Cecil B. De Mille critica

ANDREW SARRIS

The New York Times

Simon Louvish’s elegantly exhaustive study of Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) carries the respectful if not necessarily reverent title “Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art.” It examines that life largely though not entirely through his 70 movies, completed during a 42-year career, from “The Squaw Man” in 1914 to “The Ten Commandments” in 1956, itself a remake of his own 1923 “Ten Commandments.” “The Squaw Man” was also remade as an early talkie in 1931, during a period in which all of Hollywood, and DeMille especially, was struggling, often pathetically and disastrously, to make sense and cinema out of the newfangled dimension of talk.
As it happens, I grew up listening to DeMille’s mellifluous voice on the weekly “Lux Radio Theater” as he introduced the stories of recent Hollywood movies, most often with the original stars reading their lines from scripts. Unlike Louvish, however, I was never an admirer of DeMille’s biblical epics, which, as Louvish himself acknowledges, are DeMille’s chief claims to fame, though his only film to win an Oscar for best picture was his 1952 circus extravaganza, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” And yet for all his remarkable ability to outlast and in some instances outlive much greater contemporaries — including D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor, John Ford, Howard Hawks and the ill-starred Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg — he remains something of a joke among sophisticated cinéastes, largely because of his tin ear for dialogue. (One famous howler is from “The Ten Commandments,” in which Yul Brynner’s Egyptian pharaoh says of Charlton Heston’s Hebraic Moses, “His God IS God!”)

To his credit, Louvish does not gloss over DeMille’s deficiencies and excesses; rather, he very scrupulously records them as crucial clues in a genuinely complex story rich in contradictions and paradoxes. So we learn that DeMille married the stage actress Constance Adams in 1902, when he was 21 and she 29, and stayed married to her until his death. Still, he openly cheated on her from the very beginning with female assistants and collaborators. He once boasted to a journalist that he had never spent a Saturday night at home with his wife and family through all the years he had been married; he went on to praise Constance for her patience, understanding and, well, constancy. After hiring a promising stage actor named Charles Bickford for his first talkie, “Dynamite” (1929), at the dawn of the sound era, DeMille took his leading man to a hideaway ranch with private lanes, each leading to a separate cottage for weekend trysts. Louvish quotes Bickford to the effect that DeMille showed him a large collection of erotic art and virtually staged orgies for his male guests with willing actresses and call girls. According to Louvish, DeMille’s aggressive sexuality failed to overcome his wife’s apparent frigidity. Consequently, the DeMilles had only one biological child, Cecilia, as well as three adopted children.
Louvish acknowledges a debt to DeMille for his subject’s prodigious research into his own family roots, specifically his father’s Dutch ancestry. He spent much less time on his mother’s British Jewish side of the family, even though his ever resourceful, business-building mother supported the family after her husband died, when Cecil was 11.
Louvish does not explicitly draw the logical inference that DeMille’s contrasting attitudes toward the two branches of his family reveal his bigotry. But the author does conscientiously lay out all the evidence, so we can draw the inference for ourselves. Nonetheless, in the early chapters of his book, Louvish deals with the liberal influence on Cecil and his brother, William, exerted by the writings of Charles Kingsley, a “Protestant controversialist” who was “a clergyman and a champion of England’s poor and working people.” Oddly, as Louvish pointedly notes, “part of his religious creed was fiercely anti-Catholic, and his ideas were also part of a philosophical trend in Victorian England promoting a ‘muscular Christianity’ that combined godliness and manliness by going back to the ‘Teutonic’ roots of English history.” Shades of the Nazis’ master race. It is as if Louvish were preparing to describe for us the muscular Christianity, with its flashes of cruelty and sadism, in DeMille’s very popular religious and historical spectacles.
An even stronger influence on the entire DeMille family was that of Henry George, a populist writer and champion of a single tax to lift the victims of landed wealth from poverty. Karl Marx, no less, ridiculed George in 1881 for being “utterly backward” in wanting to tax landowners instead of the rising captains of industry. But as far as the DeMilles were concerned, his heart was in the right place, and in 1903 William married George’s daughter. (They had two children, one of whom, Agnes de Mille, would take her place as a giant of American dance.) Cecil’s plays and movies demonstrate that he acquired from Kingsley and George the moral imperative of championing the underdog — often the Native American, in morality tales like “The Squaw Man.” Indeed, one friendly later critic of DeMille’s work likened his place in American cinema to that of James Fenimore Cooper in American literature.
And so, as Louvish makes abundantly clear, DeMille may have been too easily dismissed by the mostly liberal and left-wing film establishment because of his right-wing anti-union and anti-Communist activities during the cold war, particularly during the McCarthy and Hollywood-blacklist years. On one occasion, John Ford and George Stevens decisively intervened to thwart DeMille’s attempted purge of Joseph Mankiewicz as president of the Screen Directors Guild.
In addition to fully documenting this incident, Louvish makes his own position crystal clear in his eloquent summation: “One does not have to agree with the political views of any artist to evaluate and appreciate the art. Much depends on how narrow your choice is of who you are willing to learn from. For myself, I am certainly an opponent of the ideas DeMille propagated in his ‘Crusade for Freedom’ in the 1940s and 1950s. I find much of his behavior in this period loathsome and offensive. His was one of many prominent but reckless voices that laid the ground for the assault by Senator Joseph McCarthy on the rights of employment and free speech of so many American citizens and so many of DeMille’s fellow workers in film, television and radio. And yet the films of his own great golden age have been an unexpected joy to discover, an undervalued treasure-trove of totally achieved, totally controlled movies that defined his own peculiar America in his own peculiar way — before he ‘found the truth.’ And once he had found his ‘truth,’ he began the long decline, which nevertheless was punctuated with majestic flourishes that will, with their own distinctive skill and manner, stand a more rigorous and long-sighted test of time.”
Thus, for all its length and copious detail, Louvish’s biography is a great read and, incidentally, a fascinating history of a life lived to the hilt through a long, turbulent segment of our time.
Andrew Sarris, a professor of film at Columbia University and a film critic for The New York Observer, is the author, most recently, of “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film — History and Memory, 1927-1949.”

A Life in Art.
By Simon Louvish.
Illustrated. 507 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $27.95.
Da The New York Times, 15 giugno 2008

FERNALDO DI GIAMMATTEO

È con Griffith uno dei padri fondatori del cinema americano. Figlio di un docente universitario di origine olandese e di una madre teatrante, di ascendenza ebraica, alla carriera militare preferisce quella della scena, con il fratello maggiore William. Quando Samuel Goldwyn e Jesse Lasky fondano una società cinematografica, DeMille si aggrega come direttore artistico e, nel 1914, va a dirigere il suo primo film (The Squaw Man) in un luogo desolato della costa del Pacifico, Hollywood. Uomo di spettacolo e di azienda, artista e commerciante, intuisce quali sono le regole per imporre il cinema all'attenzione del pubblico: sfarzo, temi piccanti, attori seducenti, contrasto fra bene e male con la finale vittoria della morale (puritana, quella dei padri pellegrini che sbarcarono nel Massachusetts), rigorosa costruzione narrativa. Tutta la sua lunga carriera - si concluderà nel 1956 con il rifacimento di I dieci comandamenti che aveva girato, muto, nel 1923 - si svolge all'insegna esclusiva dello spettacolo.

Rassegna stampa di Cecil B. De Mille