DeMille's Last Epic, and the Fifty-Year Broadcast It Started

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.