Abstract
This chapter briefly looks to the ways that DeMille’s significance has been marginalized by a lack of contextual awareness in his critics and summarizes the main arguments of this text. The chapter’s title is taken from a play written by a young, pre-Hollywood DeMille, where a dead man’s ghost returns to correct the wrongs he committed throughout his life. Following his own death, in January, 1959, DeMille’s “ghost” first appeared through numerous insider “tell-all’s” that mocked him as a hypocritical martinet with odd sexual fetishes. But the director’s public appeal remained strong—particularly through the annual television broadcast of The Ten Commandments—and raises the question of why this is so.
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Notes
- 1.
See Eyman , Empire of Dreams, 45–48; Hayne , Autobiography, 58–61.
- 2.
For “sheets and sheets,” see BYU, Box 259, Folder 8.
- 3.
For multiple accounts related to the “Grimm” narrative, see BYU, Box 314, Folder 2; Box 332, Folder 11; Box 508, Folder 3; Box 428, Folder 14; Box 421, Folder 1; Box 383, Folder 14.
- 4.
For his analysis and extended correspondence exploring television, see BYU, Box 324, Folder 11; Box 332, Folder 11; Box 369, Folder 23; Box 445, Folders 10, 14.
- 5.
For comments see BYU, Box 445, Folder 10; Box 369, Folder 23.
- 6.
For comments see BYU, Box 445, Folder 10; Box 369, Folder 23.
- 7.
Anthony Quinn , The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 235–250. A similar account—of the brave actor standing up to the evil DeMille—is seen in Charles Bickford , Bulls, Balls, Bicycles & Actors (New York: Paul S. Eriksson, Inc., 1965), 162, 168–178, 191–198.
- 8.
Higham, DeMille, ix–x. Rife with misquotes and lacking documentation, the wholesale panning of every DeMille film following The Whispering Chorus (1918) suggests little familiarity with his body of work. Brownlow , The Parade’s Gone By, 180–188.
- 9.
While at times insightful and provocative, all of the following treat DeMille’s commercial success as evidence of his greatest failing. Perlmutter, “For God, Country, & Whoopee: De Mille and the Floss” Film Comment (Jan–Feb 1976): 24–28. Christie, “Grand Illusions,” Sight and Sound 1:8 (December 1981): 18–21. Barra, “The Incredible Shrinking Epic” American Film 14, No.5 (March 1989): 40–45, 60–61. See also Birchard , “Cecil B. DeMille vs. The Critics,” 285.
- 10.
For “black cape,” see BYU, Box 375, Folder 5. For a similar, and again humorously self-aware assessment by DeMille of his critics, in 1957, see BYU, Box 486, Folder 3. For “nothing immodest,” see BYU, Box 375, Folder 5.
- 11.
See Chapter 8, “Politics Dissolved: Cecil B. DeMille and the Consumer Ideal, 1918–1929,” in May , Screening Out the Past, 200–236.
- 12.
May, Screening Out the Past, 232. Eyman , Empire of Dreams, 510.
- 13.
Noël Carroll , A Philosophy of Mass Art (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 15. Eyman , Empire of Dreams, 510.
- 14.
Isaacs , Toward a New Film Aesthetic, 58, 89. Isaacs concludes, “This spectacality is perhaps the realization of what [Walter] Benjamin had in mind with this classic formulation of the mechanically reproduced work of art. In the age in which mechanical reproduction has consumed all prior artistic modes (which is to say our age in which cinema dominates the other art forms as mass culture entertainment), the spectacle impulse subsumes the narrative and thematic. And this ontology of the spectacle … is precisely that which has reconciled itself to its status as reproduction.” Ibid., 88.
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Blanke, D. (2018). Re-Locating DeMille. In: Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76986-8_8
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