Movie of My Week: "The Ten Commandments" (1956)
Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 12:51AM 
An all-time favorite, I always watched it every year as a kid when it came on TV, usually making it to . . . oh, maybe the 6th or 7th.
I remember getting the VCR tape in the late 1980s and just going wild with it, watching it over and over. I love De Mille's staging of scenes. The guy could wring every little bit of drama out of a moment, and the script really is a thing of beauty, despite the occasional 1950s Cold War pontificating. Plus, my God! Anne Baxter and Yul Brenner and Vincent Price and Edward G. Robinson, often together in bunches on screen! With Heston at his finest to boot. Really an amazing Hollywood spectacle.
When I wrote my Diss, I would pop the tape in every morning and just let it play. I have probably "watched" it a couple of hundred times and know the script pretty much by heart.
So imagine how excited I was to get the Blu Ray. Now, I'd seen cleaned-up versions before, and I watched the widescreen version in my home theater, so I knew all the side bits that had been lost in all my previous 4x3 viewings (I saw it once in a movie theater on a Saturday afternoon with my sister Mary in Boscobel WI in the mid 1970s).
But I have to say, the Blu Ray is unreal. The sets pop out like never before and the costumes are unbelievable. You can see every stitch. I also noticed things in the background I simply never could make out before. Very cool and often breathtaking in its scope. Plus, somehow they fit it to the 16:9 without seeming to lose anything, and so the you-are-there feeling (my home theater screen goes about 100 inches) was fabulous. I was mesmerized and it made me happy to think of how many other great films out there will be so rediscovered thanks to Hi-Def.
Reader Comments (1)
Tom that's some old school film making brought back to life in a massive way. I spent some time out of circulation a while back and caught up on some of the classics on a borrowed blue ray - this was one of them, Agree just awesome.