Whaaatt?! No Ten Commandments This Year?!

[moira finnie]

Whew!

I thought I missed something. Not seeing Cecil B. DeMille's annual televised Passover/Easter ritual, The Ten Commandments (1956) on the basic cable television schedule earlier, I thought that the suits at Paramount had decided to worship their calf of gold instead of giving us all a treat as a result of the new Blu-ray edition being issued here in the U.S.

Thanks be to Yahweh I now see that ABC will be unspooling the Exodus story on Sat. Apr. 23rd at 7:00 PM EDT. Of course, with all the commercials that will be interlaced between the Plagues visited upon the Pharaoh and his people, the movie should end sometime Monday morning around 6 AM. (I'll probably be looking for Vecchiolarry and his brother in the biggest crowd scene, as we discussed earlier this year in this thread.)


Above: Artist's rendering of an imaginary meeting at the Paramount Marketing Dept.

Please see poll above and thank you for your vote!

[movieman1957]

It is long enough on its own but to get through the whole thing with commercials to see Moses with his snow white hair watching as his people go off without him was a monumental task. Now with both this and the silent version on my shelf I don't have to worry about taking all night to see them.

It is nice that it is still being shown.

[moira finnie]

It is long enough on its own but to get through the whole thing with commercials to see Moses with his snow white hair watching as his people go off without him was a monumental task. Now with both this and the silent version on my shelf I don't have to worry about taking all night to see them.

Ah, yes, Chris, you may have copies of this classic, but do you have the Blu-ray? Here's a chance to poll likely blu-ray users in the future, which I've posted above.

[movieman1957]

I missed the poll initially. I do have one that "upconverts." That was a compromise so that I wouldn't feel compelled to buy the DVD's again or spend a fortune on others. But who knows.... (It would be just like TheBride to get me one for my birthday or something.)

[CharlieT]

I think I'll just break down and pull out my plain old DVD and watch it without the commercial interuptions. As far as Blu-ray goes, you can't miss something you haven't seen.

[moira finnie]

I saw a few minutes of The Ten Commandments--but I just had to give up after Rameses responded to Nefretiri's announcement that "I do not love you" with "Does that matter? You will be my wife. You will come to me whenever I call you,and I will enjoy that very much. Whether you enjoy it or not is your own affair. But I think you will..."

Dang, Yul Brynner NEVER suffered from poor self-esteem, did he? I never noticed it before, but Ann Baxter looked a lot like Claudette Colbert in her facial structure, not just in her Egyptian gladrags and headress. I think Claudette slipped in more humor as well as pre-code naughtiness into her characterization of Cleopatra, while Ann's hotsy-totsy, heavy-breathing royal pain cranked up her hot house sex appeal to a ludicrous degree.


Not that it isn't a classic, but...boy, what a spectacle.

[movieman1957]

Would you expect Pharaoh to act differently? It is pointed later when his father (Cedric Hardwicke, in what may be the most natural performance in the film) tells him that the only thing he can't conquer is his own arrogance. More than once it got him in trouble.