shifts in taste that America was going through in the 50’s. The fact that he died in early 1959 is probably a good indicator of why.