Still, this final testament probably isn’t the best place to begin with this gifted director, who has been too frequently overwhelmed by the image he created for himself. 5 on its list of top-grossing movies adjusted for inflation its $1,049,310,000 puts it after “E.T.” but before “Titanic.” The Web site Box Office Mojo places it at No. The 1956 “Ten Commandments,” which proved to be DeMille’s final film, remains the best known of the 80 he directed, and by far his most financially successful. He concentrated his skills on how to construct his films so that (at their best) they roared along with the speed and efficiency of an express train, provided rip-roaring interpersonal drama to go along with the larger narrative, gave the audience their money’s worth by filling the frame with opulent décors, dazzling costumes and armies of extras in meticulously composed tableaus. (Although he did make a pair in fiberglass, light enough for Heston to carry down the mountainside without assistance from a crane.) And what’s worse, the tablets don’t work: the clasps holding the discs in place easily come loose, allowing the discs slip and slide against each other.Īnd DeMille, no matter what his loftier ambitions, was always first and foremost concerned with what worked. Plastic tablets? Nothing but real granite would do for him. The discs are loaded with commentaries, newsreels, trailers and a new 75-minute documentary, “Making Miracles.”īut it’s doubtful that DeMille, a fanatical stickler for detail, would have signed off on the set’s tacky execution. The tablets themselves split open to reveal the six discs, which contain both DeMille’s famous 1956 version of the story starring Charlton Heston and his 1923 silent feature with Richard Dix that was his first pass at the material. It’s all packaged inside a dictionary-size box with a lenticular 3-D image of the Red Sea on the front when the sea is “parted” on a built-in hinge, a plastic reproduction of DeMille’s sacred tablets rises majestically into view. DeMILLE would probably have approved of the concept behind Paramount Home Entertainment’s 55th anniversary gift set edition of “The Ten Commandments,” an appropriately colossal undertaking that includes three Blu-ray discs and three standard DVDs, a commemorative book, reproductions of the original program and assorted documents and costume sketches.

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