DeMille/Hitchcock

In his recent bio­graphy of Cecil B. DeMille, Empire of Dreams, Scott Eyman points out: “[…] DeMille’s images became part of cinema’s DNA, and, as already noted, many of his plots had a strange way of turn­ing up in later years as well. As the film his­tor­i­an Robert Birchard poin­ted out, The Little American is clearly a fore­run­ner to aspects of Rex Ingrams The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse; char­ac­ter­iz­ing a rela­tion­ship at a din­ner table is most fam­ously done by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, but DeMille did it first in Something To Think About; in The Ten Commandments, a dying Nita Naldi pulls a cur­tain off its rings, which Hitchcock—a great DeMille admirer—lifted for Janet Leigh’s death throes in Psycho.”

During the Q&A at an event at the Museum of the Moving Image, the crit­ic Dave Kehr (whose new book When Movies Mattered is a com­plete must-own), riff­ing on what I call the Ecclesiastes the­ory of the arts (e.g., the notion that there really IS noth­ing new under the sun), described the gal­van­ic effect of watch­ing the Blu-ray of the 1923 DeMille Ten Commandments (avail­able, at the moment, only, alas, in the super-duper deluxe gift edi­tion that Kehr con­siders in his DVD review column in the New York Times Arts & Leisure sec­tion today, which I’d link to except I think that pay fire­wall’s gone up already) and see­ing the curtain-ring effect executed nearly four dec­ades before Hitchcock recalled it, lif­ted it, and, let’s face it, immor­tal­ized it in a way that its ori­gin­al did not. Dave admir­ingly enthused that Hitchcock was a real “mag­pie” with a near-photographic memory. Here is the sequence of shots from the ’23 film; the mur­der­er is Rod La Rocque.

And Psycho, 1960:

Hitchcock, writ­ing in 1965 for the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Given the skill that per­mits a man to dir­ect, skills shared in vary­ing degrees, per­haps the most sig­ni­fic­ant and indi­vidu­ally import­ant thing about a dir­ect­or is his style. This style is evid­enced by both his choice of sub­ject and his man­ner of dir­ect­ing it. Important dir­ect­ors are known for their style. The record speaks of Ernst Lubitsch as hav­ing a style char­ac­ter­ized by cine­mat­ic wit, of the pictori­al quip. Charlie Chaplin is spoken of as hav­ing a style, and it is inter­est­ing to notice that it was his incur­sion into dra­mat­ic dir­ec­tion in A Woman of Paris that seemed to crys­tal­lize this style. […] On the whole, style was slower to mani­fest itself in U.S. pic­tures, always except­ing the extra­vag­an­zas of C.B. DeMille and the works of Griffith and Ince.”