I was always under the impression that this was essentially the silent version of what DeMille eventually remade for the 1956 version, which is true to an extent. The first hour of this movie is pretty much the last act of the 1956 version, and it's all very straightforward and to the point, not really focused on the life of Moses like the later film. It's about what you'd expect out of a version screened at a Sunday school for young kids. The effects are also pretty impressive for the era. But that's just the first hour in a 136 minute film. The rest is this melodramatic morality play about how members of the youth are abandoning Christ and go out of their way to break the Ten Commandments and how they will reap the consequences. It's very much Cecil B. DeMille's soapbox preachy mode with a level of "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards!" It's not bad, it's a decent melodrama that's amusingly unsubtle in it's messaging. But despite being centered around the Ten Commandments, it feels so out of place and tacked on after the climactic epic of Moses parting the Red Sea and so on. I'm not entirely convinced the story of Moses thematically has much to do with the actual content of the commandments, but attempting literary criticism of the content of the Bible is absurd in its own right, so who am I to complain?
I was always under the impression that this was essentially the silent version of what DeMille eventually remade for the 1956 version, which is true to an extent. The first hour of this movie is pretty much the last act of the 1956 version, and it's all very straightforward and to the point, not really focused on the life of Moses like the later film. It's about what you'd expect out of a version screened at a Sunday school for young kids. The effects are also pretty impressive for the era. But that's just the first hour in a 136 minute film. The rest is this melodramatic morality play about how members of the youth are abandoning Christ and go out of their way to break the Ten Commandments and how they will reap the consequences. It's very much Cecil B. DeMille's soapbox preachy mode with a level of "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards!" It's not bad, it's a decent melodrama that's amusingly unsubtle in it's messaging. But despite being centered around the Ten Commandments, it feels so out of place and tacked on after the climactic epic of Moses parting the Red Sea and so on. I'm not entirely convinced the story of Moses thematically has much to do with the actual content of the commandments, but attempting literary criticism of the content of the Bible is absurd in its own right, so who am I to complain?
