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.
CR: What was his opinion of Mr. DeMille personally?
FH:
He loved him. He always called him Mr. DeMille. In the Paramount deluxe
edition of the new Blu-ray, there’s all sorts of supplemental materials
including a letter that I’d never seen. It was written to
C.B. DeMille on the occasion of my Christening. He wrote with
considerable respect and affection and you can tell that his
relationship with DeMille was pretty special.
CR: Of course, they had worked previously for Paramount on The Greatest Show on Earth.
FH:
That’s exactly right. It’s funny that the two roles he became best
known for- Moses and Ben-Hur- came from two great directors for whom he
had previously played a supporting role. In the case of DeMille, he did The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played the circus manager opposite Jimmy Stewart, who was an established star. After The Ten Commandments, he did The Big Country for
William Wyler opposite Gregory Peck, who had the lead role. Which is
probably an odd career move that you wouldn’t see happen today. But he felt that Wyler was another great director. He was right- and it got him the part in Ben-Hur.
CR: What many people don’t realize is that you have a cameo in The Ten Commandments as the infant Moses…
FH:
It was the starring role, but they didn’t give me first billing! I’ll
tell you a funny story about that. When I was born, my mom got a
telegram from C.B. DeMille. It said:
“Congratulations- he’s got the part. C.B. DeMilleâ€
I can’t remember when Ten Commandments was not a part of our family and our history. It
affected everything that came after, but only in a good way. I don’t
think Chuck ever felt he was type-cast in Biblical roles. He only did
three of them: The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told in which he played John the Baptist for George Stevens.
CR: Not only is it true that they don’t make movies like that anymore, they don’t make leading men like your father, either.
FH: That’s very kind of you to say that.
CR: On a personal level, I always felt his best performance was as Gordon in Khartoum.
FH: There’s some wonderful, wonderful casting in that – Laurence Olivier, Richard Johnson… I worked with Richard when I directed Treasure Island. I also worked with him on our film Crucifer of Blood. He was Watson to dad’s Sherlock Holmes.
CR: Despite the wealth of Charlton Heston titles being released on DVDs, there are still a few hold-outs. One of them is Counterpoint, the WWII film in which he played the conductor of an orchestra. Are there any plans to release that title?
FH: Not that I’m aware of, so let’s start a campaign! I’d love to see Counterpoint come out, along with The War Lord, another
Universal title. I think studios are thinking, “We’ve got this whole
repertoire and it doesn’t cost that much to restore these pictures for
Blu-ray.†At least it doesn’t, comparatively speaking. Even
if you just go back and make a new transfer from the negative, you
don’t have to do a lot of expensive restoration as Ron Smith did with Ten Commandments. I’d like to see a Blu-ray of Paramount’s Will Penny, a
wonderful picture he did for that great director, Tom Gries. He also
wrote the wonderful script. It was dad’s favorite smaller film. If you
asked him what his favorite movie was that wasn’t an epic, he would say Will Penny.
CR: I’d like to see a proper release for your own movie with your father that you wrote the screenplay for, The Mountain Men, which is very under-rated. It’s only come out in a pan-and-scan edition.
FH:
Oh, thank you very much. That’s a great idea. It would also make a
great Blu-ray release. I think the negative should be in great shape
because it wasn’t that long ago. It was 1980, I think. I would love to
see that picture widescreen because it was shot in Panavision up in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The locations were gorgeous. It would be a
wonderful candidate for that kind of release.
CR: Wasn’t the movie shot under the title of Wind River?
FH: That was my original title but the studio decided it was a little too nebulous so they decided to go with The Mountain Men. It was a great adventure for me, personally because it’s the first movie that I did with my dad. People
often ask me what it was like working as a director with him. Was he
tough? Was he difficult? Was it awkward for me? Obviously not. He
was the easiest guy I ever directed. He had a lot of good ideas and he
showed up on the set prepared, on time and knowing all his lines. He
never complained about having to wait around, or anything like that. He
was the quintessential working actor. He loved to work and he felt he
was privileged. He would otherwise have been doing it for free if he
could have found a way to feed his family, as he would say.
CR: Your father was such an iconic figure…could you ever just relate to him as a dad?
FH: You
know, the world tends to think of him as Ben-Hur , Moses or El Cid, but
he was very loving and very funny. He loved to trade jokes back and
forth and he would always send me cartoons from the newspapers. He was a
very friendly, open kind of guy. I think anyone who knew him would tell
you that.
CR: What is your next film project?
FH: If you don’t mind me making a plug, it’s called The Search for Michael Rockefeller. We’ve
now completed it and we’re taking it out to film festivals this year.
This movie is sort of in your reader’s wheelhouse. We’re using a lot of
archival footage that we found. It was taken in 1969 and 1970 by a guy
named Milt Machlin, who used to run Argosy magazine. If you go to our
web site at www.searchformichael.com you’ll get an explanation about how I found this film. It was never edited together. It just sat in a warehouse in Vermont. Sort of like The Blair Witch Project! I stumbled into it and it was a whole detective story. We used it to put together a whole new documentary. It’s
all this old, wonderful 16mm footage- all scratchy with flash frames.
(Note: Michael Rockefeller of the legendary American family, was the son
of Nelson Rockefeller. He disappeared while on an expedition in the
Amazon and his fate remains a much-debated mystery- Ed.) We’re also
doing a documentary about my dad for the Warner’s Blu-ray of Ben-Hur that
comes out next month. There will be a lot of old footage that my mom
shot in 16mm on the set. We’ve included his journals and a lot of
photographs that have never been seen before.
CR: The book The Actor’s Life
only takes your father’s journals through the year 1975. I assume he
continued writing entries for every film he made after that.
FH: Yes,
right up until he got too sick to do it. He was very good at it. He saw
the journal as not only a way to keep track of where he was and when,
but also as a professional record of a working actor’s life. I
went back to the original pages and scanned them at a high resolution
and we were able to use a lot of them in the documentary. He talks about how he got the part, the first day of principal photography and the Academy Award. A lot of that isn’t in the book.
CR: It would be wonderful if you can get the journal printed again in book form, updated through the most recent entries.
FH:
I think that Warners is going to do that and publish it in some
fashion, along with all the photographs my mom took that no one has ever
seen. We’re very fortunate that so much of our family history was
documented in that way.
CR: What do you attribute the lasting legacy of The Ten Commandments to?
FH: First and foremost, it’s a Cecil B. DeMille film. I think it’s the quintessential epic. It was at the time and I think it still is. I don’t think it’s eclipsed by Ben-Hur or more recent epics like Gladiator, even
though they’re wonderful films. Some people say it’s a little dated and
Anne Baxter’s performance is over-the-top but I strongly disagree with
that. I think if you look at that film, you realized they succeeded in
bringing to the screen an accessible story with believable characters
from a famous Biblical period in history. It’s very difficult to make
that accessible. I think they succeeded and created interesting,
complicated characters that transcend this giant, epic story. For that reason I think it is the quintessential epic and now we can see it the way DeMille intended us to.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER BLU-RAY FROM AMAZON
CLICK HERE TO ORDER DVD FROM AMAZON
CLICK HERE TO ORDER DELUXE COLLECTOR'S EDITION FROM AMAZON