"Oh Moses, You Stubborn, Splendid, Adorable Fool!"
I like to watchThe
Ten Commandmentsevery year as I get ready for Passover. Is it dangerous to
base my understanding of Jewish history on the work of an anti-Semitic film
director?
By Danny
Miller, Contributor
Writer and book
editor in Los Angeles
Apr 4, 2007, 09:38 AM EDT |Updated May 25, 2011
This post
was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors
control their own work and posted freely to our site.
That insanely
anachronistic bit of dialogue was uttered by Anne Baxter's Nefretiri to
Charlton Heston in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. Cecil
B. DeMille's second retelling of the Passover story (he first filmed the
Biblical tale in 1923) is the campy benchmark against which all other cinematic
depictions of the Exodus will forever be compared, including the new ABC
mini-series that debuted last year. For some, DeMille's film eclipses even the
Bible. "I don't need to read the Haggadah," I remember telling my
horrified grandfather as a kid at our seder table. "I already saw the
movie!"
