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(2018) Cecil B. Demille, classical Hollywood, and modern American mass culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter analyzes the powers of commercial culture during the last decade of DeMille's professional life. The chapter argues that the director's remarkable late-career success was based largely on his ability to refashion an appealing and popular brand that was manifest in the public's awareness of a unique "DeMille genre." Noting the struggles, at mid-century, by both industry insiders and academics to come to terms with a rapidly changing mass audience, the chapter explores both The Greatest Show on Earth and The Ten Commandments. Showing a greater affinity for his earlier themes than those of the late-1930s and 1940s, these films highlighted a syntax of consensus through the shared semantics of visual pleasure, a stylized realism, and the spectacle of crowds. A close reading of passages common to both the 1923 and 1956 releases of his Biblical epic identifies how DeMille modified his filmmaking in the modern era.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-76986-8_7
Full citation:
Blanke, D. (2018). Behold their mighty hands, in Cecil B. Demille, classical Hollywood, and modern American mass culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 253-304.
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