The Ten Commandments: When Movies Were Good

The following letter appeared in today’s Statesman from Thomas Humprhey:

I am writing to thank Merrie Sprague for her letter where she provided the story behind the Ten Commandments monument, that it was donated by Paramount Pictures in 1956 to promote the movie and serve as backdrop when Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston came to town.

Has this fact been made public before? A purely religious icon in the city park is, of course, inappropriate, but this is different. Knowing its historical context, I strongly support the monument’s return. It’s not a monument to one particular ideology but to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Granted, “The Ten Commandments” was a little over the top but remember DeMille in “Sunset Boulevard” when Norma Desmond came to the studio and he couldn’t bear to tell her she was all washed up. Or Heston as the Mexican G-man in “Touch of Evil”? Great stuff. Considering the dribble Hollywood puts out nowadays like “Snakes on a Plane,” Norma Desmond was right: “It’s the movies that got small.”

Heh heh! Oh my gosh. Of course the monument came in 1965, 9 years after the Ten Commandments original release, but still the cinematic viewpoint in this debate is most interesting.

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