I just wrote a story about the intersection between faith and film (look for it April 4), in which I opined that Hollywood is far from the irreligious entity Christians sometimes accuse it of being. We’ve seen a barrage of movies lately that take faith and spirituality very seriously. Granted, they rarely espouse a traditional Christian worldview, and that can challenge and frustrate Christian moviegoers. But even the most critical films still acknowledge that faith is a prime mover of people.
In my story, I said that older films—unable to directly question or critique religion—often made just a passing mention of faith (if they mentioned it at all). But there were exceptions: big ones. I was reminded of that this week with the re-release of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments on Blu-Ray and DVD, on shelves today.
Commandments, made in 1956, was a lavish production so religious and so sincere that it feels a little preachy these days. But the film was a massive hit back in the day and a deserved classic now. In it Charlton Heston forever helped shaped the way most of us think of Moses. I mean, wouldn’t we be just a wee bit disappointed if we met Moses in heaven and he proved to be 5-foot-5 with a weak chin and squeaky voice? No one brought more gravitas to biblical characters and themes than Charlton Heston.
But all that gravitas—the muscular thunder Heston brought to those roles—might’ve been a bit misleading, according to his son, Fraser.
“He’s known for these biblical roles, of course, but Dad wasn’t like that,” he told Plugged In. “Moses the humble man [the Moses we meet near the beginning of The Ten Commandments] was closer to Dad than Moses the prophet.”
Fraser Clarke Heston made his screen debut in The Ten Commandments, playing the baby Moses when he was just three months old. He hung out with his father on movie sets for most of his childhood (one of his first memories was riding with his dad on a chariot on the set of Ben-Hur) and, when Fraser grew up, he became a director and producer in his own right. He worked with his father on a bevy of projects. One of those—Charlton Heston Presents The Bible, aired on A&E in the early 1990s, was also released today on DVD.
It was an interesting project, according to Fraser, honing in on four critical biblical narratives: “Genesis,” “The Story of Moses,” “Jesus of Nazareth” and “The Passion.” Charlton, Fraser (the project’s executive producer) and crew would travel through the Holy Land and find interesting, relevant locales, where Charlton would narrate the stories right from the King James version of the Bible—playing all the characters as he went along. It’s a trip through some of the Good Book’s most significant passages with a master storyteller.
Appropriately, Fraser’s favorite episode was “The Story of Moses”—particularly near the end, when Moses tells his people “that I should not go in unto that good land,” passing the mantel of leadership to Joshua. “Just the way Dad read it was just incredibly moving,” Fraser said.
Charlton Heston died in 2008, after a six-year journey with Alzheimer’s disease. Fraser, through films like The Ten Commandments and projects like Charlton Heston Presents the Bible, has more tools to remember his father than most of us have: “I think we’re very fortunate as a family to have this work preserved,” he says, saying they give insight to Charlton as “both an artist and a man.”
And, in the case of The Ten Commandments, they also give insight to a different time in the entertainment industry—when a big-budget Bible story was the stuff of box-office gold.
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