Bottom line: This is a brilliant excursion by historian Kevin Brownlow into the grand life and times of the religiously righteous but often lurid filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille.
8-9 p.m. Monday, April 5 TCM
Film scholar Kevin Brownlow, the most zealous chronicler of the silent era, starts his latest recollection with mixed admiration of his subject in "Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic," running on TCM. He uses a rush of abrupt edits from a couple dozen family, friends and cohorts -- that C.B. was a saint and a terrible monster and a saint and a monster, etc. This runs an hour at 8 tonight and the second hour at the same time Wednesday.
The references run from fakey director, heroic, a tyrant, a split personality, hated by everybody who worked for him -- and, concludes one-worded Evelyn Keyes on the master, he was "God."
Is it a shot at his omnipotence? Maybe not. Agnes DeMille, the legendary choreographer, watched a lot of her uncle as "a battlefield commander" and raves about his energy but affirmed that he was a fervent autocrat, and you had to justify to him the air that you breathe and the space that you occupy with your existence.
DeMille directed 70-some movies over 50-some years in his lordly perch looming above the sets, ranging from his first and the first in-Hollywood feature, "The Squaw Man" (1914), to "The Ten Commandments" (1956).
As Turner often does with its enormous film library, it takes the opportunity to run a package of relevant movies, in this case several of DeMille's, including "Squaw Man," "King of Kings" (1927), "The Cheat" (1914) and "Sign of the Cross" (1932).
Director Brownlow and producer Patrick Stanbury, his partner in Photoplay Prods., do a fine job of assembling their witnesses, including adopted DeMille son Richard, granddaughter Cecilia, composer Elmer Bernstein (he composed the music track), Martin Scorsese, Angela Lansbury, Charlton Heston and Sidney Lumet, who asserts that C.B. "never had an original thought in his head."
Often DeMille seemed a silly egocentric. "Don't be extras," he yells at an army of his extras on one set, "be a nation."
Steven Spielberg, while reverent of DeMille's achievements, seems amused by some of DeMille's excesses but marvels over DeMille's parting of the Red Sea as the "best special effects sequence of all time." The production clips supposedly haven't been seen before now.
Brownlow invokes telling anecdotes from his 13-part series first run in the 1970s, "Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film," perhaps the best study done on filmmaking. Those bites come from many of the long departed, including niece Agnes and DeMille's sultry star Gloria Swanson.
Brownlow captures DeMille's glaring ironies. He claimed family values and wallowed in religious righteousness, but, as Brownlow writes in his narrative, DeMille's films were filled unmistakably with "sex, sadism and lurid melodrama."
One of Brownlow's strengths is that he has sharp eyes and ears for detail. In "Cleopatra" (1934), in which Claudette Colbert takes the legendary milk bath, DeMille had air blown from the bottom of the giant tub to keep up the bubbling. The problem is that Colbert was ticklish.
CECIL B. DeMILLE: AMERICAN EPIC TCM Photoplay Prods.
Credits: Producer: Patrick Stanbury Director: Kevin Brownlow Film editor: Christopher Bird Music: Elmer Bernstein Narrator: Kenneth Branagh
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