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DeMille doubtless has good reason to be confident. In five previous attempts, from the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments down to Samson and Delilah in 1949, he has made a lot of hay in the religious field. But DeMille has not been content to trust merely in God. He has crowded the giant Vista Vision screen with such stars as Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner. Anne Baxter. Edward G. Robinson. Yvonne de Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Judith Anderson, Vincent Price. Moreover, DeMille spent ten years in planning the picture, three years and $300,000 in research. After that, he spent almost three months in Egypt and the Holy Land, shooting his key scenes "in the very places where"-so the picture's publicity puts it—the episodes of Exodus transpired. In the flats back of Cairo, DeMille built the biggest movie set in history, a 60-acre mockup of the traditional "treasure city" of Per-Rameses that probably constituted the biggest piece of construction work undertaken in Egypt since the Suez Canal. For one scene alone, the beginnings of the Exodus, he used more than 20,000 extras —at least twice as many people, according to the generally accepted estimate, as were involved in the actual historical event.
Back in Hollywood, the producer discovered that the Paramount lot (35 acres) was not big enough to contain his other big scene: the crossing of the Red Sea. He therefore demolished the intervening buildings, joined Paramount and RKO territory, built a 200,000 cubic-foot swimming pool, installed hydraulic equipment that could deluge the area with 360.000 gallons of water in two minutes flat. This scene alone cost more than a million dollars and took 18 months to shoot.
And the result of all these stupendous efforts? Something roughly comparable to an eight-foot chorus girl—pretty well put together, but much too big and much too flashy. And sometimes DeMille is worse than merely flashy. It is difficult to find another instance in which so large a golden calf has been set up without objection from religious leaders. With insuperable piety, Cinemogul DeMille claims that he has tried "to translate the Bible back to its original form." the form in which it was lived. Yet what he has really done is to throw sex and sand into the movie goer's eyes for almost twice as long as anybody else has ever dared to. He throws it very cleverly indeed. The dancing girls are numerous, nubile and explicitly photographed. Yul Brynner. as the Pharaoh, swaggering barelegged across the screen, will delight his millions of feminine admirers. Even Moses, a part in which Charlton Heston is ludicrously miscast, looks less like a man who staggers into the desert to find God than one who flies to Palm Springs to freshen up his tan. According to the script, that was the kind of fellow Moses really was, at least as a young man. There are moments, in fact, when it seems that the Seventh Command ment is the only one DeMille is really interested in; to the point where the Exodus itself seems almost a sort of Sexodus—the result of Moses' unhappy (and purely fictional) love life.