DeMILLE, CECIL B.

(1881-1959), film director and producer. DeMille may well have been the most important filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet his work is rarely mentioned by film critics or historians. Rather, his importance lies elsewhere. Starting in 1914, he helped found a major studio, Paramount Pictures, and produced and directed during the next forty years more than seventy films that grossed over $750 million. His original production and remake of The Ten Commandments were the top-grossing films of the twenties and fifties, respectively. By the end of his career he had presided over the industry's major trade associations and served as vice president of the Bank of America. Claiming to be a man with a "keen sense of civic responsibility," he was an anti-union Republican and an anticommunist who sought to mobilize American films in the cold war era to save free enterprise and democracy around the world. During his career, he received numerous honorary degrees and national awards, and two public schools in California were named for him.

DeMille saw his work as an extension of duties handed down to him by his family. Unlike other early filmmakers, such as D. W. Griffith or the studio magnates of immigrant Jewish stock who came from poor backgrounds, DeMille was the son of a well-to-do eastern family that traced its ancestry in America back to the seventeenth century. His father had been an Episcopalian priest, but in the 1890s joined with the Broadway impresario David Belasco to create plays catering to the New York wealthy. In this environment, Cecil and his brother turned to acting, producing, and writing plays advocating a "social revolution through drama."

DeMille entered the movie industry just as it was creating the first mass audience in the United States. He became known for addressing through his films the fears surrounding the rise of the new consumer culture and the moral revolution of the twenties. In film after film, his characters belonged to those classes whose ancestors had helped found a nation on notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and concepts of economic freedom. Yet his men and women felt trapped in urban offices or Victorian homes. To alleviate their boredom, they turned to nightclubs or amusement parks where the classes and sexes mingled, and the New Woman and dances like the Charleston challenged the old order of self-denial and public virtue. DeMille's films proposed leaving undisturbed the old code of Anglo-Saxon virtue dominating public life, but instead altering private life. The family would satisfy the desires for new relationships between men and women, and the yearnings for consumer pleasures.

During the next three decades, DeMille joined other filmmakers in merging the new popular culture with nationalism. His films' protagonists struggled to reform the country, contain rebellions, and counter the hedonism of the day. In the more placid fifties, films like The Ten Commandments and Samson and Delilah were filled with metaphors signifying triumph over the Golden Calf and Godless external enemies, the latter not too different from his perception of the Soviet Union.

Summing up in 1958 the spirit animating his work for over half a century, DeMille recalled that his mother had persuaded her husband to leave the ministry for the "wider pulpit" of the stage. Their son's films had been seen by over 3 billion people and had inspired numerous leaders to identify with the new "American way" of abundance. Truly, said DeMille, this achievement had fulfilled his mother's "prophecy."

Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1983); Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Bodeen, The Films of Cecil B. DeMille (1969).

Lary May

See also Movies.