Customer Reviews

The Cecil B. DeMille Collection (Cleopatra/ The Crusades/ Four Frightened People/ Sign of the Cross/ Union Pacific)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Producer-director Cecil B. DeMille was one of Hollywood's great storytellers. His movies are sometimes derided as hokum, as with the magnificent remake of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956 that shows on TV every Easter season. But give the man credit for truly believing in the plots he was telling and for hiring the finest people on both sides of the camera. Decades later, his films are still being watched and greatly enjoyed.

Universal's THE CECIL B. DeMILLE COLLECTION contains no less than four grandly entertaining and gorgeously photographed masterworks--THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932, Paramount), CLEOPATRA (1934, Paramount), THE CRUSADES (1935, Paramount), and his masterpiece UNION PACIFIC (1939, Paramount). Only the badly written and ludicrously acted FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE (1934, Universal) is a dud. DeMille's actors in SIGN OF THE CROSS include Claudette Colbert as an evil empress, Charles Laughton as Nero, Fredric March as a Roman officer, and Elissa Landi as the Christian girl whom March will sacrifice his life for. Watch for Colbert bathing in asses' milk, which two kittens lick. This is the uncut roadshow version.

Two years later, Colbert is Cleopatra and her leading men are Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon. I can never remember which is Julius Caesar and which is Marc Antony. This visual feast won a Cinematography Oscar for Victor Milner, who would work frequently with Mr. DeMille. The Interior Decoration should have won also. This 1934 production, running a tight 102 minutes, is light years more entertaining than the four hour 1963 epic.

THE CRUSADES has Henry Wilcoxon again, this time as Richard the Lionhearted. We are in 1200 A.D., where the Christians are fighting for control of Jerusalem. Joseph Schildkraut has a great supporting role as a power-mad soldier or general, C. Aubrey Smith is deeply moving as the Christian wise man willing to give up his life for Christianity, and Loretta Young is at her loveliest as Verangaria, who is willing to marry Richard so that his army has enough food and drink for a trek across the Middle East. THE CRUSADES is one of my favorite movies as a Christian about people willing to die for the power of Christianity. And, once again, Victor Milner makes it look absolutely gorgeous.

My favorite in this first-class boxed set is UNION PACIFIC, a thrilling 139 minute saga about the building the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860's. The cast is magnificent--Barbara Stanwyck (with Irish brogue) as an engineer's daughter torn between marshall Joel McCrea and train robber Robert Preston. The chief bad guy is always dependably evil Brian Donlevy, while Akim Tamiroff and Lynne Overman are McCrea's aides, always ready with pistol and whip. Boy, I love this movie, which has impeccable sets and photography. I know movies were frequently made on studio back lots, with a lot of rear projection. But UNION PACIFIC really looks as if it were shot out in the desert and with real trains. It may be fiction, but it makes me feel like a kid again, watching all twelve chapters of a cliffhanger serial at one sitting. It is one of Mr. DeMille's crowning achievements for me.

These prints are shimmering knockouts, seemingly all from the UCLA Film and TV Archives. They are great fun, but also tell intelligent stories and have passionate triangle romances. If only Universal Home Video had included some serious bonuses and individual cardboard cases for each movie, like the incomparable Warner Home Video does. Because of that lack, I am giving this set a 5 star rating for four of the movies, but knocking it down 1 star for the packaging with the disks loose, two on top of each other on open up cardboard. Heed this, Colleen Benn. The lack of bonuses and protective casing on the movies is especially galling on a set selling for $60 ($52 from Amazon), the same price as the Warner Home Video deluxe sets. No, it is actually MORE expensive than Warners, and for LESS bonuses. I only paid $42 for a six film Clark Gable collection from Warners with a ton of bonuses and each movie in protective casing. One of these days, Universal will get the lesson.

The movie that made me want to buy this collection was "Cleopatra" with Claudette Colbert as a kind of "flapper queen of Egypt" which to me has always been a great hoot. While these are not the sorts of movies I would use to illustrate a particular historical epoch due to their accuracy, I would show them if I wanted to entertain someone. The Crusades is a good example with its characterization of a fictional king "Michael of Russia" when Russia as a state did not even exist.

De Mille was a larger than life figure and he was drawn to showing larger than life figures Colbert plays both Cleopatra and Nero's amoral wife covorting in mikl baths with passers by in "Sign of the Cross." The Crusades, while not historically accurate has hosts of memorable scenes. Union Pacific features Barbara Stanwyck in an adventerous role.

This is an excellent collection of De Mille's films and I am looking forward to others being released on DVD in the future

All us film buffs want to see more of these kind of titles finally coming out on DVD, but I'm flabbergasted that they're putting out these interesting but rather obscure films without any extras.

Sales figures show that classic titles sell surprisingly well when they are accompanied by background documentaries and commentary tracks. DeMille isn't exactly a household name nowadays, and this series cries out for a better release. Shame on Universal!

Cecil B. DeMille will never be viewed as a master of cinema along the lines of a John Ford, a Howard Hawkes, an Alfred Hitchcock, or a John Huston. But he did know how to delivery the goods. I do believe that anyone who love movies from the '30's and '40's will enjoy this collection.
For me the highlight of the collection is Claudette Colbert. She is so much fun to watch in both CLEOPATRA and SIGN OF THE CROSS. She is truly magnficent!!! And you can see why she was such a popular star. She may have won her Oscar for IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, but her all-knowing performance as Cleopatra probably help cinch the award for her.

Universal's collection of several of the great showman's biggest hits is a half-hearted affair - the films are there, but the showmanship is completely missing in a lackluster presentation.

De Mille's Cleopatra is much more fun than you'd expect, played as much for deliberately camp comedy as for spectacle and a lot pacier at 104 minutes than the Elizabeth Taylor version. Warren William plays Caesar as De Mille himself, Henry Wilcoxen plays Anthony as an oaf and Claudette Colbert takes centerstage as the kind of vixen who knows which side of the Roman Empire her bread is buttered. At times De Mille's tongue is firmly in his cheek - not least a wonderfully drawn out death scene from Leonard Mudie that wouldn't look out of place in Carry On Cleo or Cleo's spectacular seduction of Tony on that fabled barge - but there's some fine filmmaking here too, not least a great battle montage padded out with footage from the silent Ten Commandments. It ain't history but it is fun. Nice score from Rudolph Kopp too.


De Mille's The Crusades isn't history either, but it's certainly a lot more fun than its reputation implies. Wilcoxen reprises his macho oaf routine as Richard the Lionheart, but despite the film being best remembered for failing to make him the major star De Mile thought he could be, he's a surprisingly confident and rather likeable oaf: Wilcoxen was always a better actor than he was ever given credit for, even if his sword has a better part in the movie than he does. Loretta Young is the gushing God-botherer Berengaria and many of De Mille's regulars pop up - Ian Keith, C. Aubrey Smith, Joseph Schildkraut and John Carradine (all of whom feature in Cleopatra) - to add color to the monochrome proceedings. It's no Kingdom of Heaven, opting for simplistic melodrama at every turn, but it's done with zest and passion, not to mention some remarkably ambitious camerawork at times. And the songs are maddeningly catchy.


The Sign of the Cross was a surprise too, but not a pleasant one. Obviously intended as a pretty blatant ripoff of earlier movie versions of Quo Vadis (although the play its based on was first performed in 1895, the year Sienkewicz's novel was first published), it's hard to believe just how monotonous and relentlessly static De Mille managed to make it. Claudette Colbert and Charles Laughton are fun as Poppea and Nero, but they're hardly in the picture, far too much time being taken up with Frederic March hamming it up as Marcus Superbus (no, really) as he falls for Elissa Landi's Christian gal Mercia (no relation to the county). It's restrained to the point of being inert at times, with far too much of the dreary Christians, although it does perk up for the arena finale which features dwarfs battling Amazon women, elephants crushing Christians and gorillas menacing naked women. The last 15 minutes aside, Dreary with a capital D.


It's hard to avoid the phrase `run of De Mille' for Cecil B.'s Four Frightened People, one of his lesser efforts that sees four white folks jumping ship after an outbreak of Bubonic Plague and taking an ill-advised and badly guided trek through the Malay jungle that rips off their stereotypical civilized veneer to reveal the stereotypical clichés beneath. Claudette Colbert's Miss Jones goes from downtrodden mousy schoolmarm to red-hot, husky voiced wisegal almost as soon as she breaks her glasses, henpecked Herbert Marshall discovers his inner he-man (yes, they really do use that phrase), William Lundigan goes from self-obsessed indifference to obnoxious would-be lecher, while only Mary Boland's matron remains unchanged in her determination to bring civilization and a reduced birthrate to the islands. On the plus side, Leo Carillo is entertaining as their local guide who seems to think owning a tie makes him English and there are a few good exchanges - "It's practically virgin territory." "Perhaps that why Mr Corder doesn't like it." - and it's only 78 minutes long.


De Mille's last black and white film, Union Pacific is something of a rarity these days, rarely revived on TV and forgotten in the wake of the Biblical epics that form only a small part of his repertoire. Harking back to his earlier The Plainsman, instead of friends Gary Cooper and James Ellison fighting over Jean Arthur against the background of the Indian Wars on the Great Plains we get friends Joel McRea and Robert Preston fighting over Barbara Stanwyck against the background of the building of the first coast-to-coast railroad. McRea's the agent assigned to stop Brian Donlevy's saboteurs, with old friend Preston among their number and Stanwyck the Hollywood Irish engineer's daughter they both love. Throw in train wrecks, Injun attacks, the odd gunfight, plenty of spectacle, Akim Tamiroff and a complete disregard for history and you've got the closest thing to talkie version of John Ford's The Iron Horse going. It's not up to the 1939 gold standard, but it is entertaining hokum.


While this set does boast uncut versions of all five films, it's maddeningly devoid of any extras whatsoever - a real crime, since De Mille's overblown trailers, usually hosted by the man himself, are great value, as are the many promotional short films that were made for the films. Since all still exist and are regularly excerpted in documentaries, there's no excuse for such lazy treatment.

OK. So Universal, with an impressive library of Paramount movies from the 30s and 40s, and a less-impressive but still significant library of its own films from the classic era decides finally not to smoosh films onto DVD-18s like they are cattle, and give a more "proper" presentation" to some of the jewels in their vault.

So applause to them for even knowing that they own THE SIGN OF THE CROSS, and releasing the restoration that UCLA did on the film, along with some other notable DeMille classics in a multi-disc set (along with a rather boring turkey [FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE}.

The marvelous Kevin Brownlow created an epic biography of DeMille, but is it to be found here? No.

Did Universal create any extras for this set? No.

Did they even try to find the 1960s TV special about the man?
No.

While it's commendable that instead of the annual re=release of FRANKENSTEIN or 16 CANDLES that they dug into their vault a bit, these acceptable transfers with no supplementary materials are pathetic compared to what kind of presentation they could, and should have been given.

...which only means they'll be re-issued with proper extras in a year for less money!

Cleopatra, 1934 - (****) - forget liz & dick! this is the version to see: all the excesses of de mille (how that man could cover up smut with righteousness, lol) and a tour-de-force performance by claudette colbert in the eponymous role, not to mention warren william and de mille stalwart henry wilcoxon as julius caesar and marc antony, both gleefully chewing up the over the top scenery. once you see that barge sequence (what ARE they doing there???) you will never forget it. first rate fun, and until "the ten commandments", arguably the directors best.

The Crusades, 1935 - (***) - henry wilcoxon is a fine richard the lion hearted, and ian keith a fine saladin, in cecil b de milles plea for tolerance. unfortunately, apart from the usual spectacle, the movie falls rather flat, probably victimized by the bland righteousness of leading lady loretta young: surely one of the more deservedly forgotten stars of hollywoods golden era. watch it for the size of the thing, but you might want to have a book handy during the dialogue sequences.

I was more interested in the three older films: Cleopatra, Four Frightened People, and Sign of the Cross, since they were produced before the censor's code stymied DeMille. These early talkies offered quite an eyeful and earful! The other two were good period pieces; less theatrical and pretentious than some of DeMille's later films. Technical quality great considering the age of the movies.

These movies are good,but they don`t really represent the best of DeMilles work.Films like The Ten Commandments (1923)and the remake in 1956,The King of Kings (1928)Samson and Delilah(1949)and The greatest Show on Earth(1950)are Demilles best in my opinion.Still these movies contain the elements that make his movies fun to watch;such as lavish costumes,action,battle scenes and plenty of drama.I would recommend this set to any Demille fan.

This collection of 5 films from Paramount in the thirties is a fair introduction to the epic film maker, Cecil B de Mille. In a long career, de Mille's films were certainly big but that did not mean that they were good. There is some dreadful rubbish in this collection but that is actually part of de Mille's appeal. No-one could make a film so big yet so bad. The public loved the junk even when the critics swooned. Let's start with the rubbish.

In 1934, "Four Frightened People" describes the trek through the Malaya jungles of 4 passengers who have abandoned a cruise ship carrying the bubonic plague. Credibility does not even remotely arise not only in the dumb screenplay but in the generally poor acting of the principals, William Gargan and Herbert Marshal, in particular. Mary Boland, with dog in her arms and plenty of makeup, is completely absurd as a divorcee trying to curb the birth rate and Claudette Colbert plays a mousy teacher who breaks her glasses and transforms into both a leader and a beauty. Colbert actually is quite good, the best of the quartet but the film is corny and predictable. It was both a critical and box office flop in its day and it is no surprise.

In 1935, De Mille made one of his religious epics for which he was famous. This one stars the magnetic but charmless Henry Wilcoxon as King Richard and Loretta Young as his queen, the fictional Berengaria. They make an odd team. The film has far too much talk with some dreadful dialogue (one soldier says to Young "That's kinda rough on you"). As a result, it is really boring and, of course, as history, complete fiction. For the enthusiast, catch Ann Sheridan as a slave ("The cross, the cross, let me kiss the cross") and J Carroll Naish as the head of the slave market.

The next 2 films star Claudette Colbert and are good examples of De Mille's expertise with crowd scenes. They have their share of delights, mainly visual, amidst the generally ludicrous dialogue and distorted history. Released in 1932, "The Sign of the Cross" is another religious epic with Charles Laughton's Nero fiddling while Rome burns and Colbert as a his evil wife Poppea. These 2 play it for laughs (Laughton very camp and Colbert very sexy) and elevate the film every time they appear. Unfortunately, the rest is bogged down by that prize ham, Fredric March, as the prefect of police who falls for Christian Elissa Landi, an ethereal beauty with lovely but ludicrous English diction. The film was reissued during the war and cut but we have the restored road show version here so we see Joyzelle Joyner's lesbian dance, tantalising glimpses of Colbert's torso as she bathes in ass's milk and some gratuitous violence in the Circus Maximus scenes. The film is corn but ripe corn at that so it is worth seeing.

De Mille's 1934 version of "Cleopatra" is an improvement. Compared to the overblown Taylor/Burton opus from the 60s, this is a simpler and therefore more entertaining film. Warren William is OK as Caesar and Claudette Colbert's sensational figure is very provocatively draped. She acts with that tongue in cheek quality which became one of her trademarks. There are some stunning visuals, particularly the capture of Marc Antony on Cleopatra's barge. One scene when Calpurnia hosts a lunch is hilarious due to the ludicrous dialogue. There are lots more - "You and your friends, Romans and countrymen" etc. The film has undergone some restoration so it looks good.

The final film is the best of the set. "Union Pacific" is a rousing western set around the building of the railroad which opened up the west. A sterling cast is headed by Barbara Stanwyck at her most appealing as a rough and tumble Irish heroine fought over by Robert Preston and Joel McCrea. The film was made with the co-operation of the Union Pacific Railroad so it looks and sounds authentic.

The films are in excellent condition but there are no extras, not even original trailers. The set is sometimes available at a fraction of its very expensive launch price and that is just as well because the high proportion of poor films and the mediocre packaging don't warrant a high price. The lack of extras, particularly information about De Mille's place in the history of Hollywood, means too that the uninformed may be disappointed by the corn.