Paramount Home Video has released Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in a restored, Blu-ray edition. Painstakingly restored by Ron Smith and his team, the film has been can now be seen in its original magnificence. Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer discussed this project and other aspects of Charlton Heston’s career with his son, filmmaker Fraser Heston.
Cinema Retro: The year 2011 is shaping up to be a great time for Charlton Heston fans. There are some very high profile releases of his major films. What do you attribute that to?
Fraser Heston: Much of it is due to my own hard work trying to get some of these titles out. In all seriousness, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur are both coming out in April. I think it’s a coincidence that the new technology has come around so much that it allows you to go back and restore these films in such a manner as to allow you see these films in ways you haven’t enjoyed them before. For example, Paramount really broke new ground with The Ten Commandments. It looks great.
CR: The credit goes to Ron Smith at Paramount and his team.
FH: Yes, they have done stuff at high resolutions that has never been done before with more lines per frame than anything like it. I saw it projected on a very large screen at the Egyptian Theatre and it looked phenomenal. Obviously, the colors looked great and it was pristine. The grain in each shot was very fine. I’d like to think the restoration looks like the answer print that C.B. first screened for Paramount. Even when you see a first-run movie in a theater, you’re not seeing a print made from the negative. You’re seeing a print made from an inter-negative, which is several generations down the line. So, in essence, the restoration allows you to be virtually sitting next to C.B. looking at his first answer print.
CR: It must give you satisfaction to see your father’s legacy so much in the forefront recently.
FH: It does. You know somebody asked me the other day if I was ever disappointed that he was primarily associated with The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. The answer is no. Those films became a major part of our family history and we’re very proud of those films and I know dad was, too. They made his career and I think it’s wonderful that we can see these come out again. The same sort of technology can be applied to his other films like Antony and Cleopatra, Mother Lode and Treasure Island and the Bible series that we’re also coming out with next month.
CR: I’m happy to hear that because some of these films like Mother Lode, I haven’t seen in many years.
FH: Neither had I. When I watched Mother Lode and Antony and Cleopatra the other day, I was blown away. We did the frame-by-frame restoration of both of those films from the original negatives and I got take part in that process. I sat there for every single frame. It’s amazing what they can do. I haven’t seen the Blu-ray versions yet, but even the standard DVD version is so much better.
CR: Although your father won the Oscar for Ben-Hur, would you say that The Ten Commandments was the film that was most important because it elevated him to major stardom?
FH: It certainly started him on that path. I was re-reading his journals for a documentary we’re preparing about my dad. So I went back and scanned those journals day-by-day back to 1957. (Note: Heston kept a journal of his experiences on every film set. The journal was published in book form as The Actor’s Life.- Ed.) I went back to his original pages, so there was a lot of stuff I hadn’t read before. He felt The Ten Commandments hadn’t quite put him in that stratosphere yet. That was surprising to me, because it was one of the most successful films of all time. It certainly helped him get the role of Ben-Hur, which he won the Academy Award for. That certainly cemented it, if you will.