"In those days there were three great directors- D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Max von Mayerling," says Erich von Stroheim in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. The line is poignant because we know that Stroheim the actor is in some sense speaking of himself and his own vanished career as a director, and that D.W. Griffith spent the last seventeen years of his life unable to work in the industry he helped to create, but what of Cecil B. DeMille? In Wilder's picture we see DeMille busy on the set directing his sixty-eighth picture, Samson and Delilah, still a power in the motion picture industry and seemingly untouched by Hollywood's adversities. Yet, DeMille's Joan the Woman (1916-17) was every bit as big a failure as Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and DeMille was even more profligate with studio money on his 1923 version of The Ten Commandments than Stroheim was on Greed (1924).
What set DeMille apart? Why did he remain successful when other, arguably more talented filmmakers fell from professional and public favor? Early in his career Cecil B. DeMille's films were highly regarded, while his later work was often met with critical derision, but the fact remains that no other director was a major force in the film world over such an extended period of time.
Allan Dwan's career was longer (1910-1961) than DeMille's (1913-1959), but Dwan started out making one-reelers and ended up making "B" features. John Ford spent his first ten years as a director making inconsequential Westerns and program pictures. George Marshall had the staying power, but many of his projects were trivial at best. DeMille, on the other hand, could lay claim to creating prestigious major attractions in each of his five decades as a filmmaker.
DeMille's box-office success was staggering. In Hollywood, where the dollar is almighty, it is easy to see why he was considered the greatest filmmaker of them all. Chaplin-? Big grosses, but very few pictures. Lubitsch-? Despite his prestige, virtually all of his films lost money. Sternberg-? Blonde Venus (1932) was a modest hit, The Scarlet Empress (1934) kept people out of theatres in droves. Many found DeMille's success revolting. He was criticized for pandering to the lowest common denominator, and damned with faint praise in phrases like "Master of Spectacle" or "Great Showman" or "the director who brought the bath tub to the screen."
When Andrew Sarris wrote "The American Cinema," his classic testament to the auteur theory, he rated Cecil B. DeMille on "The Far Side of Paradise" and observed that "Griffith, Chaplin, Lubitsch, Murnau, Eisenstein, Ford, Hawks, Capra, Welles, Renoir, Ophuls, and all the others came and went without influencing his style in the slightest." The implication being that from his first picture in 1914 to his last in 1956 DeMille never altered his technique. Of course, this would be a debatable proposition under any circumstances, but for the sake of argument let us assume that it is true. What Sarris seemingly failed to take into account is that while DeMille may not have been influenced by others, he himself was a highly influential filmmaker.
Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923) is clearly patterned after the comedy-dramas pioneered by DeMille in the late 'teens, and Lubitsch's frothy explorations of domestic strife also owe much to DeMille. Eisenstein surely saw DeMille's The Crusades (1935) before he created his battle on the ice for Alexander Nevsky (1938), and the vivid psychological dramas of Renoir owe something to DeMille's pioneering efforts in The Whispering Chorus (1917). William Wyler, George Stevens, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray all tried their hands at Biblical spectacles, a genre virtually created by DeMille. Even King Vidor and Alfred Hitchcock borrowed images from The Ten Commandments (1923) for The Fountainhead (1949) and Psycho (1960).
It is surprising for a director of DeMille's stature that the critical reception of his career has been based on a mere handful of his seventy pictures- all the more surprising because the majority of his fifty-two silent films and all of his sound films survive. The Cheat (1915), The Ten Commandments (1923), and The King of Kings (1927) seem to be the only DeMille silents revived with any regularity. Lip service is paid to social comedies like Male and Female (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920), but few seem to have actually seen them.
There is no shortage of interest in DeMille the man, but the suspicion arises that DeMille's work has been purposely ignored. Perhaps because The King of Kings and The Ten Commandments (1923) are similar in tone to his sound film spectacles many assumed the rest of DeMille's output was in the same vein, but such a sampling is not really representative. Many of the director's best pictures, including Kindling (1915), The Golden Chance (1916), Old Wives for New (1918), Saturday Night (1922), and The Godless Girl (1928), are virtually unknown to film scholars. [1]
While DeMille's early dramas and domestic comedies were enthusiastically received by critics, the symbolic and allegorical approach to character and drama which DeMille embraced in Something to Think About (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920) and followed in much of his subsequent work, put him at odds with changing critical tastes. To understand DeMille's fall from grace among the critical establishment it is necessary to have a sense of the great changes taking place in American culture after the First World War.
The 1920's were an artistic 'golden age' in the United States, especially in the world of literature. Before the First World War, the most popular American writers were people like Zane Grey, Gene Stratton Porter, Rex Beach, and Booth Tarkington. In the 1920's only Tarkington would maintain his critical standing with such post-war literary lions as Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway. These new writers pursued a more realistic tone and the critical community in New York was quick to hail the "new American literature." While urban areas like New York and Chicago embraced the new realism in the arts, much of the United States population was still scattered across a vast rural landscape of farms and one-horse towns.
In the 'teens, movies were often frank in their treatment of issues like poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, but the stark realism of films like Reginald Barker's The Italian (1915) or DeMille's own Kindling (also 1915) was clearly out of favor in the early 1920's, largely because increasing production costs forced filmmakers to seek the widest possible audience. A writer like Sinclair Lewis was reviled for his portraits of a mildly corrupt business man in "Babbitt" (1922) and a hypocritical preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1927). The notoriety made Lewis's novels best sellers. But a book can sell a few hundred thousand copies and be wildly successful, while a few hundred thousand patrons for a movie at the then-average ticket price of fifteen cents could not come close to covering the negative cost of a picture like Manslaughter (1922). [2] So DeMille adopted what New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall called "...his queer flamboyant style..." [3] to make his social criticism more palatable.
In a sense the movies were twenty years behind the times in the types of material they presented. Three Weeks (Goldwyn, 1924), the torrid screen romance starring Aileen Pringle and Conrad Nagel, was based on a 1907 novel by Elinor Glyn! Zane Grey and Rex Beach were prime sources for film adaptations in the 1920's and the popular but heavy-handed Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco-Ibanez was touted as a genius by Hollywood. In addition, American movies faced heavy censorship pressure in various states and local communities and filmmakers were forced to compromise artistic vision in favor of commercial reality.
The Hollywood dramatic film of the 1920's was often schizophrenic. Screen stars wore the latest Vanity Fair fashions, danced the Charleston, and drank "bootleg booze," but underneath all the outward flash the heroine was more virginal (i.e. virtuous) than she appeared, or else her indiscretions were met with devastating moral retribution. Some filmmakers overcame these restrictions by placing their stories of sex and sin in exotic foreign settings- Monte Carlo, the North African desert, some imaginary principality. This approach also went back into the early part of the century in works like "The Man From Home" by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson (1907) and "Graustark" by George Barr McCutcheon (1901). [4]
Cecil B. DeMille, on the other hand, told stories about the American middle class (upper middle class might be a more appropriate designation) in clearly American settings. At a time when films often pitted a virtuous hero against a despicable villain, DeMille rarely fell back on this cliché. In a DeMille film one finds that the less-than-perfect protagonist and the not-completely-evil antagonist are best friends or brothers- two sides of the same coin. There are few black-hearted villains, no dastardly deeds. The characters in DeMille's films are motivated by common human emotions- but these emotions are treated in an uncommon manner.
As early as 1919 the story was told that DeMille put his heart and soul into making The Whispering Chorus (1917), and when audiences proved indifferent to his artistic efforts he decided to give up on art and give the public what it wanted: SEX, SIN, and SATAN with a half reel of REDEMPTION thrown in for good measure. Such a reading of DeMille's career allowed the high-minded to feel superior to the great unwashed, but we now know that The Whispering Chorus was a respectable box-office hit and it certainly didn't generate any backlash against the audience by Cecil B. DeMille. In fact, the picture deals with many of the thematic concerns that DeMille explored throughout his career.
DeMille often suggested that it was essential to show the wages of sin in order to demonstrate that virtue is its own reward, but it would be a mistake to say that he was a moral absolutist. In films like Why Change Your Wife? and Don't Change Your Husband DeMille dared to suggest that husbands and wives could drift apart without the necessity of painting him as a cad or her as a whore. In Saturday Night he introduced two couples who are very much in love- but love is not enough to keep them together. In The Godless Girl the atheist and religious zealot meet half way- she comes to accept that there might be something valid in religious belief while he becomes more tolerant of human frailties.
Forbidden Fruit (Paramount, 1920), made during America's flirtation with prohibition, shows people of the tenements at a "social club" where alcohol is kept hidden behind the counter; while at an affluent home drinks are openly served- even in the presence of the Bishop! In Four Frightened People (Paramount, 1934), a society woman is taken prisoner by south sea natives and she ends up lecturing the village women on the benefits of birth control and equality in their relationships with their husbands. What DeMille did was to plant his message in the midst of the most extravagant melodrama in these kind of idiosyncratic moments.
For the rural audience DeMille's candy ball in The Golden Bed (1925) or the party aboard a captive dirigible in Madam Satan (1930) were the height of big city moral decadence, for the shop girl in the city they were exotic fantasies. For some these scenes were erotic, for others absurd. One could never be quite certain whether DeMille was serious or simple-minded. Mordaunt Hall called Dynamite (1929) "...an astonishing mixture, with artificiality vying with realism and comedy hanging on the heels of grim melodrama." And perhaps this was DeMille's secret. He offered something for everybody. DeMille's approach was good for the box-office but devastating to his reputation among critics who were looking for realism in the arts.
DeMille's adherence to the aesthetic conventions of the 19th century American theatre contributed to the lack of appreciation for his work. He grew up around the Broadway theatre of David Belasco in an era that prized the "well-made play." DeMille placed a heavy emphasis on story and often employed intricate plot devices and narrative complications. He also believed that great drama followed from great events and great themes. By this aesthetic, the strengths of the modern story in The Ten Commandments (1923) are precisely those elements that modern audiences find most difficult to embrace. That Dan McTavish could break all of the commandments within a single convoluted storyline strains current dramatic sensibilities, and the preachment inherent in such a treatment is also out of favor. Yet in 1923 Jesse L. Lasky wrote to his partner Adolph Zukor, "You will be amazed at the sincerity with which Cecil has handled this tremendous subject, it is almost as if he were inspired, a new and much bigger Cecil B. DeMille... I have never heard a sermon, read a book, nor seen a play that has affected me as much as The Ten Commandments...." [5] If one is suspicious that Jesse Lasky was not exactly an unbiased observer, then take the words of James R. Quirk, editor of "Photoplay" magazine. He wrote "[ The Ten Commandments is] The best photoplay ever made. The greatest theatrical spectacle in history... it will last as long as the film on which it is recorded." [6]
Few critics would echo these sentiments today, but if DeMille remained old-fashioned in his dramatic approach, he was certainly not naive and he calculated his films with great precision. just as D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (Griffith-United Artists, 1920) and John Collins's Blue Jeans (Metro, 1917) demonstrate the dramatic virtues inherent in the conventional form of 19th century American melodrama in spite of banal action set pieces like the ice rescue or the hero lashed to a log inching toward death in sawmill, so the modern story in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923), which owes much to the middle class theatrical entertainments of the turn of the century, demonstrates virtues of its own for those who can look beyond the story-telling and acting conventions that are basic to DeMille's treatment.
The Biblical spectacle that opens The Ten Commandments shows the influence of The Road to Yesterday, a 1906 play by Beulah Marie Dix and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland that pioneered the use of the historical flashback. [7] It is designed to amaze and fill the eye with spectacle, but it also grounds the modern story by suggesting that the problems of the present are eternal human conflicts fought in all times by all people. The characters in the modern story are symbolic rather than specific, and the story is allegorical rather than realistic. Mother McTavish is an unbending religious bigot. One son turns his back on his mother's teaching, while the other absorbs only the true Christian faith- he is a self-sacrificing believer willing to forgive the indiscretions of others. DeMille's allegorical approach in The Ten Commandments was in keeping with the moral parables of the Bible, but many critics found his moralizing heavy-handed and obvious.
DeMille's rabid anti-Communist politics in the 1950's also took a toll on his standing in the critical community. For the longest time Marxist critics seemed to be the only people who took film seriously as an art, and it simply wasn't fashionable for the political left to acknowledge Cecil B. DeMille as anything more than a bourgeois capitalist vulgarian. In such an atmosphere it became easy to ignore the fact that DeMille took a relatively sympathetic view of the Russian revolution in The Volga Boatman (1926), and that the Soviets invited him to make films in the U.S.S.R. DeMille preferred to gloss over these items on his resume as well.
A picture like This Day and Age (1933) was mistakenly seen as anti-democratic when in fact it carried a populist message. DeMille was essentially a romantic who sided with the underdog. His anti-labor-union stance in the 1940's and '50's seemed to be based on a sense of rugged individualism rather than any labor vs. capital ideological dispute. DeMille certainly felt a responsibility to keep his own crew working, whether he was shooting a picture or not. However, if DeMille was ambivalent about labor unions, he was clearly anti-totalitarian in his politics. In the filmed curtain speech for The Ten Commandments (1956) he explicitly stated his intentions: "The theme of this picture," he said, "is whether men are to be ruled by God's law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today...." Little wonder that some critics preferred to perpetuate the mythology that the capitalist Hollywood studio heads exalted DeMille's crass commercialism over the higher artistic accomplishments of Griffith or Stroheim. They conveniently forgot that alcoholism was the downfall of Griffith, and the inability to deliver a finished picture was Stroheim's. They also forgot to remember that Sergei Eisenstein was prevented by the Soviet state from pursuing his career as successfully as he might and that V.I. Pudovkin was forced to produce some of the most puerile Stalinist propaganda to remain active as a director.
Cecil B. DeMille was not without his faults as a filmmaker. Rarely do his films touch the emotions in the way that say John Ford's do. The performances of his actors lack the understated intensity elicited by William Wyler. There is little genuine humor in his work, and he lacked Sternberg's unerring eye for visual composition. But he communicated with audiences in a way that few others did.
"I respect responsible criticism," DeMille wrote in his autobiography. "What I deplore in many critics is not that they criticize, but that they do not see!"
DeMille considered himself an artist, even if others did not. It is clear, when one sees films like Kindling (1915) or The Golden Chance (1915) that DeMille was perfectly capable of creating naturalistic films, but he chose to work in the flamboyant manner that became his trademark. Like D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille was one of the creators of the art of motion picture story-telling. DeMille's technique was so completely absorbed by his fellow filmmakers that his innovations have been clouded by latter-day familiarity.
Now as DeMille's work receives belated reconsideration his critical reputation will almost certainly be adjusted. Whether for better or worse, DeMille would have been content for others to decide. All he would ask is a fair hearing.
Footnotes
[1] Forty-five of Cecil B. DeMille's fifty-two silent films survive in various archives. The largest collection of DeMille silents is housed in the Eastman House collection, although the AFI Collection in the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film and Television Archive hold several significant titles. Two of the silents, The Squaw Man (1918 remake) and The Devil Stone (1917) survive only in fragment. The Wild Goose Chase (1915), The Arab (1915), Chimmie Fadden (1915), Temptation (1915), The Dream Girl (1916), We Can't Have Everything (1918), and Feet of Clay (1924) are not known to exist in any archive or private collection.
[2] Manslaughter cost $384,111.14 to produce according to DeMille's records.
[3] Hall, Mordaunt, review of The Road to Yesterday, New York Times, December 1, 1925.
[4] DeMille made a screen version of "The Man From Home" in 1914, but he rarely indulged in the "Europeans are corrupt/Americans are pure" school of story telling. For The Affairs of Anatol (1921), based on a play by the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, DeMille transposed the action to New York and treated the characters as Americans.
[5] Jesse L. Lasky to Adolph Zukor, October 5, 1923.
[6] James R. Quirk writing in the February, 1924 issue of "Photoplay" magazine. Since it is patently obvious that The Ten Commandments will physically last as long as the film on which it is recorded, one must assume that Quirk meant to convey that the picture would be of enduring audience appeal long after its initial release.
[7] DeMille made a film version of The Road to Yesterday as his first independent production in 1925. It was a notable box-office failure. It is interesting that The Road to Yesterday, which was so influential to DeMille and to D. W. Griffith, only came to the screen near the end of the "historic flashback" cycle that lasted roughly from 1916 to 1925. Noah's Ark (Warner Bros., 1928) and Forgotten Commandments (Paramount, 1932), which re-used the Biblical sequences from The Ten Commandments, finished the genre in dramatic pictures, but the device became the domain of comedians like Eddie Cantor in pictures like Roman Scandals (Goldwyn-United Artists, 1933) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (20th Century-Fox, 1937).
© 1991 Robert S. Birchard
Robert S. Birchard, "Cecil B. DeMille Vs. The Critics," in L'Eredita DeMille (The DeMille Legacy), (1991, Pordenone: Edizione Biblioteca dell'immagine), pages 284-291. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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