GROSS/40 1949 - Samson and Delilah - biblical tribal screwball
Cecil B. DeMille was a miserable bastard but essentially invented contemporary Hollywood.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
SAMSON AND DELILAH, Director CECIL B. DEMILLE, Cast HEDY LAMARR, VICTOR MATURE, GEORGE SANDERS, ANGELA LANSBURY, script JESSE L. LASKY JR., FREDRIC M. FRANK, HAROLD LAMB, production company PARAMOUNT, 1949, 134 MINUTES.
This one’s tough to write about. It’s a blob. The biggest movie of the year 1949, and the template for the epic form - biblical, mythical, comicbook, lone hero, space opera - to the present day… It’s a great big, silly, camp monstrosity - and mean-spirited too. Let’s see if I can figure this out.
To start with, there’s Cecil B. DeMille
He’s literally become part of the language - his name means ‘vast, ridiculous, phoney-baloney historical entertainment’ or ‘on-screen Hollywood excess - gold hats, pretend stone temples, armies of extras’. Gloria Swanson’s plaintive line from Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood post-mortem Sunset Blvd., has also lodged in the culture - “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up…” used and mis-used freely, even more in the selfie culture (TikTok is full of ‘Mister De Villes’ and ‘Mr. DaMills’).
Wilder’s movie - released a year after Samson - was already at work mythologising DeMille (he’s played by another legendary director, FFS) - at that point over thirty years into his filmmaking career and still ten years from its end.
DeMille has come up here before - his Something to Think About was 1920’s top-grossing film, a sentimental, prototype epic. I called it a “…an abrasive, teeth-grindingly awful film made by one of the most famous Hollywood conservatives” and found in the movie “rigid bourgeois domestic norms” and a “morbid interest in sexual transgression, broken marriages, illegitimacy…” Also, though, I said the movie “…marks an important moment, at the end of the exploratory phase and the beginning of the consolidation - of stories, technique and ideas - that would lead to the great, final phase of silent cinema.”
Politics and ideology
The political DeMille was a bore - nothing of interest - just a standard-issue Republican businessman. But this tells us something about where he sat in the production-relations. He’s still a hero of the ‘right to work’ right for his life-long battle against the trade unions and against talent he identified as communist (he provided lists to his friends in the FBI but he was cagey enough never to actually testify). He was a craftsman but he saw himself as boss class, standing outside the community of movie creatives - an industrialist, not an artist. A passionate anti-Soviet, he later endorsed beligerent cold war hawk Barry Goldwater for President. His movies - this one included - are packed with anti-Soviet imagery.
The ideological DeMille was much more important. His contribution across the decades to the solidifying order of reactionary Hollywood ideals is incalculable. In Samson and Delilah, a film set in Gaza three thousand years ago, the package of middle-American values - individual, family, nation, blood - is all present. There is no collective here bigger than a village or more meaningful than a tribe. Are there any humanist gems among DeMille’s big, mechanical entertainments? Any hymns to the masses? No, there are not. There’s something so rigid about the DeMille universe. He’s the polar opposite of Vidor or Hawks or even - easily his equal in his passion for the American way - Frank Capra.
Every DeMille movie, no matter how grand, is parochial, small-minded, grimly anti-social. I’m really developing a kind of DeMille allergy. He’s surrounded in this era by artists writing and directing and acting in films that honour ordinary people, lives lived, love, struggle, joy. But he’s not in that club. He’s in the other club.
Epic
DeMille’s influence is important because these movies have shaped world cinema ever since. In Western movies at least, the form that the contemporary epic takes, whether it’s the continent-scale adventure, the history-spanning yarn, the skyscraper-vaulting superhero fluff - is fully DeMille-compliant. The shape of the DeMille epic became the template for everything really big in the movies.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is no contemporary epic - no box-office giant in our era, no franchise (anything with a score by Hans Zimmer) that doesn’t conform pretty precisely to the DeMille model. Every hero is a wronged individual, every one of them rugged, resourceful and preturnaturally capable. Every society is a brutal autocracy, always reduced to a dictator, a crushed population and an implausibly bullet-proof hero. Please help me out here. Which contemporary epic (let’s confine it to this Century) doesn’t comply? LOTR? All the Marvels? Gladiator? The space operas? Mission Impossible?
DeMille enters his Imperial phase
So, in 1949, the westerns and melodramas are behind him. A critical element of these late-period dramas is the state. It’s always a very particular kind of state too, always the overbearing, one-dimensional state of the stone temples, the plinths, the carved columns and the smug elites arrayed on platforms (like Khrushchev’s boys reviewing a parade). These states usually have vaguely-described belief systems (which are, as you’d expect, placeholders for communism). There are thuggish autocrats of the kind we now call supervillains (and their goons in sandals, so many goons in sandals). De Mille’s ugly, unitary state is always the principle antagonist for our hero. This kind of beligerent, publicly repressive state was the primary Hollywood state until it was replaced by the secretive, retiring structures of the paranoid counterculture era - see Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation…
Our hero is a bundle of contradictions. DeMille’s Samson is apparently dedicated in a priestly way to God but fixated on a blonde bombshell from the ruling tribe up the hill in the castle. He is heroic but petulant - and very, very easily led. Samson is ‘the lion of Dan’ - from the Danite tribe, part of a loose Israelite confederation. His preternatural strength gives him great status. He’s loved by his people and he protects them but he’s ready to jump the fence for a pretty face. This is very DeMille - he’s a prude who loves misbehaviour, a disapproving scold who finds sex and betrayal exciting.
The bombshell - an exceptionally implausible Angela Lansbury - wants to marry Samson and her father agrees, although the groom is from a despised lower caste - there’s a vague trade-off that. The bombshell is fickle - very fickle - and dumps him, disappearing into the bed chamber with another guy literally during the wedding feast. Nobody seems even slightly surprised.
But waiting nearby is another girl, the bombshell’s scheming sister Delilah - and Lansbury’s bombshell is soon dead anyway, run through with a bronze spear and immediately forgotten (this is what happens if your name’s not in the title). Samson’s new girlfriend, played by Hedy Lamarr, loves him and will do anything to be with him but then betrays him and then changes her mind and decides to die with him. It’s honestly a blur: she adores him, she despises him, she longs for him, she drugs him and enslaves him, she feels guilt for betraying him, she humiliates him… You may be able to keep up with this. I can’t (perhaps you’re a biblical scholar). DeMille doesn’t care. He’s the original vibes director. The detail doesn’t matter much, he just needs to sustain the tension until the big moment.
Misunderstood
Lamarr is one of those perennially mis-cast actors. Her whole career, after she arrived in America, is based on a kind of wilful, collective misunderstanding, a misrecognition. She makes a famously sexy movie as a young actor in Czechoslovakia. Consequently - stupidly, predictably - American directors ask her, time and again, for exotic. For seductress; dangerous temptress (I’m avoiding ‘femme fatale’ here), but what she gives us, every time, is something else - it’s a kind of disdain. She actually withholds sex, sensuality, emotion - always sufficiently apart from the character as written to give us a little shiver of alienation. It’s fascinating to watch, her dry discomfort with these roles visible in the flicker of her eyes in close-up. Here it does something to slow, unpretentious Victor Mature that somehow elevates him above the ridiculous. They’re a magnetic pairing in a ridiculous setting.
And here’s something you weren’t expecting. Samson and Delilah is a screwball. Seriously, I practically fell off the sofa when I noticed this. The four-way ensemble: Lansbury, Lamarr, Mature - and the superlative George Sanders (who can keep a straight face in the silliest of circumstances) could have been lifted from a Howard Hawks or a Frank Capra romance. For Lamarr and Mature read Colbert and Gable. They snipe at each other like Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart. There are even some weak gags. Their switchback affection - now she loves him, now she’s enslaving him; he’s helplessly smitten, now he hates her - is a staple of the clever, sharp-edged dramas of the thirties and forties. Embedded in this ridiculous, in many ways contemptible, movie, is an unlikely romantic comedy - and it’s really the film’s only redeeming feature.
Incidentally, Samson and Delilah is basically Mr. Smith Goes to the Temple. The arc of the movie is ‘little man takes on corrupted institution, brings it low’. Samson’s destruction of the temple is Smith’s filibuster on the floor of the senate. Both are superhuman efforts, both set individual against brute authority, both expose the cynicism and stupidity of the institution, both model populism as we now know it.
Speaking of George Sanders’ straight face. Read my piece about 1947’s biggest movie Forever Amber, in which Sanders as King Charles II prances around Whitehall in a kind of lilac playsuit while maintaining the chilly authority of the absolute monarch.
Victor Mature was the butt of a thousand gags and satires. He was the muscle-bound Italian brute amongst a generation of brilliant, wiry thespians who could carry their lines like angels. But he was funny and self-deprecating - his generation’s The Rock. When asked about his profession later in life he used to say “I’m not an actor, I’m a golfer, and I’ve got 64 movies to prove it.”
Hedy Lamarr didn’t invent wifi. She’s sometimes described as an inventor. She was no inventor - she was a brilliant dilettante with a deep understanding of some big concepts. As a child she was fascinated by tech and radio and she carried forward these interests right through her life. The frequency-hopping patent she was awarded during the war was important in its day - and a distant descendent is still in use - in military cryptography and, notably, in Bluetooth (not wifi, though).
This is brilliant. If you get this newsletter in email you’ve missed this bit (and who actually gets to the bottom anyway?). David Thomson (yes, my favourite), says this of Lamarr in Samson: “But she had a kind of gloomy sexuality that places the story in that intriguing ground where biblical overlaps with screwball—bibleball?” (this is from his lovely Have You Seen? which is one of those books people used to keep by the TV).