6:30 AM: The 1936 The Green Pastures is a musical adaptation of several Bible stories, based on a Broadway show that Marc Connelly adapted from Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; it features an all-African American cast, led by Rex Ingram as "De Lawd." I know what you're thinking, but it's actually a terrific movie, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Except that it's interesting to compare its staging of the journey out of Egypt and, especially, the Golden Calf period to the way DeMille handled them in The Ten Commandments. For one thing, in Pastures, the decadence that breaks out while De Lawd is otherwise occupied actually looks like something that a rational adult might be tempted to join in on. DeMille's looks like interpretive dance night at Burning Man, and DeMille's voice on the soundtrack explaining how awful it all is doesn't help. (For one thing, he starts out by complaining that the people started expressing their sinful nature by putting on gaudy clothes, and then he starts complaining that they began to take off their gaudy clothes. You just can't win with some people.)
8:15 A.M.: Watching the 1953 Salome soon after seeing The Ten Commandments, one of the first things you're likely to notice is that a lot of the same people tend to turn up over and over in these kinds of pictures. Clearly, if you ran a studio and discovered which actors looked more plausible than not wearing a bedsheet, you didn't want to take too many chances. Here, Cedric Hardwicke is the Roman emperor Tiberius, who fans of I, Claudius will remember as having been quite the dirty fucker, and who plants a mine by giving Pontius Pilate (Basil Sidney) a government job, and Judith Anderson is Queen Herodius, who is always giving King Herod a hard time for his reluctance to have the trash-talking prophet John the Baptist (Alan Badel). Herod is played by Charles Laughton, twenty years after first grabbing Hollywood's attention as Nero in C. B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross; in that movie, he played a powerful monster who enjoyed his work, but here he's troubled and bent out of shape because he doesn't know how to handle this John the Baptist business. Herod is plagued by father issues: he is the son of the earlier King Herod, who, in a similar situation many years earlier, ordered the murder of all male children in the city of Bethlehem, a move that was judged by most observers of the day as a gross over-reaction. Laughton's Herod, who remembers his father's piteous and agonized screams, especially when he read Maureen Dowd's latest column, is plagued by the thought that he might err in the same way his father did, and also by the suspicion that his father always thought his brother Jeb was really the smart one.
Where does Salome enter into this, you ask? It's a good question, and one that seems to have been judged by the screenwriters as not entirely within their powers to answer. Salome is played by Rita Hayworth, which sounds like a good deal at first. But Hayworth, whose production company was responsible for the movie, seems to have been going through one of those periods of a yearning for respect that sometimes befall screen goddesses, sometimes at the oddest of times. In some scenes, Hayworth tries to act seriously by slipping into a bogus British accent, so she'll fit in with her illustrious co-stars (and with her less illustrious ones, chiefly Stewart Granger as a Roman soldier she has the hots for); in others, she tries to convey heavy emotion by breathing so hard between her lines that it's as if she were trying to invent the obscene phone call centuries before some invents the telephone. In the version of this story that we all know and love, Salome dirty dances for the king in order to persuade him to have the Baptist executed for her pleasure. In this one. Rita's Salome takes to the dance floor in a gilded blue robe and modified kaiser helmet in hopes of steaming up Herod's glasses so badly that the old boy can be persuaded to spare the Baptist, but her ploy backfires: seeing her husband watching the evening's entertainment with his tongue in his lap, Herodius leans over and whispers that if he'll have the Baptist beheaded by the time Rita executes her last shimmy shake, she'll put in a good word for him with Rita about what a terrific personality he has. Things wrap up quickly and badly. Rita's reaction to the sight of John's head on a salver makes Herod realize that he'll be sleeping on the couch, and as the people outside bang on the gates, Stewart Granger lectures the royal couple: "Live! Live in torture. May the blood of the man you've murdered rise in your throats to choke you." All that remains is a quick twist ending: Herod and his queen feared John the Baptist as a threat to their power because they thought he might be the messiah, but a final shot of Rita and Stewart Granger standing in a crowd listening to some guy deliver the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that it is in fact this guy who is the real Keyser Soze. The movie ends with the words "This is the beginning" appearing on screen.
10:00 AM: King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959) has many points of distinction. For one thing, it stands as a lasting reminder that the birth of the state of Israel once seemed like something that Hollywood could stand to cash in on. The story involves a power struggle for the throne of Israeli between the sons of David, Solomon (Yul Brynner) and Adonijah, played by my man George Sanders, with the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) plotting with the Egyptians to destroy the Jewish state. As part of the production design, the Israelis' shields, home furnishings, and maybe their underwear are emblazoned with the Star of David. I'm pretty sure this is anachronistic, but it's not like I was there or have a piece of the copyright action, so what the hey. Perhaps harder to account for is what will strike many people as the central stroke of miscasting that has George Sanders playing the Sonny Corleone role of the fiery-tempered, violent brother while Yul Brynner handles the Michael role as the bookish Solomon who, somebody reminds us every three minutes, is a legend in his own time for being just as wise as shit. (There is no third brother to serve as the Fredo figure, and he is missed.) This is also one of those very special movies in which Yul has hair, perhaps because Solomon's precious brains need all the protection they can get. (Brynner was a late addition to the cast, stepping in for Tyrone Power after Power keeled over from a fatal heart attack as a consequence of doing a fight scene with George Sanders, which, for those of you who don't know, tells you just how bad George Sanders was.)
The movie, which is a long sumbitch, is padded out with some of Solomon's greatest hits scenes, such as the time he pulled the old let's-cut-the-kid-in-two-and-give-each-of-youse-half gag. This is to keep you alerted to the fact that he is, once again, wise. It might have been a nice touch if he could have indicated the depths of wisdom in some simpler fashion, such as dressing sensibly, but that ship had sailed by the time that the costume designer persuaded Yul Brynner to swan about in what looks like a Confederate army leisure suit with a big-ass Star of David medallion that looks like what Bob Guccione might break out for the high holidays. (Brynner's beard and toupee also serve to heighten a previously unsuspected resemblance to Hector Elizaondo.) He may be wise, but he's mortal, and certain things cut off the flow of blood to his brain just as fast as they do with the rest of us, so Sheba Lollobrigida goes to work on him, bewitching him with her ultry-sultry wiles, until God can't take it anymore and starts caving roofs in just to distract Solomon's attention away from his new friend's exposed midsection. After a big battle, Solomon kills George Sanders accidentally on purpose, and then carries Sheba's bruised and broken body into the temple so that God can demonstrate his own unquestioned superiority to Sam the Eagle when it comes to resurrections: he not only restores her to full health but scrubs her face and throws in some Botox. It would be easy to say that King Vidor has done better work, since most of us have. What's a little embarrassing is that one of the occasions when he did better work was Duel in the Sun.
12:30 PM: And now, it's time for the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room of Easter television: Ben-Hur, the 1959 Oscar-festooned super-epic that arguably announced the end of the era of the '50s religious epic, a genre that did not surpass itself so much as max out all its credit cards in this one last wallow. I'll confess right now that I have never fully understood this movie's qualfications as a religious epic. To my eyes, it's a "prestige" (i.e., bloated) version of a Roman sword-and-sandal action movie with brief but strategically placed cameos by a pair of feet and a hand or two that, we are to understand, are connected to the great unseeable presence that is Him. But you go trying to argue with fifty years of conventional wisdom and see where it gets you.
The plot is basically one of those Horatio Alger success stories, as contemporary culture critics understand the Alger books as tributes to the knack for picking out the right rich, powerful man to brown nose. Having had his life destroyed when he doesn't have sense enough to cross the street rather than run into his old school chum Messala--played by Stephen Boyd, an actor so habitually over-intense that I like to imagine he didn't die so much as supernova--our hero, Mr. Hur (Charlton Heston), climbs back to society's upper rungs while showing an unerring instinct for who to save from drowning when pirates attack the ship where he's manning the oars as a galley slave and whose reins to hold during the big chariot race. At the end of that race, you do get to hear the greatest line anybody ever wrote for somebody to say to Charlton Heston, when Pontius Pilate--played by Frank Thring this time--crowns him the winner and says, "Permit us to worship you."
About the only thing else I can think of to say about the movie is that, if you watch it after you've been gorging on films like Salome and Solomon and Sheba, it's impossible not to respect, even with one eye at half-mast and half your brain switched to autopilot, just what a tremendous professional job the director William Wyler did. You might think that someone gainfully employed by a major studio and entrusted with the job of bringing a big epic in on schedule would be able, at a bare minimum of competence, to direct the extras in a crowd scene so that they looked like human beings with some independent life, and to make the sets look as if somebody had lived in them for more than five minutes and as if they were still going to be standing five minutes after the director yelled "Cut!" But whether or not this stuff was worth doing at all, to see if done completely badly is to give you a fresh appreciation for how hard Wyler has to have worked to get it done half-right.
