Along with D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille was one of the great pioneers of American silent films, although by the late 1920s it was already clear that he had become mired in an outdated cinematic style, which was most evident in his later films, particularly his opulently kitschy 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments. While foreign innovators like Sergei Eisenstein and Carl Theodor Dreyer were exploring the connections between cinema’s psychological dimensions and the aesthetics of editing and camera movement, DeMille was happy staging opulent pageantry in front his static camera, essentially continuing the idea that motion pictures were little more than postcards with movement.

And that is precisely what The King of Kings is. Anyone who has ever seen those pious religious postcards that portray the life of Christ in the broad strokes of simple pastoral beauty will immediately recognize the source of DeMille’s vision. It is very much a film of its time, and audiences reacted to it with great emotion and spirituality, something that is difficult to do today. The reverence of The King of Kings is less to Biblical fidelity than it is to a particularly strand of the Christian imaginary, one that wants everything clean, neat, and wholesome, from the morals to the characters’ beards. This is the same imagination that insists on Jesus, a Middle Eastern carpenter, being almost feminine in his blonde hair/blue eye beauty.

Interestingly enough, though, DeMille picked H.B. Warner, a fairly unattractive actor who was almost two decades too old, to portray Jesus. Warner, a 40-year veteran of the stage and screen, was a consummate professional, and he excelled at exuding a simple sense of divinity that required virtually no acting. Instead, for the duration of the film Warner maintains an almost unchanging look of passivity; it’s not a look that derives from weakness, but from the sense of already knowing what’s going to happen. Because Warner didn’t do much to convey Jesus’ essence, DeMille chose to depict Christ’s divinity--and he is fully divine here, with barely a speck of any messy humanness--through cinematic tricks, particularly a holy glow that always sets Jesus apart from everyone else around him. It’s so tasteful it’s tasteless.

The production of The King of Kings is one of the most discussed of the silent era, particularly because of DeMille’s having numerous clergy members bless the production before the cameras rolled on the first day and his supposed insistence that his actors sign contracts that they wouldn’t engage in any “un-Christian” behavior during the film’s production. DeMille was intent on not running into controversy, and all of these tactics are classic preemptive measures that tackle criticism before it can even be leveled. DeMille had been in Hollywood long enough to know that the film industry was viewed by much of the public as a den of sin (particularly after a string of scandals in the early 1920s), and he was determined not to fall into that gaping maw.

Of course, that didn’t mean that he didn’t inject a little salaciousness into the film. After all, this is Cecil B. DeMille, the man whose bread and butter was making films about moral transgression (particularly adultery) that justified themselves by punishing said transgressions at the end. The old saying was “Three reels of sin, one reel of redemption,” and no one did it better than DeMille. Since he was dealing with the life of Christ, he had to curb his tendencies a bit, but there is no other way to explain the film’s opening sequence, which introduces us to Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) at what is described in the film’s souvenir program as a “brilliant banquet,” but is clearly a thinly veiled orgy. Magdalene, whose swirling metallic brass bra suggests more skin than it covers, is referred to in the souvenir program as a “witty, beautiful hostess,” but it’s as clear to us now as it probably was to audiences in 1927 that she’s a seductive harlot, an ancient rendition of the 1920s’ “New Woman” who was so threatening to patriarchal piety. DeMille’s twin obsessions with sin and redemption are perfectly encapsulated in the film’s use of the newly designed two-strip Technicolor process. The only two scenes in the film that use color are the opening scene at Magdalene’s “banquet” (the sin) and at the end when Christ is resurrected (the redemption).

DeMille also loved spectacle, and he gives us a heavy dose of it in the aftermath of Christ’s death on the cross, when the earth splits open, lightning strikes from the darkened sky, and the veil in the Temple is torn in two. The entire sequence is an amazing display of technical prowess, and the special effects hold up surprisingly well nearly 80 years later. The crucifixion sequence also affords DeMille one of his more emotional displays, as he crosscuts between Christ on the cross and his betrayer, Judas (Joseph Schildkraut), hanging himself in despair. It makes one wish that DeMille had been more daring in using cinematic techniques to heighten the film’s impact, rather than assuming that his massive sets and pastoral compositions would do it all for him.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images copyright ©2004 The Criterion Collection