Unconquered

He was the Titan of Tosh, the High Priest of Humbug, the Prince of Piety, Patriotism and Pornography -- of the soft-core and sado-masochistic variety.

But you knew all that about Cecil B. DeMille, didn’t you? It has been the standard line on him in all the best critical circles since . . . oh, I don’t know . . . let’s say 1927, when he brought out the epic “The King of Kings.” Simon Louvish, who subtitles his book “A Life in Art” instead of something more accurate (like “A Life in Hokum”), has taken on the daunting, not to say hopeless, task of smuggling DeMille out of camp’s camp and ushering him back into more respectable circles.

I’m not certain that this is among the critical-historical community’s more pressing tasks, since De- Mille’s works nowadays live mainly on late-night TV and in the yearning hearts of the cultish, but I do respect the misguided earnestness of Louvish’s effort -- especially since he was denied access to the DeMille archive and to interviews with people who knew him. His research is thus confined almost exclusively to secondary and highly ephemeral sources -- fan magazine features, press releases, inept reviews by the likes of the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther and Mordaunt Hall. (“No, no,” the tortured reader cries, “not Bosley again.”) He also has his own not entirely first-rate critical sensibility to consult. Here a crude strategy comes into play; Louvish insists that DeMille’s silent films offered a subtle, dramatically persuasive gloss on the manners and morals of Jazz Age “consumerism” as it embraced something like modernism.

In a sense, this is an inarguable point: A few of these movies are available on DVD, but most have to be ferreted out in the archives, where only Louvish and a handful of silent movie geeks have seen them. Maybe he’s right. But practically speaking, the rest of us will never be able to test his thesis. So I’m just going to let his early identification of DeMille as the American Lubitsch stand unchallenged. What’s harder to keep silent about is the lack of new, interesting biographical information in this book. Louvish drops tantalizing hints about mistresses, foot fetishism and orgies at DeMille’s weekend retreat: These stand in vivid contrast to the image of DeMille as a devoted husband and family man. But in this telling, the snarky stuff does not come to salacious life. Worse, DeMille himself does not come alive, either. We see that he came by his taste for grandiosity naturally; his father was a religiously idealistic playwright in the manner of his friend, David Belasco, and his mother was a prominent play agent. Solidly Episcopalian, the family’s socio-political beliefs were Progressive in the turn of the century manner -- sympathetic to the poor, skeptical about the privileged, but also at least slightly racist and anti-Semitic. Louvish observes that you almost never see blacks in a DeMille film and that Jews were only permitted to play villainous roles.

What the author does not make us understand is the source of DeMille’s personal grandiosity. Bestriding his sets in puttees and boots, shouting abuse to his crews and armies of extras (but never his stars) through his omnipresent megaphones and microphones, trailed by a boy who slipped a chair under the director’s descending bottom whenever, without warning, he chose to sit, he was an absurdly tyrannical figure -- and, according to Agnes DeMille, his choreographer-niece, “the hardest and most terrifying man I have ever met.” What we can say is that his manner must in some measure be responsible for the congealed quality of his spectacles; frightened people cannot act or even behave in a persuasively natural manner.

Louvish believes that DeMille lost whatever claim to artistry he might have made when, after sound came in, he turned his exclusive attention to spectacle, both secular and spiritual. There was a time when I might have disagreed. As a child I knew he was peddling twaddle, but I thought he was a fairly lively filmmaker. That’s no longer true; whenever I encounter a DeMille movie now, I’m struck by the lumbering awkwardness of its movement, the witlessness of their dialogue, the stiffness of their acting, the cheesiness of their special effects, the absurdity of their sexuality and, of course, the simple-minded inanity of their religious and patriotic fervor.

By the 1940s, he was isolated from the Hollywood mainstream -- one of its few directors whose name was recognized by the public (and wildly rich as a result), but essentially a dinosaur making dinosaurs. Hosting “Lux Radio Theater,” he was also a radio star who refused to pay a one-dollar assessment levied by his union to support a campaign against a new law that would have outlawed the closed shop. I think he was right in principle about that -- how dare a union insist that its members support political ideas with which they disagreed? But he was fired, and that launched the old progressive on a reactionary course that defined the rest of his life. There was not a right-wing cause that did not enlist his sympathetic support and, in 1950, during a Directors Guild struggle over the imposition of a loyalty oath on its members, he made a public fool of himself with anti-Semitic behavior at a rancorous meeting at which he led the fight for the oath. (It was cranky old John Ford, who’d been around the business as long as DeMille, who put him in his place.)

Yet his films continued to prosper (he even won the best picture Oscar for the insanely plotted circus story “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1952). On the other hand, these films were marketed to -- and (lavishly) praised by -- all the wrong, or at least artistically unconscious, groups: chambers of commerce, Kiwanis clubs, religious organizations. When he received the Great Living Americans Award from the United States Chamber of Commerce, he shared the honor with a man who bred “the hen of the year” -- and that says nothing about The Exalted Order of the White Elephant conferred on him by Thailand.

White Elephant, indeed. What better description of Cecil B. DeMille as he approached the end of his career? Secure in his solipsism, absolute master of his petty domain, he was isolated from the Hollywood community, which kowtowed to his grosses and laughed at him behind his back. He rather reminds Louvish -- this is his best critical insight -- of Mel Gibson, turning huge profits with his embrace of sadistic religiosity while enduring the sneering contempt of the intellectual and cinephile communities, which were soon joined by the world at large when his own bad behavior left him open to charges of hypocrisy.

Things never got that bad for the well-guarded DeMille. He died (in 1959) rich in empty honors but poor in the regard of people who know anything about the movies or, for that matter, political decency, true spirituality and the truthful representation of human nature in a fictional form. He perhaps deserves a better biography than this plodding effort, something tuned to the ironies inherent in the man and the times he touched. But who in his right mind would undertake at this late date the tale of a 20th century Ozymandias, his formerly grand image and elephantine works crumbling in the desert like, well, like the recently recovered remnants of sets for DeMille’s first biblical epic, 1923’s “The Ten Commandments”?