Of the range of literary, biblical, classical and contemporary subjects to which filmmakers turned to help respectabilise the medium, none was better placed to answer the riven institutional need than the apocryphal Judith – establishing her bifurcated credentials in this respect by drawing explicitly upon her dual identity as duplicitous siren and godly widow. Caught between two powerfully felt, but potentially antithetical, central institutional aspirations, it was understandable that the moving picture industry should have seized gratefully upon material able to satisfy both needs at once. Needless to say, though, the impulse to find a higher artistic and moral register did not dispel the commercially driven need for films to maximise popular appeal by providing visual and narrative thrills. Early cinema’s self-styled ‘uplift movement’ explicitly sought to redeem the industry from charges of scurrility and degeneracy by making films of cultural value.
Though production output testified to the centrality of both, it was the second of these imperatives, the need to assert the ‘improving’ potential of moving pictures, that conspicuously claimed the column inches in the trade press. On the one hand was the commercial imperative to thrill and to titillate on the other, the public relations need to edify and to educate. The early film industry was characterised by conflicting market needs. Further research into DeMille studies, biblical epics, and the religion-and-film field is warranted, recommended and already long overdue. Utilising textually-based humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens, this article concludes that DeMille was a far defter biblical filmmaker than has hitherto been appreciated. Consequently, following a close reading of Samson and Delilah (1949) and a selective review of the critical DeMille, film and religion literature, this article uses Delilah’s (Hedy Lamarr) “thorn bush” tag, given to her during the wedding feast confrontation scene with Samson (Victor Mature), to explicate ten thorn bush themes that reveal some of the hidden depths of C.B.’s biblical artistry. This situation is in need of re-examination, rectification and renewal. However, the many deftly engineered sacred subtexts, thematic preoccupations, and aesthetic skills of this movie trailblazer were frequently denied, derided or dismissed during his lifetime and decades thereafter. DeMille was a seminal cofounder of Hollywood, a progenitor of Paramount Pictures, and an unsung auteur who was not only an early pioneer of the religion-and-film genre but became the undisputed master of the American biblical epic.
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