It’s 1923. The building blocks of classic Hollywood are coming together and the people are enjoying silent movies in their movie palaces in the years following the Great War. Director Cecil B. DeMille, known for the biblical epic 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, releases a movie with the same title in this year.
What this first The Ten Commandments offers casual movie fans who have always meant to watch classic movies: an epic Biblical “prologue,” engaging pre-noir framing of light and dark, a possibly heavy-handed morality tale, and an early example from DeMille’s extensive filmography.