Cecil B. DeMille

American film director

• Born: August 12, 1881
• Birthplace: Ashfield, Massachusetts
• Died: January 21, 1959
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

Capturing early twentieth century American values on the screen, DeMille achieved popular, if not critical, success in his film spectacles and sex comedies.

Early Life

Cecil B. DeMille (deh-MIHL) was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts. His mother, née Matilde Beatrice Samuel, was descended from an English Jewish family; his father, Henry deMille (Cecil was alone in capitalizing the “D”), was descended from Dutch immigrants who prospered in the northeast. DeMille, who was intent on advancing on social as well as artistic and financial fronts, never acknowledged his Jewish ancestry. Similarly, he maintained that his father was a “professor” who taught at Columbia University; such was not the case, but the story suited the image that DeMille sought to maintain.

DeMille’s parents were particularly influential in determining the course of his life. After a brief teaching career, his father considered the ministry but, at his wife’s urging, opted for a career in the theater instead and, in fact, became a successful playwright. Though he died when DeMille was only twelve, the theatrical influence continued in the person of DeMille’s mother, who, after she failed at running a school for girls, became a theatrical agent in New York. DeMille credited his mother with playing the most influential role in his life, for she passed on to her favorite son her ambition and competitiveness, as well as her belief in women’s rights. As a result, DeMille was left with contradictory emotions in his relationships with women: He wanted to dominate, but he also respected independent women who resisted his efforts at control.

DeMille attended the Pennsylvania Military College before he completed his education at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Like his father and his older brother, William, who was establishing himself as a playwright, DeMille had decided that his future was in the entertainment world. After his graduation in 1900, he took an acting job and appeared both in New York and on the road. In 1902, he married Constance Adams, an actor, and they spent several years working together in various acting troupes without much success. Nor were his playwriting ventures first with David Belasco, then with his brother more successful. By the end of the decade, his dramatic endeavors, which included a stint as manager of his mother’s theatrical agency, had been unrewarding, both financially and critically.

Life’s Work

DeMille’s real career began in 1913, when he and Jesse L. Lasky, a musician friend, saw The Great Train Robbery (1903) and became intrigued with the possibility of telling a story through the cinematic, rather than dramatic, medium. As a result of their subsequent discussions, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company was formed: In addition to DeMille and Lasky, the partners were Arthur Friend, an attorney, and Samuel Goldfisch, who later became Samuel Goldwyn. The Squaw Man (1914), the company’s first production, was shot in Hollywood, where the company relocated. While the company was named for Lasky, DeMille was actually in charge of the film, which was a tremendous financial success, and both the Lasky Company and DeMille were established as forces to be reckoned with in the film industry. By 1915, DeMille had expanded the company by hiring additional directors and cameramen, as well as some eighty actors and actresses. Among his recruits was his brother, William, who left the New York theater to head the fledgling company’s script department. With the purchase of screen rights to ten of David Belasco’s plays, DeMille gained valuable properties in addition to the prestige Belasco’s name generated. To distribute their films, the Lasky company signed a distribution contract with the newly formed Paramount Pictures. By the end of 1915, DeMille himself had directed twenty-one films.

One of those 1915 films was The Cheat , a society drama about a deceitful woman who is branded by a Burmese ivory merchant who lends her ten thousand dollars on the condition that she sleep with him. The East-West sexual content (Sessue Hayakawa played the Burmese) titillated film audiences and made the film a financial as well as artistic success. With The Cheat, DeMille established himself as a director of quality films, and beginning in 1916 he began to direct fewer but more expensively budgeted films. In 1916, DeMille signed a five-year contract with Famous Players-Lasky (while DeMille was filming in Hollywood, Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players company effected the merger with Lasky): That contract brought him a thousand dollars per week and the assurance that his films would be identified specifically as his work. A “DeMille” film had much the same box-office appeal as a film by D. W. Griffith, the acknowledged leading director. In fact, DeMille, who was a master at public relations, did much to shape the American public’s image of the director as the dominant creative force in filmmaking. On the set, he was an imposing figure in boots, jodhpurs, open shirt, and Louis XV hat; to convey his commands he carried a whistle but later adopted a megaphone and then a loudspeaker. His private life was no less conspicuous: first, an appropriately ornate mansion; then a magnificent “weekend retreat” called, with DeMille restraint, “Paradise”; finally, a yacht, purchased in 1921, called Seaward. DeMille acted and lived the role of the director, both in art and in life.

Before World War I, DeMille made films in several different genres: comedies, Westerns, war pictures, and society dramas. After the war, however, he sensed a growing public interest in consumerism as the lower classes began to desire to emulate the rich. Gone was the Protestant work ethic that promoted sacrifice, postponed gratification, and celebrated hard work and honesty; in its place was the ethic of the Jazz Age, with its permissive attitudes toward sex and morality and its elevation of materialism over spirituality. That postwar audience renounced Victorian values and endorsed the “fast” life of the rich and the famous, which they found in DeMille’s films with their emphasis on “sex appeal” and the “modern woman.” DeMille, whose mother had passed on to her son similar views about independent women, seemed particularly suited to depict “the modern woman.” The most important of these popular sex comedies were The Affairs of Anatol (1921), Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920).

DeMille’s film production slowed to about two pictures a year after 1922, probably because of DeMille’s entrepreneurial efforts, which extended beyond filmmaking to film production: Cecil B. DeMille Productions was formed to enable him to control production of his films. After some bitter disputes with Zukor over production costs (well in excess of a million dollars) for The Ten Commandments (1923), DeMille broke with Famous Players. Lasky purchased the Ince Studios and arranged to have his films distributed through Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). When, however, the Keith Albee-Orpheum circuit of theaters merged with PDC, DeMille Productions, and Cinema (the holding company), his control over production was again threatened. After subsequent mergers and consolidations further weakened DeMille’s control, he signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Unfortunately, his three MGM films did not fare well at the box office, and his contract was not renewed. In fact, when he returned from an extensive overseas trip and wanted to make The Sign of the Cross (1932), he had difficulty financing the film until he got the necessary backing from Paramount (the old Famous Players-Lasky). The financial success of The Sign of the Cross established him at Paramount, where he stayed for the remainder of his career, and freed him from any anxiety over control of his films.

The Sign of the Cross, like The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings (1927), was pure spectacle heavily laced with sex, in this case featuring Claudette Colbert in a notorious milk bath, a gay Nero, lesbian handmaidens, and sexual images of lips, thighs, and feet. Since success breeds success, DeMille’s skill with spectacle led to other similar efforts, notably Cleopatra (1934), The Crusades (1935), and a reworking of The Ten Commandments (1956). While DeMille made financially successful Westerns such as The Plainsman (1937) and Union Pacific (1939), spectacles were his forte, and they are the films for which he is remembered. Actually, DeMille, who was not temperamentally suited to handling details, was at home with spectacles because of the challenge they posed. In a sense, the epic poet is superior to the lyric poet because scope is important: Only a larger-than-life director could handle the larger-than-life themes and the religious/philosophical content of the historical spectacle.

Of the seventy films he directed, less than twenty were made between 1929, when he made his first sound film, and 1956, when he made his last film, a new version of The Ten Commandments. One reason for his relative inactivity was the time and energy he devoted to each film; another reason involved his extracinematic political activities. A self-made man, the embodiment of the Horatio Alger myth, DeMille believed in the individual, not the State, and became active in the Republican Party and in contemporary political issues. Predictably, DeMille opposed the stand of the American Federation of Radio Artists against right-to-work legislation (DeMille himself was associated with the Lux Radio Theatre) and in retaliation organized the DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom in 1945. As a consultant for a government agency producing Cold War films, he favored loyalty oaths and opposed so-called communist infiltration of the film industry. Although he lost the Lux Radio Theatre job in 1944, he wrote for several years a nationally syndicated column espousing his conservative beliefs. For his “patriotic” efforts, he was recognized by the American Legion, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon presented him with the Freedom Foundation Award.

Perhaps because he was such a fervid anticommunist, perhaps because he had such a strong ego, DeMille thought that he and his films were the targets of leftist reviewers. At any rate, despite a string of box-office successes, he did not receive the acclaim he sought from serious film critics. On the other hand, he was recognized by the film industry he had helped to create: In 1953, he received an Academy Award for Best Picture for The Greatest Show on Earth and also the prestigious Irving Thalberg Award both from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the first D. W. Griffith Award given by the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association; in 1956, the Screen Producers Guild gave him the Milestone Award for his contributions to the American film industry. Three years later, he died in Los Angeles of heart problems; he had characteristically ignored the heart attack he suffered during the filming of The Ten Commandments.

Significance

DeMille’s film career and life were characterized by ambition, determination, and competitiveness. His sibling rivalry with his older brother, who initially outshone the younger DeMille, served to motivate him, and when William joined him in Hollywood, DeMille triumphed. In fact, his desire for control was such that his adopted sons called him “Mister.” On the set he was “The Chief,” “Mister DeMille,” or “Boss.” Because he did not want competition from the actors and actresses who worked for him, he preferred to work with lesser-known stars whom he could control and develop. Similarly, he had a stable of actors and actresses with whom he repeatedly worked in a kind of stock company; presumably, they could be counted on to cooperate.

Although DeMille never received the critical acclaim accorded Griffith, he shaped film history. Few others in the entertainment business shared his grasp of what the public wanted. DeMille knew small-town America, and he himself was torn, as were other Americans, between Victorian ideals and modern realities (a conflict epitomized in the sexual titillation of his biblical epics). If, in his films, he appealed to the concerns of his time rugged individualism, upward mobility, and consumerism his death in 1959 spared him from the fate of many directors in their declining years: irrelevance. The 1960’s would not have been a fertile decade for a director with DeMille’s conservative politics and desire for control.

Bibliography

Birchard, Robert S. Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. A detailed account of DeMille’s films and how they influenced the course of film history.

Bodeen, DeWitt. “Cecil B. DeMille.” Films in Review 32 (August, September, 1982): 385-397. An overview of DeMille’s cinematic career, the article summarizes the plots of several DeMille films and contains a filmography.

De Mille, Agnes. Speak to Me, Dance with Me. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. An account by DeMille’s niece (a well-known choreographer) of her experiences working with her uncle on Cleopatra. Includes personal observations about DeMille’s life and career.

DeMille, Cecil B. Autobiography. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959. DeMille’s own account, aided by Donald Hayne’s editing, of his life and career is more revealing about his career than about his private life and temperament.

Ewen, Stuart, and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. 2d ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. An analysis of DeMille’s sex comedies and melodramas as they shaped consumption patterns of immigrant women seeking to emulate life in films.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. An indispensable compendium of resources, the book contains, in addition to a comprehensive bibliography and a filmography, archival information and an excellent short biography.

Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. The best book-length biography of DeMille, Higham’s book also contains helpful critical discussions of the films.

Orrison, Katherine. Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic “The Ten Commandments.” Lanham, Md.: Vestal Press, 1999. A behind-the-scenes look at how the epic film was made.

Ringgold, Gene, and DeWitt Bodeen. The Films of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Citadel Press, 1969. A lavishly illustrated (stills and photographs of Hollywood “personalities”), film-by-film treatment of DeMille’s work. Information provided includes a synopsis, cast credits, and excerpts of contemporary film reviews, as well as a biographical introduction and a filmography.