Cecil B. Demille : A Life in Art

Summary

Cecil B. DeMille is Hollywood's most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose biblical sagas, such asSamson and Delilahand his 1956 version ofThe Ten Commandments,with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultraconservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the "neoconservatism" of our own times. The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his seventy ?lms, of which ?fty were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid ?lm fans, though his ?rst 1923 version ofThe Ten Commandmentsand his 1927 tale of Jesus Christ,King of Kings,linger in the imagination. A founder-pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society, and the pursuit of money made America a battle?eld of clashing values and temptations. Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major reexamination of Hollywood's most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle---a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.

Author Biography

Simon Louvish has written eleven works of ?ction and ?ve previous movie biographies of Hollywood’s classic stars: Mae West, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Mack Sennett. He lives in London, England, but wanders as far a?eld as China and California on occasion.

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Prologue: The Champion Driver	p. ix
The Play's the Thing
'Who Knows Where the Chain May Go?'	p. 3
The Hereditary Germ	p. 13
'Intelligent Effort Along an Individual Line...'	p. 22
Back from the Dead...	p. 32
Men Blowing Horns	p. 43
The Drama's Flickering Bogy
There's Some Movie Folks Working There	p. 53
'Raised in the Finest Traditions'	p. 66
'The Shaping of Lives'	p. 75
The Elemental Values, or The Many Faces of Cecil B. DeMille	p. 86
From Tenement to Bull Ring: The Many Faces of Cecil B. DeMille, Part II	p. 95
The Future of an Illusion	p. 107
On a Noble Eminence, or Moving Towards the Light	p. 115
America's Sweethearts	p. 130
The Thunder and the Whispers	p. 140
The DeMille Commandments, or Civilization and Its Discontents
Take an Idea and Add Money	p. 153
Don't Change Your Star	p. 163
The Monarch of All He Surveyed	p. 174
Thought Trained Upon a Deeper Motive	p. 184
Fool's Paradigms?	p. 196
Towards the Tablets of the Law	p. 205
'A Powerful Preachment'	p. 214
And the Band Played On	p. 227
The Candy Ball, and Other Indulgences	p. 236
Red Cecil, from the Volga to the River Jordan	p. 248
Coasting to Golgotha	p. 258
In Godless Hollywood - the Last Silent Hurrah	p. 272
Let Us Go Down, and There Confound Their Language
'Couldn't They Stop that Horrible Sound?'	p. 287
Lucifer's Consort, or Where Do We Go from Here?	p. 296
Shall We Gather by the River?	p. 305
This Day? This Age?	p. 319
Exultant Pomp, and Silver Fanfares	p. 332
Walking the Plank, or The Misadventures of Jesse Junior	p. 342
So Shall It Be Written, So Shall It Be Done!
'The Ink-throwing Behemoth - Leviathan!'	p. 357
Two-gun Cecil: The Misunderstood Hero	p. 366
With the Jawbone of an Ass: From Fort Pitt to the Philistines	p. 378
'I'm Ready for My Close-up'	p. 391
Into the Home Stretch: Towards Mount Sinai Resurgent	p. 404
A 'Spiritual Acetylene Torch'	p. 411
Epilogue: 'A Man Is No Better Than What He Leaves Behind Him'	p. 429
Appendices
Acknowledgements	p. 443
Notes on Sources	p. 445
Chronology, Plays and Films	p. 465
Select Bibliography	p. 485
Index	p. 489
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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