Posted on 04/10/2006 7:18:20 AM PDT by Watershed
Director Robert Dornhelm is painfully aware that there may be a large audience out there eagerly waiting to hate his new version of "The Ten Commandments," premiering Monday and Tuesday, April 10-11, on ABC.
After all, the story of Moses leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt has been told before, and unforgettably, by Hollywood showman Cecil B. DeMille in his ultralavish 1956 production starring Charlton Heston as Moses. Adapted from a variety of religious novels, that earlier version introduced a number of extraneous characters and story lines to the biblical account, yet a fair number of fans today regard DeMille's epic with near-reverence.
(In fact, ABC is hedging its own bets, airing DeMille's version on Saturday, April 15, just days after this new "Commandments.")
Small wonder, then, that Dornhelm initially declined when executive producer Robert Halmi Sr. came to him with the project.
"My first reaction was, 'Why? Why should I be the sacrificial victim who gets slaughtered?' " Dornhelm recalls. "To do a television version of this huge epic (seemed foolhardy). Then I saw (DeMille's version) again and thought it really wouldn't be that hard to top, not to sound immodest. Then, when Mr. Halmi told me he wanted to make it as real as possible, that made it even more interesting."
Halmi's own interest in revisiting the story of the Exodus arose from his conviction that great stories need to be retold for new generations every 35 years or so. "And I wanted to do it as reality," Halmi says. "My characters are real. The location is real. There is as much reality costumewise, researchwise [as we could manage]. I had three different religious advisers, a Muslim, a Christian and a rabbi, going through every word of the script. I wanted to be more true to the story and its characters."
That meant, in turn, examining the principal character of Moses as a human being, not the powerful icon Heston portrayed in DeMille's account. It was Ron Hutchinson's script that helped persuade actor Dougray Scott to sign on as Moses.
"You tell people you're playing Moses in 'The Ten Commandments' and they just go, 'You're what?'" Scott says, laughing. "But I thought the writing was just terrific. I knew Ron Hutchinson from his days as a playwright in London. He was terrific then, and he has become a really good Hollywood scriptwriter. He did a great job with that story, I think, examining it from a point of view that I don't think the audience ever has seen before. Certainly it's very violent, because it really tries to capture that period of history.
"Instead of the iconic figure that Charlton Heston portrayed, you get to see and even kind of smell what Moses must have gone through."
The new version charts mostly familiar territory, especially in its first half, tracing Moses' narrow escape from death as an infant to his encounter with the burning bush and subsequently, his confrontations with the Pharaoh, Ramses (Paul Rhys), leading to the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves and their long, frustrating quest in search of the Promised Land.
Whereas Heston's Moses was a towering, thunder-voiced pillar of authority, Scott's Moses is plagued by self-doubt. He is virtually horrified to learn that God has selected him for such a formidable task, since he is painfully aware of his inner flaws.
"The character starts off at quite an intense pitch and then becomes even more intense," Scott says, "so that was the challenge for me, to see how far we could take this character on his emotional journey, this arc that he goes through and his relationships with everyone: with himself, his family, his tribe and, of course, God. Moses has to deal with his fear, his paranoia, his loneliness, his pain, his anger, his temper and his lack of compromise. He's unrelenting, and a very multilayered human being, albeit an extreme one."
Give Scott full marks for his commitment to the role, since the inner torment of his Moses comes across unrelentingly. The big question, of course, is whether viewers will want to spend three or four hours with such a tortured soul.
If some viewers ultimately find this remake too much of a downer, Dornhelm is OK with that, as long as they come to his "Commandments" with an open mind. It's the zealots who insist DeMille's version is somehow untouchable that make him see red.
"I find that notion offensive, myself," he says. "I was really impressed with [DeMille's version] when I saw it as a young boy, because it was such a wonderful cinematic extravaganza. But it was what it was. The only thing missing was Esther Williams performing one of her water ballets in the Nile. It was a show, first and foremost. And it still works very well for some people who love that spectacle. But to me, if I am talking about important issues like faith, spectacle is the last issue that I would like to deal with.
"Just because there has been this huge, colossal canvas painted with one man's vision doesn't mean we can't retell it. We've been retelling every silly police drama a million times, and nobody questions why. I've been asked this question: Why would you redo such an important masterpiece? And the answer is always, if it's a good story, and there is something we can learn from it, there are always new ways to interpret it and to gain new perspectives on it."
I wonder if this ill be as accurate as the story of Noah that had PIRATES attacking the ark. I am not making this up.
I saw a preview of this the other night... the "Parting of the Red Sea" scene looks EXACTLY like the one from DeMille's movie. With all the CG technology available today I wonder why they didn't render it using computers?
Personally, although C.B. DeMille's version was truly epic, I thought that the TNT story of Moses,
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0117086/
was a less overblown and more accurate telling.
And all hell broke loose when they walked into a bar...
I hate to be nit-picky, but what is the Muslim (and the Christian, for that matter) doing there?
And why the generic descriptions (Muslim, Christians) for those two faiths, but a position title (Rabbi) for the other?
> Why would a Muslim be consulted, since this event took place before here was a Muslim religion!
Note: this alleged event also took place well before there was a *Christian* religion.
Muslims were consulted, I presume, because the Moses story shows up in the Koran.
> the story of Noah that had PIRATES attacking the ark.
Arrrr. Pirates of the paleozoic.
Well, I won't be watching. Thanks for that link. It is obvious this is going to be another anti-religion piece from Hollywood.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the five Commandements that he dropped didn't say anything about Beer and Football.
Unintentional hilarity from CBS, that's for sure!
"I think the Noah epic with Ted Danson, where Noah ends up in a sea battle with Lott as a pirate is probably the ultimate in screwing up a Biblical account."
I have never quite recovered from that fiasco. If I remember correctly it was shown over two nights. I went to bed the first night absolutely stunned. Never bothered to tune in the second night.
"Making him human" is usually Hollywood-speak for claiming he's a vegetarian, pot-smoking, openly homosexual, far-left "social activist."
I suspect this movie was needed because of the inner torment the CBW/Hesten version gives to a lot of liberals...
I read a review of this TV-Mini-Doc this morning, and by all accounts, this is another snorer.
Not to mantion the futility of trying to out-do Charlton Heston's Moses...
Well, he was a "social activist."
"Halmi's own interest in revisiting the story of the Exodus arose from his conviction that great stories need to be retold for new generations every 35 years or so."
I told you to paint the PORCH!!!
- I'm sure a bit of compromise with Pharoah instead of listening to THE LORD would have benefitted Israel, then and now greatly
not to mention an anti-second ammendment activist.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.