Nefretiri spends the entire film in a dizzy heat over Moses, baring her teeth in fits of jealous passion and using drapery and bejeweled accessories as her own personal weapons of seduction. While Brynner’s huffy priss stops short of the obligatory homoeroticism that seems the mark of so many ‘50s historical spectacles (not to worry, John Derek’s wide-eyed, mouth-agape, head-tilted-back-as-he-grasps-Charlton’s-biceps performance, as Joshua, picks up the slack), Baxter’s chest-leading performance rides high in the annals of camp. Which makes DeMille’s decision to cast the hysterically campy Yul Brynner and Anne Baxter in the crucial roles of Rameses II and his wife, Nefretiri, an inspiration, whether intentional or simply by God’s fate. The Ten Commandments is hardly different from this model, but DeMille’s pre-Code films got away with a lot more than Hollywood typically allowed in the 1950s. In the early history of narrative films, DeMille was always a cinematic shaman whose relationship with religious morality was primarily as an 11th-hour trump card, which allowed him to film suggested orgies and Roman atrocities only to still lay down cheap redemption to send audiences out of theaters with their composure (and moral preconceptions) still intact. If you’re going to mount a nearly four-hour-long production based on an ancient text, this is the way to do it: with an abundance of ornate sets and costumes, kitschy special effects, and a mind-blowingly stentorian cast backed up with literally thousands of extras. Of course, this critic wildly simplifies sacred matters, but so does DeMille’s 1956 blockbuster (also his final film). In stark contrast, and by most accounts, Mel Gibson’s ode to the key event of the New Testament fairly reeks of the retrograde brimstone characteristic of the Bible’s earlier, far more vengeance-oriented sections. Watching the showcase, which reverently documents Moses (Charlton Heston, in the role he believes he was born to play) and his calling to free the Hebrew slaves from the hand of Egypt’s tyrannical pharaoh, you can practically smell the slow cookers simmering away in the church kitchenette for potluck lunch.

Sinai sequence, it feels like the grandest archetypal Sunday-school pageant ever produced, which, for all intents and purposes, is to say it’s a product of the post-Resurrection take on the events surrounding the creation of Moses’s oppressive law.

The Ten Commandments is a film that’s ripped out of the Old Testament, but aside from the final Mt. DeMille’s riotously flatulent Exodus epic, a filmmaker with delusions of godliness could be counted on to be benign.

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