review the special edition DVD<\/a> with the commentary track about a year ago, but I can\u2019t remember when I last watched it with the regular audio track), and it was amusing to see this film so soon after getting married \u2014 especially scenes like the one where Princess Nefertiri (the very vampy Anne Baxter) holds up a very transparent little slip of a dress and says, \u201cAnd this<\/i> \u2026 is for my wedding<\/i> night\u2026\u201d I think I am watching scenes like this a little differently nowadays than when I watched them 20 or even 2 years ago.<\/p>\nI have also been reminded, on a few occasions, of how influential Anne Baxter\u2019s breasts were on my nascent adolescent sexual sensibility. IIRC, Cecil B. DeMille wanted Audrey Hepburn for the role at first but passed her over because she didn\u2019t have the figure he wanted (it\u2019s kind of like how he hired Charlton Heston because his nose resembled that of the nose on Michelangelo\u2019s famous sculpture of Moses \u2014 DeMille was more interested in statuary than in thespian skill). Well, Baxter\u2019s figure is certainly nice. But there\u2019s also something about the very loose, filmy, translucent cloth DeMille drapes so tightly around her bosom \u2014 especially in, say, the scene above, where she plays a board game with Pharaoh Sethi, and then has a highly antagonistic and sexually charged conversation with Rameses \u2014 that, um, I remember finding very appealing. And still do, to be quite honest.<\/p>\n
And Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who plays Sethi, is an absolute delight<\/i> in every single scene in which he appears. I still laugh out loud whenever I hear him say to the priest, \u201cYou<\/i> don\u2019t look any leaner!\u201d Or when he does that double take after Baxter says, \u201cAnd such a beautiful<\/i> enemy!\u201d His performance is simply wonderful.<\/p>\n
I know, I know, these aspects of the film are not as spiritually or historically or politically enlightening<\/a> as the stuff that I talk about in my articles on these films. But that\u2019s why we have blogs! And I know some people hate this film because it\u2019s camp. But dudes, that\u2019s one of the film\u2019s best features!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s see if I\u2019ve figured out how to capture DVD images yet \u2026 aha, it works! I recently watched the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments again for one of my various writing assignments. This was the first time I had watched the film itself in a while (I had to review the special edition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n