Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in ArtCecil B. DeMille is Hollywood’s most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose biblical sagas, such as Samson and Delilah and his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultraconservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the “neoconservatism” of our own times. The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his seventy ?lms, of which ?fty were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid ?lm fans, though his ?rst 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and his 1927 tale of Jesus Christ, King of Kings, linger in the imagination. A founder-pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society, and the pursuit of money made America a battle?eld of clashing values and temptations. Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major reexamination of Hollywood’s most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle---a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.
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Contents
Who Knows Where the Chain May Go? | 3 |
The Hereditary Germ | 13 |
Intelligent Effort Along an Individual Line | 22 |
Back from the Dead | 32 |
Men Blowing Horns | 43 |
REEL TWO The Dramas Flickering Bogy | 51 |
Theres Some Movie Folks Working There | 53 |
Raised in the Finest Traditions | 66 |
Coasting to Golgotha | 258 |
In Godless Hollywood the Last Silent Hurrah | 272 |
REEL FOUR Let Us Go Down and There Confound Their Language | 285 |
Couldnt They Stop that Horrible Sound? | 287 |
Lucifers Consort or Where Do We Go from Here? | 296 |
Shall We Gather by the River? | 305 |
This Day? This Age? | 319 |
Exultant Pomp and Silver Fanfares | 332 |
The Shaping of Lives | 75 |
The Elemental Values or The Many Faces of Cecil B DeMille | 86 |
The Many Faces of Cecil B DeMille Part II | 95 |
The Future of an Illusion | 107 |
On a Noble Eminence or Moving Towards the Light | 115 |
Americas Sweethearts | 130 |
The Thunder and the Whispers | 140 |
REEL THREE The DeMille Commandments or Civilization and Its Discontents | 151 |
Take an Idea and Add Money | 153 |
Dont Change Your Star | 163 |
The Monarch of All He Surveyed | 174 |
Thought Trained Upon a Deeper Motive | 184 |
Fools Paradigms? | 196 |
Towards the Tablets of the Law | 205 |
A Powerful Preachment | 214 |
And the Band Played On | 227 |
The Candy Ball and Other Indulgences | 236 |
Red Cecil from the Volga to the River Jordan | 248 |
Walking the Plank or The Misadventures of Jesse Junior | 342 |
REEL FIVE So Shall It Be Written So Shall It Be Done | 355 |
The Inkthrowing Behemoth Leviathan | 357 |
The Misunderstood Hero | 366 |
From Fort Pitt to the Philistines | 378 |
Im Ready for My Closeup | 391 |
Towards Mount Sinai Resurgent | 404 |
A Spiritual Acetylene Torch | 411 |
EPILOGUE | 427 |
A Man Is No Better Than What He Leaves Behind Him | 429 |
APPENDICES | 441 |
Acknowledgements | 443 |
Notes on Sources | 445 |
Chronology Plays and Films | 465 |
Select Bibliography | 485 |
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