| Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood. Preface. By Robert S. Birchard
BOOK EXCERPT
from Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood
By Robert S. Birchard
Preface
"In those days there were three great directors . . . D.W. Griffith, Cecil
B. DeMille, and Max von Mayerling." Erich von Stroheim speaks this line in Billy
Wilder's film à clef, Sunset Boulevard (Paramount, 1950). In the film
Stroheim portrays the fictional von Mayerling, a once-famous filmmaker reduced
to serving as butler to one of his former stars. The dialogue is poignant because
in some sense Stroheim the actor is speaking of himself and his own vanished
career as a director. Similarly, D.W. Griffith was ultimately unable to find
work in the industry he helped create. But what of Cecil B. DeMille? In Sunset
Boulevard we see DeMille busy on the set directing his sixty-eighth picture,
Samson and Delilah (1949), still a power in the motion picture industry
and seemingly untouched by Hollywood's adversities. Yet, DeMille's Joan
the Woman (1916) was as big a failure as Griffith's Intolerance (1916),
and DeMille was even more profligate with studio money on The Ten Commandments
(1923) than Stroheim was on Greed (1925).
What set DeMille apart? Why did he remain successful when other filmmakers fell from professional and public favor? Early in his career Cecil B. DeMille's films were highly regarded, while his later work sometimes met with critical derision; but the fact remains that no other director was a major force in the film world over such an extended period of time. Allan Dwan's career (191061) was longer than DeMille's (191359), but Dwan started out making one-reelers and ended up making low-budget features. John Ford spent his first ten years as a director making inconsequential Westerns and program pictures. George Marshall had the staying power, but many of his projects were trivial at best. DeMille, on the other hand, could lay claim to creating prestigious major attractions in each of his five decades as a filmmaker.
DeMille's box-office success was staggering. In Hollywood, where the dollar
is almighty, it is easy to see why he was considered the greatest filmmaker
of them all. Charlie Chaplin? Chaplin had big box-office grosses, but he made
relatively few pictures. Ernst Lubitsch? Despite his prestige, virtually all
the Lubitsch films lost money. Josef von Sternberg? Blonde Venus (1932)
was a modest hit, The Scarlet Empress (1934) kept people out of theaters
in droves. Many found DeMille's success revolting. He was criticized for pandering
to the lowest common denominator, and damned with faint praise in phrases like
"Master of Spectacle" or "Great Showman" or "the director who brought the bathtub
to the screen."
When Andrew Sarris wrote The American Cinema, his testament to the
auteur theory, he rated Cecil B. DeMille highlynot quite in the "Pantheon,"
but firmly on "The Far Side of Paradise." He observed, however, that "Griffith,
Chaplin, Lubitsch, Murnau, Eisenstein, Ford, Hawks, Capra, Welles, Renoir, Ophuls,
and all the others came and went without influencing his style in the slightest."
One could argue that the very hallmark of being an auteur is a consistency of
theme and visual style, and that Sarris could just as easily have substituted
the name of any one of these filmmakers for DeMille's and made an equally valid
critical observation. What Sarris was really trying to say, of course, is that
for all his virtues as a filmmaker, DeMille was somehow hopelessly out of step
with the dialectical march of the cinema as an art form.
It is clear, from films like Kindling (1915) or The Golden Chance
(1916), that Cecil B. DeMille was perfectly capable of creating naturalistic
films, but as his career progressed he chose to work in what New York Times
critic Mordaunt Hall called the "queer flamboyant style" that became his trademark.
As early as the 1920s the story was told that DeMille put his heart and soul
into making The Whispering Chorus (1917), and when audiences proved
indifferent to his artistic efforts he decided to give up on art and offer the
public what it wanted: SEX, SIN, and SATAN with a half reel of REDEMPTION thrown
in for good measure.
Was Cecil B. DeMille a mere cynic who sold out to popular taste, or was he an artist who was misunderstood by his critics? As is often the case with such questions, the answer is not simple.
Although DeMille projected a carefully crafted image as an all-powerful producer-director who worked in a rarefied atmosphere above the dog-eat-dog politics of Hollywood, the truth is that commercial realities sometimes conspired to force DeMille to turn out pictures he had little interest in making. He was also deprived of the opportunity to make several cherished projects. And, DeMille's standing in Hollywood was far from secure. There were several critical junctures in his career when he could easily have ended up as a dimly remembered has-been not unlike James Cruze, Herbert Brenon, Fred Niblo, Edwin Carewe, Sidney Olcott, Irvin Willat, and other leading directors from the silent era.
Anyone with an interest in Hollywood lore has heard tales of DeMille's colorful exploits as a filmmaker. The punch lines alone conjure up humorous anecdotes of an autocratic figure who demanded far more than the mere mortals who worked for him could offer. "Ready when you are, C.B.," shouts the cameraman who just missed a once-in-a-lifetime action shot. "When is the old bald-headed bastard going to call lunch?" whines an embarrassed extra to the assembled cast and crew when forced by DeMille to share what she was whispering during the great director's instructions for a scene. And, without missing a beat, DeMille calls, "Lunch!" Then there is the new associate who is escorted to his office in the DeMille bungalow at Paramount studio, and C.B. tells the young man, "This is an old building, you'll notice the floor slants down and to the left, and I put you here on the left side at the end of the hall on purpose so you can see the heads as they roll by." All great stories . . . and maybe some of them are true. I'd like to think so. But such anecdotes obscure DeMille's real accomplishments, even as they seek to illuminate his personality.
There has been no shortage of biographical interest in Cecil B. DeMille over
the years; but it is extraordinary for a director of DeMille's stature that
his critical reputation has been based on a mere handful of his seventy picturesall
the more remarkable because the majority of his fifty-two silent films and all
of his sound films survive. Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood is an effort
to go beyond anecdote and reminiscence to create a portrait of DeMille the filmmaker.
It is based in large part on original documents that erase the blur of nostalgia
and preserve the immediacy of a time when Cecil B. DeMille helped create the
art of motion pictures.
My own interest in Cecil B. DeMille and his work goes back to my earliest days
as a film fan in the early 1960s, but my appreciation for his skill as a filmmaker
was a long time coming. I first saw The King of Kings (1927) and Union
Pacific (1939) when I was twelve or so and was impressed with the historical
sweep of these epics. When I was in college I saw The Road to Yesterday
(1925) and thought it was one of the worst films I'd ever seen. Later, working
in a theater where a reissue of DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956)
was playing, I couldn't help feeling that the film was a work of incredible
banalityand yet I'd see looks of religious rapture on the faces of patrons
leaving the screenings. These people were either crazy, or there was something
to this 1956 relic that I was missing . . . since I was about twenty at the
time, I was pretty certain that they were crazy.
In the 1980s I came to do some unpaid work making a detailed inventory of the films in a vault on the grounds of DeMille's estate. The two houses on the property, connected by a glass-paneled hallway, had served as living quarters and offices through most of DeMille's years in Hollywood, and they remained largely untouched by time in the nearly thirty years since his passing. His suits still hung in the closet, fresh flowers were still placed on his desk each morning, and it was impossible to ignore the notion that everything was in place for an anticipated second coming.
The reward of my endeavor as volunteer film archivist was being able to borrow
and screen 16mm prints of most of DeMille's surviving silents. It was an impressive
body of work. But it was only when I saw The Golden Chance (1916) that
I began to reevaluate my impressions of DeMille's artistry. Here was a true
masterpiece unmentioned in any history of the cinema. This film had been completely
overshadowed by The Cheat (1915) which had come to stand in as a sort
of shorthand filmography for critics and historians seeking to define DeMille's
early career. Ironically, The Cheat was not a film that was particularly close
to DeMille's heart, although he was happy to accept the critical accolades for
it when French film critics embraced the film shortly after the First World
War. The Golden Chance, on the other hand, went largely unseen after
its initial release.
For me, The Golden Chance revealed DeMille's themes and techniques
in a way I had not experienced before, and I began to look again at many DeMille
films that I had earlier dismissed.
In 1988 Richard Koszarski, then working for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Long Island, asked me to write program notes for what would be the first comprehensive retrospective of DeMille's films. Richard was an old friend, but I don't think it was friendship that caused him to hand me this assignment; rather it was a short lead time and the fact that, by virtue of my work with the DeMille estate, I was one of the few people in the world at the time who had seen virtually all of DeMille's surviving films.
In some ways Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood betrays its origins in those
early program notes. It is organized as a series of chapters headed by film
titles, release dates and credits, but the text and historical content have
been greatly expandedto the point that little survives from that earlier
endeavor in this present volume. I gave some thought to arranging this book
in a more traditional fashion, especially since there is a narrative thread
that carries through the text, and the sequence sometimes strays beyond the
strict limits of the film title headings. Ultimately I felt the structure did
not detract from the narrative flow for "cover-to-cover" readers and also allowed
more casual readers the opportunity to jump around or revisit areas of particular
interest.
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