Cecil B. DeMille

gigatos | June 9, 2022

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Summary

Cecil Blount DeMille, more commonly known as Cecil B. DeMille, was an American director and producer, born on August 12, 1881 in Ashfield (Massachusetts) and died on January 21, 1959 in Los Angeles (California).

Initially an actor in the 1900s, he founded with Jesse L. Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn a film production company (the forerunner of Paramount) and in 1914 directed the first feature film made in Hollywood, The Indian Woman”s Husband. Thanks to his numerous vaudeville comedies with the then star Gloria Swanson, he became one of the most important directors of silent films in the 1920s. He then specialized in adventure and historical films, such as The Sign of the Cross, The Crusades, The Scarlet Tunics (his first film in Technicolor), Shipwreckers of the South Seas, Conquerors of a New World, Under the Biggest Big Top in the World and The Ten Commandments.

Cecil B. DeMille was a pioneer of his art and an independent producer. He was one of the rare directors to enjoy total artistic freedom throughout his career, and was one of the first to consider cinema as entertainment for the general public. A great director of crowds, he was able to impose his own recognizable style. A Republican, a fervent guarantor of the moral values of puritan America, he nevertheless transgressed the rules of morality imposed on cinema by the Hays Code in several of his films, containing scenes of exacerbated sensuality (The Sign of the Cross) or erotic metaphors (Cleopatra).

If his name remains today excessively associated with the idea of excess and gigantism in cinema, appearing as the archetypal representative of the biblical film (he shot only four in his career), Cecil B. DeMille is nevertheless one of the most important directors of the golden age of American cinema. Like David W. Griffith or Charles Chaplin, his career was decisive and his influence on his contemporaries and the following generations of filmmakers was important.

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Youth

Cecil Blount DeMille, born August 12, 1881 in Ashfield, was the second son of Henry Churchill de Mille (en) and Mathilda Beatrice deMille (née Samuel). His father Henry deMille was a descendant of the Flemish Protestant de Mille family from Bruges, who had fled to the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century during the Spanish invasion, and who had subsequently emigrated to the United States in 1658, and was an active member of the American Episcopalian Church. His mother Mathilda Samuel came to the United States in 1871 with her German Jewish family. His older brother William was born on July 25, 1878, his sister Agnes on April 23, 1891 (she died prematurely in 1895).

Cecil”s paternal grandfather, William Edward DeMille, had been a prominent merchant in North Carolina before going bankrupt in the 1860s. Henry DeMille had several jobs: pastor, schoolteacher and playwright. He was not very successful until he met the playwright David Belasco in 1887. Cecil Blount attended his first theatrical performance at the age of eight at the Madison Square Theatre. His father died on February 10, 1893, of typhoid fever.

Cecil entered the Pennsylvania Military College at the age of fifteen. He wanted to join the U.S. war against Spain, but was not drafted because he was too young. He left school in 1898 and, following the example of his brother, started acting on Broadway. He enrolled in an acting class in New York City and graduated in 1900. He acted in a successful play by Cecil Raleigh (en), Hearts Are Trumps. On tour, he fell in love with one of the actresses, Constance Adams (en): “On December 31, 1900, at midnight, sitting on the steps of a boarding house, at 9 Beacon Street, Boston, completely oblivious to the cold, we celebrated the new year and the new century by becoming engaged. They were married on August 16, 1902 in New Jersey.

After a tour of the American heartland, he began writing plays, sometimes with his brother. He also worked with the Standard Opera Company for a time. He was hired by David Belasco in 1907 for a play written by his brother, The Warrens Of Virginia. This play also featured the future star Mary Pickford. The collaboration between DeMille and Belasco ended, for a dispute over the authorship of a play, in 1911. Administrator in the American Theatre Society, he met Jesse L. Lasky, a producer of vaudeville and operettas.

A Hollywood pioneer

With Cecil arriving in Hollywood in 1913, Samuel Goldfish (then a glove salesman) and Arthur Friend (a lawyer), founded a new company, the Lasky Feature Play Company, which was named after a third friend, Jesse L. Lasky. Goldfish handled the distribution, Friend the legal side, and Cecil B. DeMille directed the films. For their first production, they adapted a play, The Squaw Man (The Indian Woman”s Husband). They left to shoot in Hollywood, then a simple village on the West Coast of the United States, in a barn rented in December 1913, which served as a studio. The film was distributed and brought in twice the money.

On the strength of his success, Cecil B. DeMille began shooting The Virginian on April 14, 1914, a film that was well received, shot with several French cameras that dominated the world market at the time, the Pathé Professional camera. After The Girl from the Wild West, shot in eight days, he moved on to The Warrens of Virginia, adapted from his brother”s play, where he began to develop his concern for realism, notably with the sequence of a train explosion. This realism cost a man his life during the shooting of The Captive in 1915, killed by a gun that should have been loaded with blanks.

The Lasky Company hired the great singing star Geraldine Farrar. DeMille, in order to “test” the star”s acting performance, cast her in Maria Rosa (released in 1916) before giving her the role of Carmen. Reassured about her performance, he offered her a third role in Temptation (en). The most famous film of 1915 was Forfaiture, which gave Sessue Hayakawa his first major role. “In this Paris dead to pleasure, devoted to silence and the anguish of war, the spectators, tense for months on a nightmare objective, finally relaxed in front of this exotic drama, involving, admirably conducted in a new spirit, an accelerated movement, a dynamism never felt.”

From marital comedies to historical films

In 1915, Samuel Goldfish met Adolph Zukor, with whom he founded the Famous Players Lasky Corporation. DeMille made only four films in 1916, including The Heart of Nora Flynn. He also acquired a large property in the Little Tujunga Canyon, not far from Hollywood, which he named Paradise. In 1917, he shot his first major historical film, Joan of Arc (Joan, The Woman), with Geraldine Farrar and Theodore Roberts. It is also the first use of color by Cecil B. DeMille in some scenes.

Adolph Zukor then forced her to make two films with Mary Pickford: A Romance of the Redwoods and The Little American, which made her “America”s little bride” and revealed the young Ramón Novarro. The escalation of star salaries led to an upheaval in the film industry and in production costs. DeMille did not believe that stars were essential to the success of a film: “I thought then, and I still think, that great films can be made without stars.” In fact, in 1918, he made The Whispering Chorus and Old Wives for New without known names. He also made a re-adaptation of his own film The Indian Woman”s Husband.

After the war, he discovered a young actress, Gloria Swanson, to whom he entrusted the lead role in After the Rain, the Weather. This success led to six others, including The Admirable Crichton (Male and Female). In 1920, he founded his own production company, Cecil B. DeMille Productions and continued to make several films a year, including The Detour and The Requisitory with Leatrice Joy and “allows moments of marivouages very bold for the time (redeemed by a moralizing intertitle) and lays the foundation for all the couple relationships of the future American comedy.

In 1923, following a “contest for the best film idea” launched in the Los Angeles Times, DeMille undertook the realization of a film with colossal means: The Ten Commandments: two thousand five hundred extras, three thousand animals, a budget of nearly 1,500,000 dollars. The film was a huge success, bringing in three times that amount. The following year, he made three films with more modest budgets. Following a disagreement with the Famous Players Lasky, he set up his own studio, the DeMille Studio, where he made The Road to Yesterday and The Volga Boatman. Another ambitious project was to bring to the screen the life of Christ, in The King of Kings in 1927. “All I did in The King of Kings and in my other biblical films was to translate into a different language, that of visual and sound forms, the words of the Bible.” He made his last silent film in 1929 with The Godless Girl.

In 1928, he signed a three-year contract with MGM and in 1929 shot Dynamite, Kay Johnson”s first appearance, and the following year supported the Hays Code. After Madame Satan, a musical film, and a new adaptation of The Indian Woman”s Husband, a failure, he created with Frank Borzage, King Vidor and Lewis Milestone the Directors” Guild (which collapsed shortly after). At that time he found himself without work.

After a trip to Europe, where he met Charles Laughton, he returned to the United States and signed a new contract with Paramount Pictures for The Sign of the Cross that launched Laughton and Claudette Colbert. Some scenes blithely circumvented the Hays Code, probably because of DeMille”s ties to William Hays, while others again used thousands of extras. He then made two films, Lynch”s Law (This Day and Age) and Four Frightened People, again with Claudette Colbert. She was in 1934 the Cleopatra of DeMille, “of which at least one sequence is anthological, that of the seduction of Mark Antony. Henry Wilcoxon, who plays the latter, later became the associate producer of the director on some films.

The Crusades is his last historical film. Loretta Young and Henry Wilcoxon are the heroes of this uneven medieval fresco. DeMille signed a new contract with Paramount Pictures giving him more freedom. In 1936, he directed the great star Gary Cooper in An Adventure of Buffalo Bill (“whose direction seduces by its ease and a concern for authenticity quite rare at the time”), then Fredric March and Anthony Quinn (who would become his son-in-law) in The Buccaneers. At the same time, he refused to become a Republican candidate for the Senate. DeMille preferred to continue to tell the story of the United States through his films. With Pacific Express, starring Barbara Stanwyck, in which he told the story of the beginnings of the railroad, he revived the fashion for the Western. The film won the Palme d”Or at the Cannes Film Festival retroactively in 2002. It was also his last film in black and white.

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Films in technicolor

In 1940, he shot his first film in trichrome technicolor, The Scarlet Tunics, where he reunited with Gary Cooper for an adventure story in the heart of the Northwest Rebellion in the 1880s in Canada. However, he remained faithful to his way of working, in the studio, and the vast majority of the sets were painted canvases, with the exception of a few natural shots shot by a second crew. Two years later, he found Paulette Goddard for The South Sea Wreckers, where John Wayne and Ray Milland faced each other. The underwater scenes allow Farciot Edouart and Gordon Jennings to win the Oscar for Best Special Effects that year.

After the entry of the United States into the war, the American president Roosevelt mentioned on the radio the heroic story of a doctor, Corydon Wassell (en). DeMille immediately seized his story and brought the hero to tell his exploits and filed the title of his future film, The Odyssey of Doctor Wassell. Once again Gary Cooper was chosen to play the American hero. Released in 1944, DeMille added a commentary at the end of the film informing that a sailor who had been left alone and probably taken prisoner had been found safe and sound.

Gary Cooper was for the last time the hero of a DeMille film in 1947, where he also reunited with Paulette Goddard, The Conquerors of a New World. The film, which dealt with slavery, was set in a context where the director had refused to oppose a California law that aimed to give every resident of the state the right to work, whether or not they were unionized. Two years later, Samson and Delilah marked his return to the biblical peplum. The Paramount Pictures executives, at first reluctant to the director”s new folly, finally let him carry out his project. The film was a huge public success, and brought in nearly eleven million dollars. The following year, he played his own role in Billy Wilder”s famous Twilight Boulevard alongside Gloria Swanson, playing an old silent film star preparing for his comeback.

In 1952, Charlton Heston”s first major film role was in Under the Biggest Big Top. The film, which recounts the misadventures of a touring circus, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1953 and was very well received by the public and by some critics: “The life behind the scenes, the daily routine, the eternal journey, the erection of the tent are described by a true Victor Hugo of the cinema. However, it seems that Cecil B. DeMille did not linger long before devoting himself entirely to his final film, a re-adaptation of his own 1923 work, The Ten Commandments. Colossal resources were deployed: more than three years of writing, months of location scouting, 15,000 animals, nearly 20,000 extras, seven months of shooting, including several sequences shot in Egypt. Already elderly, the director suffered a heart attack on a Saturday, but returned the following day after the Sunday break, thus not missing a single day of shooting, to finish his work. The film, which was presented in New York on November 9, 1956, was a worldwide triumph and several scenes belong today to the legend of cinema (the Exodus or the opening of the Red Sea).

In the 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille, following disputes with unions (refusal of the closed shop when he was a presenter at Lux Radio Theatre (en), dissension with the Directors Guild of America), became a reactionary Republican by supporting Senator Joseph McCarthy in tracking down possible agents, militants or communist sympathizers in the United States.

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Death and posterity

Cecil B. DeMille made a trip to Europe where he met Churchill, Pope Pius XII and Konrad Adenauer, among others. On his return, he went back to work: he wanted to make a re-adaptation of The Buccaneers (the film was directed by his son-in-law Anthony Quinn under the title The Buccaneers with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner) and to work on the direction of Queen of the Queens, about the life of the Virgin Mary. A last project of which we know almost nothing, called Project X, is mentioned several times in his memoirs and his last correspondence. But tired, he died without being able to realize any of them, on January 21, 1959. He is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.

The Cecil B. DeMille Award recognizes artists for their lifetime achievement in the film industry. It has been awarded annually since 1952 at the Golden Globes ceremony in Hollywood. A building at Chapman University in Orange, California was also named in his honor.

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Privacy Policy

Cecil B. DeMille married on August 16, 1902 the actress Constance Adams (DeMille) (en) (1874-1960) and they had a daughter, Cecilia (1908-1984). They also adopted an orphan girl, Katherine Lester, who took the name of her adoptive father and later married the actor Anthony Quinn.

Cecil B. DeMille was also a Freemason.

Also read, biographies – Henry II of France

Bibliography

in chronological order

Also read, history – Eighty Years’ War

External links

Sources