Last year for my film project, I cued up “Ben-Hur” to coincide with Easter. It ended up being a perfectly apropos nod to the holiday, even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of the epic. As I said then, I'm not religious but I still fully appreciated the religious symbolism wrapped up in Judah Ben-Hur’s story. Acknowledging this, I thought it might be fun to keep up the tradition with this year’s screening, “The Ten Commandments."
“The Ten Commandments” is a dramatization of the biblical story of Moses (pulling from several other sources to spice things up a bit). The first act is the journey of Moses’s growing self-awareness of his identity and the role he would play delivering freedom to the Hebrews. These two hours carry from his adoption on the Nile, to his role as a cunning and industrious prince of Egypt, to his growing sympathy for slaves and then, his eventual exile. It finishes with an encounter with the burning bush and a new resolve. The second act then turns to his mission to free the slaves and all the plagues that overcame Egypt, ending with a climax at the Red Sea.
I will try my best to be polite here, but I really struggled with this film. Not only for the gluttonous run-time, soap-opera acting, and unconvincing effects, but because of the story itself. I was reminded how positively medieval Old Testament stories can be, with a wrathful God sending to Egyptians (living at the whim of an absolute monarch) plagues, pestilence, and even murdering their children. Even the plight of the Hebrews, initially of anguish and suffering, became a weird false-idolatry fever dream that left me not quite rooting for anybody in the story.
That’s not to say I couldn’t appreciate things. I thought Yul Brynner’s performance as Rameses II, and his ability to take a character from arrogant to shattered, was brilliant. I’m also super intrigued by the story’s racial symbolism and comments on slavery, especially considering the film’s release in 1956. I am curious how this messaging intermingled with the growing Civil Rights movement and among white Americans who saw themselves in the Hebrew plight. Last but not least, despite slamming the special effects (mostly for some pretty flat rear-projected vistas), the classic parting of the Red Sea remains an excellent cinematic moment—just one not worthy of the 200 minutes it took to get there.