Ready for His Close-up

MR. DEMILLE'S EXTRAORDINARY LIFE UNSPOOLED

Cecil B. DeMille, who died in 1959, was once upon a time the most famous and successful director in Hollywood. Today, he is probably best remembered for (1) playing himself in Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard, and (2) his 1956The Ten Commandments, which we recall fondly at Passover and resent the rest of the year for having lent Charlton Heston a patina of moral authority. But aside from stodgy biblical epics, DeMille also made stodgy Westerns, stodgy war movies, and even stodgy sex comedies—70-odd films altogether. He co-founded one of the first Hollywood studios and at one point in the 40s, long before Arnold Schwarzenegger

and Ronald Reagan, was considered a viable candidate for governor of California. His was a full and important life, even if the movies weren’t that good, and it’s well told in Cecil B. DeMille, an appropriately stalwart documentary produced by film historians Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury, to be shown this spring on Turner Classic Movies. “He was an opera-maker,” says Steven Spielberg, offering a kind of bottom line. “With DeMille it was going to be a colorful explosion of imagery and extras and spectacle.... It was going to be more than your money’s worth—and that’s all that people really cared about.” “I wish I could put an image up there like DeMille could ...,” offers Martin Scorsese, his voice trailing off. “I don’t think I can.” The documentary then cuts to a thrillingly composed image from The Ten Commandments: Pharaoh’s army thunders off after the Hebrews while, in the foreground, a languorous, scarlet-robed Anne Baxter watches them go—and damned if you don’t believe Scorsese’s envy is genuine. (Rating:

BRUCE HANDY