Clergyman’s son became great movie director

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 19

Clergyman’s son became great movie director

A documentary about the legendary director, Cecil B. De Mille, including clips from some of the 70 films he produced and/or directed during his 46-year career in Hollywood, will be screened on Two in the Tuesday Documentary slot tonight.

Cecil B. De Mille was born on August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts. The son of an Episcopalian cleryman who also taught at Columbia and wrote plays, he was orphaned at the age of 12. His mother who also wrote plays, supported the family by opening a school for girls, and later a successful theatrical company.

Cecil enrolled at New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts and made his acting debut on Broadway in 1900. In 1913 he went into partnership with , ai vaudeville musician, Jesse L. Lasky, and a glove salesman, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). They formed a motion-picture firm and travelled to Hollywood to produce their first venture, “The Squaw Man” (1914). Before long the Lasky com-

pany grew into Paramount, a giant of the industry, with De Mille as its acknowledged creative force.

De Mille was a born showman. He had a knack for anticipating public taste and gauging the nation’s changing moods. In the mind of the public he is most closely identified with big historical epics and pseudo-religious spectacles. But long before these, De Mille had presented audiences with a long succession of dramatic and comic so-cio-romantic triangles spiced with a liberal sprinkling of sex and neutralised by nineteenth-century Victorian moralism.

Above all, De Mille was a master story-teller who shunned camera trickery and audience manipulation and developed his plots traditionally and skilfully. His films were often described as simple-minded and vulgar, but in sheer narrative skill and judicial pacing of action, De Mille had few competitors in Hollywood or elsewhere.