Goldilocks and the Ten Commandments

I'm a sucker for Biblical epics. Every Holy Week I try to watch at least one of the Heston epics. Ben Hur is good because it is, even tangentially, "A Tale Of The Christ". (Props to Hoosier Homeboy General Lew Wallace for writing the book. ) It does lose points for the whole Vidalisation of Judah Ben-Hur's relationship with Masallah, though, and suffers from a lackluster upstairs-downstairs love subplot. The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, does not feature Jesus, but His Dad makes an appearance in various guises--burning shrubbery, magic fingers writing the law, etc. Focusing on the events leading up to the Passover, it is the grandest epic. Idols! Statues! Sexy Girls! John Derek! Yul Brynner! It's always been one of my favourite movies, in spite of the throaty leering from Anne Baxter's Nefretiri. "mmmHOE--zess!!!" The one drawback is that the story draws from Exodus, Josephus and Hollywood's Imagination in about equal parts. Frankly, it's best described as Exodus In Drag. Come on. Admit it. Dame Judith Anderson has a pivotal role. The woman who brought Spock back to life. This is not a flannelgraph, my friends.

So, it was with great glee that I awaited ABC's new version of The Ten Commandments. That glee is matched only by my disappointment. Of course, I haven't made it through the whole thing. Maybe the thrilling bits are still sitting on my TiVo, stewing in their succulent CGI juices. I may try to find out, but I think I've lost the will. After dozing off twice during the early life of Boy Moses, I awoke to a lackluster Omar Sharif as Jethro. People, if you can make Omar Sharif seem dull, sexless and boring you have got a real problem. And a bad movie. Oh, speaking of dull, guess who did their best interpretation of a talking corpse during the Tutelage of Boy Moses montage? Yes, that's right. Richard "Riff-Raff" O'Brien. Surely you'd think if anyone would glam up this picture, it'd be ol' Ritz. But no. All he does is give a dull mummification tour, yammer about the stars and jab Young Naveen Andrews with a stick. It'd be cool if he sang "In Just Seven Years, I'll Make You A Maaa-hhhaaa---an", but no. He just tells Boy Moses to watch his temper. This lesson is lost on the kid, because thirty seconds later he's bashing in some guy's skull with a rock. And it's off to The Cardboard Cut-out Of Omar Sharif's Tent, where Moses takes a wife and walks up Mount Horeb to chat with Jesus' Dad. And I turned it off. Because for all the talk about how this was based in the Bible, the Burning Bush never tells Moses to take off his shoes for he stands on Holy Ground. That's a big deal to me, because that is I Am putting us in our place. Demanding our reverence. Our subservience. And they didn't even bother to have it in the movie.

Then there's the issue of the Moseses. I don't think it's possible for the women like me who cut their teeth on Heston's burly, muscular Moishe to be particularly moved by ABC's new incarnation. Dougray Scott's Moses looks like the Barista who sells dime bags on his lunch hour.
I know they're going for the "Moses was tortured by self-doubt" angle but they didn't have to downplay the "Moses was Jewish" angle by casting a grey-eyed, thin-lipped fellow. It seems that big, strong, Semetic men don't get to have self-doubt. I guess this is a weak complaint, though, because Heston is hardly Semetic in appearance either, yet you don't hear me complain. Honestly, that's because he's Charlton Heston. I love that man. And he looks like he could last in the desert or command an army. Scott's Moses looks like he'd give out during a spinning class.

So the DeMille movie is too gaudy, too ostentatious, too melodramatic and the ABC Miniseries is too flat and lifeless. Maybe someday someone will make a Ten Commandments that suits me just right.