Episode 13: Swords AND Sandals? In This Economy?

Details, credits, errata: Episode 13: Swords AND Sandals? In This Economy? is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. Our special guest is Caitlin Mae Burke, supervising producer of Field of Vision’s IF/Then Shorts initiative; she is the first honest-to-goodness movie producer we’ve had on the show and she was fantastic.

She forced us to watch The Ten Commandments (1956), Cecil B. DeMille’s nearly four-hour Biblical extravaganza starring Charlton Heston as Moses, Yul Brynner as Pharoah, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Anne Baxter, Yvonne DeCarlo, and the rest of the population of the planet as supernumerary slaves, Israelites, Egyptian soldiers, and so on. It won an Oscar for special effects and features some of the hammiest acting from Heston you’ve ever seen in your life but is otherwise not without its charms and Sam retains a soft spot for Vincent Price.

Our episode art on the website is The Crossing of the Red Sea, a fresco of uncertain attribution, narrowed down to three 15th-century painters: Domenico Ghirlandaio, Biagio d'Antonio or Cosimo Rosselli. It resides at the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City and is in the public domain; the photo of the painting is generously made available through Wikimedia Commons. The Egyptian soldiers are in traditional Italian military gear, and you can see a hailstorm showing Egypt who’s boss in the upper right while Mt. Sinai looms on the upper left. The “pillar of cloud” described in the Bible—cloud by day, fire by night, which guided the Israelites through the desert for forty years, using a generous definition of the word “through,” is realized by the painter or painters as a literal pillar on the water, which, I have to say, would be pretty scary to see, so you can understand why the Egyptians seem worried beyond mere drowning.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Ten Commandments is copyright 1956 Warner Bros. and brief audio excerpts are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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