Word: offing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Samson and Delilah (Paramount) bedizens the Biblical story with all that $3,000,000 can buy: Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, 600 extras and eye-crashing Technicolor, mixed by the lavish, lily-gilding hand of Cecil B. DeMille. The result may not be quite Old Testament, but it is Bible story...
The movie opens with a long shot of the earth whirling in space, and the voice of Creator DeMille himself intoning a speech that begins: "Before the dawn of history, ever since the first man discovered his soul . . ." To meet the challenge of building from there, DeMille brings on a...
Faced with an original story that seemed, for movie purposes, to be nothing but fragments and figments, DeMille turned four writers loose on the job of working up a convincing script. They telescoped the Biblical account, invented some new sequences, tinkered with motivations, added characters, threw in some dancing girls...
The dialogue is a lot less convincing, though sometimes a lot more fun. Bits of it hew more or less to lines out of the Bible ("If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have answered my riddle"). But most of it is Biblical ersatz with an...
The acting in a DeMille picture bears about the same relation to ordinary acting that a DeMille spectacle bears to everyday life. Holding up the florid tradition of black-hearted villainy are George Sanders and Henry Wilcoxon. Mature is suitably curly-haired and big-muscled as Samson. For all her...