World Famous Comics: Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art
Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art
By: Simon Louvish Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Thomas Dunne Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 528 Publication Date: March 04, 2008 Release Date: March 04, 2008
Cecil B. DeMille is Hollywood’s most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose biblical sagas, such as Samson and Delilah and his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultraconservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the “neoconservatism” of our own times.
The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his seventy ?lms, of which ?fty were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid ?lm fans, though his ?rst 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and his 1927 tale of Jesus Christ, King of Kings, linger in the imagination. A founder-pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society, and the pursuit of money made America a battle?eld of clashing values and temptations.
Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major reexamination of Hollywood’s most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle---a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.
Cecil B. DemIlle is a fine biography of the famed Hollywood Director of Epics by Simon Louvish "I'm ready when you are Mr. DeMille' So cried Norma Desmond the looney faded silent screen star in the Billy Wilder classic of 1950, "Sunset Boulevard." Old CB even appeared in a cameo in this film portraying himself as an avuncular director taking pity on Norma his erstwhile star. In real life Mr. Cecil B. DeMille was not always a kindly chap! As the director of over 70 Hollywood films from the silents to the triumph of his remake of "The Ten Commandments" in 1959 he towered high on the Hollywood totem pole of clout, hutzpah and showbiz hoopla! DeMille was born in Mass. in 1881, His older and more intellectual brother William would grow up to be a playwright and teacher of film. His father had worked on the Broadway stage writing plays for famed producer David Belasco. His mother was a Jew but DeMille liked to keep his Jewish heritage a secret in Anti-Semitic America. DeMille found work as a playwright and wrote several for the Broadway stage. He and his friend Jesse Lasky went to Hollywood and were in on the ground floor of moviemaking in the early 1900s. DeMille directed 52 silent films featuring Gloria Swanson, Mabel Normand and other early film luminaries. Author Louvish asserts that silent films were the best work done by DeMille. Among them were the first "Ten Commandments"as well as the excellent "King of Kings" about the life of Christ. Other standout silent moviews must include "The Squaw Man", "The Volga Boatmen", "The Golden Bed", and others. Many of these films have been lost. Louvish says they are worth a viewing on a good DVD transfer. DeMille's first talkie was "Dynamite." He is most known for his biblical epics such as "Samson and Delilah", "The Sign of the Cross" and his magnus opus "The Ten Commandments." DeMille won an Oscar for Best Picture for "The Greatest Show on Earth" in 1952. DeMille presents us with an uneven body of work. His films are often filled with hokum, horrible dialgoue and clumsy acting. He did do a good deal of research on his films and they do have their moments of high drama. His seventy plus films and over six decades in the movie business have earned him a place in the ranks of outstanding directors of the twentieth century. DeMille died in 1959. In his persona he was dictatorial, demanding, meticulous in research and planning.. He was an inveterate womanizer who was unfaithful to his good wife Beatrice. He enjoyed weekends at a ranch where orgies occurred. DeMille had several longterm mistresses event though he impressed people as the model of moral probity. He was an Episcopalian and student of the Bible. DeMille was also a right wing supporter of anti-communism in Hollywood and was anti-union. He had many flaws but produced good work from time to time. He was the host of the Lux Radio Theatre for years; enjoyed flying as a pilot and was a patriotic American. People either loved or loathed him. DeMille often shouted on the set acting like an imperious Simon Legree driving his actors to what he considered perfection. He did not entertain fools gladly. Louvish has done a workmanlike job on the life of DeMille. The book does get tedious when he gives us a synopsis of many of the forgettable films directed by the director. One would like to know about his personal life but as Louvish notes this book is on the DeMille film more than a detailed examination of CB's life. Any fan of DeMille or Hollywood history would enjoy this book.
Not Just Brilliant in His Epics Even if you have never seen one of his films, you probably recognize the name of Cecil B. DeMille as synonymous with big, epic moviemaking. It's inarguable that with a silent and a sound _The Ten Commandments_, a _Cleopatra_, or a _Samson and Delilah_, DeMille was at home with making colossal pictures. But Simon Louvish in _Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art_ (Thomas Dunne Books) demonstrates that there was a lot more to the director than big-scale movies. In fact, although Louvish recognizes that opinions about any movie are arguable, he finds only a few of DeMille's sound pictures really good. The great works, Louvish argues, were among the fifty-two silent films, social comedies and commentaries that were ahead of their time, and of which according to Louvish, "even the most uneven contain moments of brilliance and scenes of finely crafted technical prowess." Sadly, many of these films are gone forever (unless some trove shows up unexpectedly), and some Louvish has only been able to see within film archives, but others have been restored and put onto DVDs. If you are a movie fan, and are interested in a broader view of DeMille's output, you'll put them on your must-see list after reading this careful, big, and well-documented book. It is an unauthorized biography: "The estate of Cecil B. DeMille informed me that it could not assist me in my endeavor." That's not too surprising; DeMille was an intimidating and hypocritical man whose personal behavior was often odious, and he put his bad characteristics into service in getting his films out.
"You are here to please me," he told his crews, "Nothing else on earth matters." He dressed the part of a commander, in riding boots, puttees, slouch hat, and corduroy pants, an image of the generic director that has been caricatured ever since. He would doff his jacket and drop it, knowing a hired attendant would catch it before it hit the floor. He sat down whenever he wanted, and never had to check to see if there was a chair beneath him, because there was a chair boy hovering behind him. The other part of his drive was targeting himself: "Despite the consistent stories of DeMille's incessant bullying and the human casualties that peeled off right and left, both crew and cast of his movies could see that the boss drove himself harder than any of his satraps and minions." His films often touted conventional morality, but Charlton Heston (and Theodore Roberts before him in the silent version) did tote down tablets that included an injunction against adultery. DeMille himself had serial mistresses and plenty of female associates, which everyone referred to as his "harem". Religion and sex were mixed up in many of his films and made him hugely rich and powerful. He got the introduction to religion from his father, a staunch Episcopalian who as actor and playwright introduced him also to the stage, although he would have preferred that DeMille enter a solid trade like running a grocery. DeMille was quickly intoxicated with the huge scope that the movies could take in, far grander than what could be put on a stage, writing: "No height limit, no close fitting exits, no conserving of stage space, just the whole world open to you as a stage and a thousand people in a scene does not crowd your accommodations."
Working on the second _The Ten Commandments_, his last film, almost killed him, literally. He was shooting in Egypt and had a heart attack, but he recovered enough to resume the subsequent Hollywood shooting. He was sure that the Ten Commandments were the basis of our society, and he was a darling of the McCarthy set, proposing that members of the Screen Directors' Guild sign a non-Communist loyalty oath; John Ford himself shot him down on that one. His reactionary politics, entangled with his virulent anti-union beliefs, seem foolish now. On the right to silence, for instance, he spouted, "As an American he has the right. But he does not have the right to be silent when his silence is decisively un-American." Of course, he got to decide who was un-American. Louvish has to include these unseemly parts of an astonishing life, but naturally DeMille's politics don't matter much now. When the French film theorists praised the American directors like Walsh, Ford, and Hawks as "auteurs" who put their own personal stamp on their films, they ignored DeMille. It was a mistake to leave him out; DeMille put out seventy movies, tightly controlling every one. Louvish's entertaining biography shows that DeMille exerted the control in the small scenes as well as the epic ones.
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