It's easy to ridicule Bible movies -- and fun, too, because in a sense, they're all blasphemous and silly. The piety is phony, and the titillation and violence hypocritical. The grandiloquent dialogue blended with modern slang is the stuff of high camp, and the miracles glorify cinematic technology rather than God's power. So why can't we seem to avoid these movies?
There are perhaps two dozen major films based on Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament, as Christians call it). But curiously, only five deal with its central event: Israel's deliverance from Egypt and acceptance of God's law, the celebration of which begins this week with Passover and ends seven weeks later with Shavuot. Perhaps Hollywood has shied away from the story because it requires displaying God's voice and miracles. More likely, the problem has been the serious moral and theological issues the story raises: What is this freedom and this law granted by God to Israel? Why is freedom rooted in law? To what extent are law and freedom in tension?
It's an understatement to say that cinema is not the principal means for exploring such questions. And yet, within their limits, these films are interesting and enjoyable. It turns out that we can't entirely avoid these movies because they work, in their way, toward answers not entirely unfaithful to the scriptural texts or the communities that live by them.
Back in 1923, Cecil B. DeMille made a silent film called The Ten Commandments. It was a portent of things to come, with DeMille already displaying his penchants for grandiosity and moral minimalism. For all the extravagance that made it notorious at the time, this 1923 version of The Ten Commandments is an extremely abridged biblical drama: a little hard bondage in Egypt and just one plague. DeMille presents only forty minutes of actual Bible material, mainly as a prologue to his movie's real story: a modern parable about what happens when man abandons God's law, revolving around two brothers, Johnny and Danny McTavish, the former moral and pious, the latter a scoffer who lives for pleasure and gain. You can pretty much guess what happens.
But then in 1956, DeMille returned to the Book of Exodus to make Hollywood's most famous Bible movie: the technicolor extravaganza, The Ten Commandments. A sword-and-sandal epic lasting over three and a half hours, it contains everything an audience could want in a spectacular: colossal sets, lavish costumes, major stars, a cast of thousands, dazzling special effects, a titanic struggle between good and evil, and religious piety summoned at a moment's notice. (About DeMille's huge budget, one Hollywood observer joked, "It makes you realize what God could've done if He'd had the money.")
For some viewers today, The Ten Commandments is simply an artifact of mid-century American overconfidence and excess. Charlton Heston was cast because he had the ruggedly handsome features of an American frontiersman; also, when bearded, he resembled Michelangelo's statue of Moses. ("If it's good enough for Michelangelo," DeMille said, "it's good enough for me.") Yul Brynner, fresh from his Broadway performance in The King and I, makes his screen debut as pharaoh and plays it with the same open-shirt-hands-on-hips arrogance he patented as the King of Siam. Edward G. Robinson gives his Little Caesar best as Dathan, a Jewish traitor. Anne Baxter plays Nefretiri as a modern American sex kitten; she nearly steals the show when she laments, "Oh Moses, Moses! You stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!" (Also, don't miss the scene in which Jethro's daughters, portrayed as sex-starved sorority girls, discover an exhausted Moses near their father's well. When one sister speculates that the stranger is Egyptian, another replies, "Who cares? He's a MAN!")
The special effects are more impressive as camera tricks than evocations of God's power. The Red Sea looks like the gelatin mold it is, while DeMille's Burning Bush looks like a fake burning log. The more serious problem, however, is not the primitive special effects, but the woodenly literal reading of Scripture that inspired them. Perhaps even worse is the effect those miracles have: Once Moses gets his marching orders from God, for instance, he seems fixed in a weird trance for the last two hours of the movie -- no longer speaking but shouting everything portentously and pompously. At the orgy around the Golden Calf -- the Israelite men transformed into lusty satyrs and the women into half-naked girls out of L'il Abner -- Moses explodes, "It is the sound of song! And revelry!" Also, for some reason, he suddenly sports a huge, luxurious main of hair (tastefully highlighted).
Yet for those able to get past the kitsch, there is a payoff. DeMille seems to believe that God exists and that His will is the basis for just law, without which there is no freedom. DeMille actually makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of the film; stepping out from behind heavy theater curtains, he announces, "The theme of this picture is whether men are to be ruled by God's law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls, under God?"
Of course, DeMille's "story of the birth of freedom" gets a few millennia ahead of itself. Universal freedom may have its historical conception here, but Israel's deliverance from Egypt is the story of only one people's release, and even then, only to serve God. DeMille assumes an identity between biblical and modern American freedom. His "law" is a minimal affair, reflecting a certain kind of Protestant piety in which a human heart filled with the divine grace proclaimed in the New Testament no longer needs the rigid and detailed instruction of the Old Testament.
By the mid-1960s, it was no longer possible to make a DeMille-style costume pageant, partly because of rising production costs but also because of changing sensibilities. Moses -- The Lawgiver, a British-Italian collaboration starring Burt Lancaster, is very much a product of the 1970s. Shot in Italy and Israel, it made its American debut on CBS television in June 1975, in six hour-long installments. A mercifully compressed two-and-a-half-hour version for theaters was reentitled Moses.
The film has an artsy look that is partly naturalistic, partly hallucinogenic (note the clipped, discontinuous camera shots, especially at the beginning). A soft, golden lighting gives one the feel of watching something through the haze of myth and history. But viewers are frequently jolted out of this dreamy state into a starker reality -- by the harrowing massacre of the Hebrew firstborn, for instance, and by the plagues, which, though less spectacular than DeMille's, seem more terrifying.
While it's nice to be relieved of bombast, this small-scale story has its own drawbacks. Egypt looks more like a village than an empire: There are hardly any pyramids in sight, and the royal palace could be a catering hall easily redecorated for the bar mitzvah party scheduled later that evening. There's little sense that the drama being played out is of enormous significance. The scenes of hard labor are few and perfunctory, lacking The Ten Commandments' melodramatic (but accurate) narration of the Israelites as "children of misery," a people making mortar in an "inferno of mud and straw."
Courageously, or perhaps foolishly, Moses attempts a deeper study of commandment and covenant than DeMille dared. "The law" here is not an easygoing top ten, but an elaborate code whose specificity and toughness is made shockingly vivid. Where The Ten Commandments shows only general divine wrath over the Golden Calf incident, Moses displays the retribution of the Levites, members of the priestly class who execute rebels by shooting them with arrows or pushing them off cliffs. Also depicted is the story from Numbers 15, in which a man is sentenced to death by stoning for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. The movie makes the story worse by having Moses render the verdict after a casual glance at a statute book; then he tops it off with an observation that "The law is the law." (In the actual Bible, God issues the verdict.)
Thus, though Moses doesn't sugarcoat Scripture, it falls into the equally dangerous error of hypertextualism. Traditional Judaism and Christianity have not, by and large, understood every biblical passage in a literal way; the Bible has always been a document read through communities of interpretation, which soften or allegorize the hard passages. Moses leaves the erroneous sense that such cruel punishments were normative, when the opposite is closer to the truth. Moses deserves credit for confronting difficult scriptural passages, but it's not up to the task of working them through.
When a new movie entitled Moses, starring Ben Kingsley, debuted on TNT during Passover/Easter week of 1996, it drew 2.3 million viewers -- a fraction of the 10.6 million who tuned in to ABC for yet another showing of The Ten Commandments. Like the Burt Lancaster Moses, TNT's is a laid-back, small-scale production that doesn't hit you over the head with epic meaning. Kingsley's Moses, more than any other, actually grows as a person, his spiritual state slowly being transformed as he internalizes what is commanded as law.
Unlike Heston's "haughty and handsome" prince, Kingsley's young Moses is a callow, insecure outsider. Though raised in the royal court, he feels himself neither Egyptian nor Hebrew. He remains tentative and unformed even after God reveals Himself in the Burning Bush. Unlike Heston -- who is zapped into a kind of zombie prophet -- Kingsley tells the people, "I believe God spoke to me." His fellow Israelites had been expecting something more definite.
But as God continues to keep His word, Moses grows. His faith exists in tension with his fears, but he comes to trust God above his own faculties. At the Red Sea, for example, he must wait with raised staff for hours before the waters part. When the miracle finally happens, the faithless multitude prostrates itself in astonishment and awe, but Moses bursts out laughing -- not surprised but exhilarated and thrilled.
Though he angrily reproves the Israelites for sin and rebellion, it is clear that this Moses loves the people: He weeps when punishment is inflicted on them, whether by God or by the Levites. When his sister Miriam is stricken with a skin disease for blasphemy, Moses visits and comforts her. The seemingly harsh punishment is shown not as divine bullying but as a redemptive, healing process by which those who excommunicate themselves from the covenant can be brought back. Jethro, Moses' adviser, gives voice to this notion of law as the way to freedom: "Laws are not sufficient by themselves. The people . . . must learn to want to follow the law without fear. . . . When they have learned that, they will truly be free."
The Prince of Egypt, a 1998 Dream-Works production, represents a return to the 1950s style of grand biblical epic. An animated cartoon, it includes some of the best artwork ever put on screen, particularly the pyramids and the gorgeously colored desert vistas and skies; it also breaks new ground in giving a three-dimensional appearance to animation. In this retelling, Moses and Rameses grow up together not as mortal enemies but as brothers -- a couple of hunky teenage jocks who like to hot-rod their chariots around the pyramids, causing mayhem.
Moses' carefree youth ends when, by chance, he meets Aaron and Miriam, his real brother and sister, and the truth of his Hebrew origins comes out. Moses, desperately shaken, retreats to the palace wall which bears a pictographic record of the dynasty, and discovers the truth about his adoptive father, the pharaoh, who once ordered the murder of all Hebrew firstborn. The hieroglyphic characters come to life and, in an awesome display of animation artistry, reenact the slaughter. (It's also a brilliant strategy for telling children the story without scaring them to death.)
Zipporah here is not the solid, modest character portrayed by Yvonne De Carlo in The Ten Commandments but the stereotypical feminist heroine of Disney -- and now, Dream Works -- productions: She's svelte and sexy, fiercely independent and incredibly athletic. When Moses hears God's voice out of the Burning Bush, commanding him to return to Egypt to free his people, he briefly demurs, and the flames flare angrily. But you can be sure God didn't mean anything by it: In this cartoon version, God doesn't interfere in people's lives, except to make sure they're free. Which brings up the real narrative problem with The Prince of Egypt: Moses is merely a liberator, not a lawgiver. The film has no interest in law, let alone in all its detailed, nettlesome rules.
Not surprisingly, the Israelites never seem to have any difficulty managing their freedom: There's no blasphemy or rebellion, not even a Golden Calf. When they receive the Commandments, there's no mention of law; the tablets are held up at the end as a kind of icon or idol. In the film's final spoken words, Zipporah declares, "Look at your people, Moses. They are free!" This message is reinforced by the movie's large, lush musical score, particularly the pop-chart power tune "When You Believe," which emphasizes human rather than divine power: Who knows what miracles you can achieve, / When you believe.
But one shouldn't be too hard on The Prince of Egypt. The argument against such a film -- that it can mislead viewers into thinking they have the real story without studying the book -- seems unpersuasive, since even the reading of Scripture, without the interpretive prism of a religious community, can be misleading. If the Bible itself is not a sufficient account of Bible stories, surely we should adjust our expectations for motion pictures. That said, the old cliche still holds: Read the book before you see the movie.
Matthew Berke is managing editor of First Things.