Word: delilah
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TWENTY years ago, when Cecil B. DeMille realized he could film the destruction of a Philistine temple better than anybody else, he cast about for a story that would lead up to so magnificent a climax. Sampson and Delilah, the result of his search, has found its way back to Boston and, although the first 107 minutes pale beside the last ten, it's well worth seeing...
...should confuse DeMille with art, but Samson and Delilah comes closest of all his films to fitting normal standards of taste. For once he departs from the archaic film-making conventions which mark his other work. Technically, The Ten Commandments is cruder than Birth of a Nation, but Samson and Delilah looks comparatively modern. DeMille's camera moves more than usual, and often beautifully. He stages Delilah's discovery of Samson's blindness with real cinematic imagination; the camera follows Samson turning the millstone as he passes by her, completely oblivious to her seductive presence. The color, while no better...
Samson and Delilah displays all of DeMille's virtues and few of his faults. Despite a mawkish prologue ("Human dignity perished on the altar of Idolatry"), the mating of liberty with monotheism is less corny than in The Ten Commandments. The vitality of villainy provides the film's greatest fascinations; DeMille stood foursquare against sin but always loved the chance to show just how much sin he was against...
...biggest sinner for them all is Delilah, and her characterization makes the film truly bizarre. In the classic story of good man led astray, DeMille pays little attention to the seduced here, concentrating instead on Delilah's lust for Samson. From her first appearance, as the kid sister of Samson's beloved, she is obviously excited by Samson's body, and her reaction to his outwrestling a lion is explicitly sexual. DeMille tentatively suggests Delilah's role as emasculating bitch (at one point she turns Samson into a docile houseboy), but ultimately backs away from this idea...
Angela Lansbury executes the thankless role of Delilah's spear-wielding sister, looking like a porcelain Valkyrie and apparently regarding with doubt her future as a blonde bombshell. Victor Mature, who plays Samson, is quite fat and quite bad, but he pulls down a wicked temple...