The Ten Commandments (1956)

The Ten Commandments was Cecil B. DeMille's final film, made forty years after his own 1923 silent version of the same story, and he narrates it himself over an unusual spoken prologue framing the Exodus as a story about whether people are "ruled by God's law or by the whims of a dictator." Shot in VistaVision and Technicolor on location in Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Rameses II, its production scale, thousands of extras, real desert locations, and the parting-of-the-sea effects that won the film its only competitive Oscar, was itself treated as part of the spectacle the story demanded.

The film has had an afterlife beyond any ordinary theatrical release. It made its television debut on ABC in 1973, and the network has broadcast it every year since during the Passover and Easter season, a tradition now more than fifty years old and one of American television's longest-running annual programming events; since 2006 it has aired specifically on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday. Few other mid-twentieth-century films of any genre have been placed in front of a fresh American audience, year after year, for that long, which is itself a fact about how one dramatization has shaped popular familiarity with the Exodus story independent of scripture.

The film's own opening credits are unusually candid about its method: it was written, in the writers' own words, in accordance with the Bible and also with Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash and other ancient sources, and DeMille's screenwriters used those non-biblical historians specifically to fill in the decades of Moses's life at Pharaoh's court that Exodus itself passes over in a single verse. That gap is exactly where the film's most memorable invention sits: the decades-long rivalry between Moses and Rameses over the fictional princess Nefretiri, an entirely extrabiblical romantic and political plot with no equivalent in the Torah, built to give the years the text is silent about a dramatic shape.

Once the story reaches the events Exodus does narrate, the film follows the text far more closely: the plagues, the Passover instruction, the parting of the sea and the giving of the Law at Sinai all track their biblical originals in sequence, even where the special-effects staging is the film's own invention. The pattern is therefore not a film that departs from scripture so much as one that dramatizes scripture's own narrated events fairly closely while filling scripture's own silences with extrabiblical legend, exactly the material its credits name, and never claiming those filled sections come from Exodus itself.