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They just don't make epic movies like this anymore -- probably because, among other things, the cost of hiring and costuming that "cast of thousands" would be so astronomical today. Those are all real people playing the crowd scenes, not computer generated images such as we see today in films like Star Wars Phantom Menace and Titanic. For their time, the special effects in "Ten Commandments" were spectacular, and the parting of the Red Sea is still very impressive (I read somewhere that they did it with Jello!) Plus, the music is absolutely magnificent. (See my review of the CD, Music From The Soundtrack Of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.) Now, having sung its praises as classic cinema, I must point out that this film is really more Christian than Jewish, even though the Exodus story is originally Jewish and remains the central theme of the Passover celebration. Jews and Christians (as well as Muslims and Baha'is) share the story of Moses, but their imagery is often quite different. Among other things, all the main characters in this movie are played by lily-white Caucasian actors, whereas the real Moses and his family were probably dark-skinned. In 1952, however, that was not the Hollywood standard of beauty for movie stars. Cecil B. DeMille started his career directing silent films, where melodramatic body postures and facial expressions, rather than spoken dialogue, were used to convey the action. He continued to use the same visual techniques here, with carefully-posed scenes that reflect biblical illustrations from the great religious painters like Rembrandt and Reubens. The result is a movie that looks just like the pictures in your Sunday school lessons -- if you're a Christian, that is. From a Jewish POV, the movie has quite a few anachronisms. For example, most Jews would not portray Moses as bare-headed after he received the Ten Commandments on the mountain, because Jews cover their heads during prayer. How much more so would Moses have covered his head when actually speaking with God! But Christians do portray Jesus and other holy men with bare heads, so that image of Moses was used here, too. Also, the way that Heston delivers his lines is reminiscent of a pulpit minister preaching the Gospel, rather than the way a rabbi (Jewish clergyman) speaks to his congregation. Ditto for many of the dramatic poses that Heston strikes. It made for good drama in a mode familiar to American audiences back in the 1950s, but it's not authentically Jewish (or, for that matter, Middle Eastern) body language. In fact, the only character in the film who seems "Jewish" to the average person's eye is the villain Dathan, played by Edward G. Robinson. Alone of all the Hebrew characters, Dathan speaks with a Yiddish accent and uses some Jewish body language. Problem is, he does it in an offensively stereotyped way. I absolutely cringe every time Dathan whines that "a god of gold will lead us back to Egypt" as he points to the statue like a midway circus barker hawking his wares. This scene evokes everything negative about how Jews are often portrayed in the popular culture (i.e., dishonest, gold-hungry, manipulating, self-serving, etc.), with the result that children watching this film tend to see Dathan as "the Jew" and everyone else as "good Christians," even though ALL the Hebrews in the story -- good guys and bad! -- are Jews. (I should also add that using a Yiddish accent at all is a big anachronism, since the Yiddish language originated during the European Middle Ages, many centuries after Moses.) There's another major anachronism at the end of the film, too. Moses, just before his death, hands Joshua a BOUND BOOK of God's teachings that looks suspiciously like a King James Bible. Sorry folks, but the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was originally a scroll, not a modern book with bound pages. Bound books were not even invented until around the third century A.D., which is why the Talmud has standardized page numbers, but the Bible does not. (Chapter-and-verse numbers were not added until the Middle Ages.) Jews today still use hand-written Torah scrolls in the synagogue rituals, and the idea of scrolls in general was certainly familiar to most viewers, if only because the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered only four years before this movie and were all over the news. So, it beats me why a scroll was not used in this scene instead of a book. UPDATE 2009: I stand corrected on the "book vs scroll" blooper -- now that I can see it paused on a big screen TV, it is actually a small scroll (see discussion in comments below.) I'm not sure how I mis-perceived this all these years, except that I was only 9 years old when I first saw it with my family in the theater in 1956. And it is referred to as a "book" in the script, which may have confused my child's brain and, once implanted, the error remained for subsequent viewings. (Which just goes to show how much influence films have on the minds of children, for good or for bad.) At any rate, I do see my mistake now and I thank those of you who pointed it out. However, I still stand by my opinion that it is basically a Protestant film. For heaven sakes, it even uses "Onward Christian Soldiers" in the score for the Exodus scene. It took Bruce Feiler in his book,America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story to point this out to me, since it is not a piece of music that I, as a Jew, would have readily recognized as such. But upon re-watching the scene -- yes indeed, it is there! (I did, however, recognize "Kol Nidre" as the Exodus background music in the 1923 silent film version -- also a big anachronism, but at least it was Jewish! You can see the silent version on The Ten Commandments (50th Anniversary Collection) DVD set.)