Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf, a recent 508-page hardcover book by Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber), covers the life and career of the legendary American film director from his birth in 1881 to his death in 1958, two years after he completed his last and most famous film, The Ten Commandments.

DeMille always expressed a deep attachment for the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, as he referred to them. He was raised a Protestant, but Louvish reveals that his father was Protestant and his mother Jewish.

Of the 70 motion pictures that he directed, 52 were silent and many of the best are unknown to modern audiences, according to Louvish, who has also penned books on W. C. Fields, the Marx brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Mack Sennett and Mae West.

DeMille’s first historical epic was Joan The Woman (1917), a telling of the Joan of Arc story. He cemented his reputation as a master of the grandiose biblical saga with a silent version of The Ten Commandments in 1923. He made King of Kings, a film about the life of Jesus, in 1927 and Samson and Delilah in 1949.

DeMille was in his early 70s when he began work on the modern version of The Ten Commandments, which famously featured Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharoah. Memorable performances were also delivered by Anne Baxter, Yvonne de Carlo, Cedric Hardwicke, John Carradine, Vincent Price and Edward G. Robinson. As well, the production featured 30,000 extras and 15,000 animals.

DeMille’s first choice for Moses had been William Boyd, a sixtyish actor known for his roles in Hopalong Cassidy and other westerns. No matter that Moses was 80 years old at the time of the biblical Exodus, Boyd was likely too old for the role. Fortunately, he turned it down and it went to the younger and more virile Heston, who also voiced the speaking part of God. The baby Moses was played by Heston’s own infant son.

Much of the production was shot on location in Egypt. For the Exodus scene, which showed throngs of Hebrews leaving Egypt, entire local villages were hired to take part. “The Exodus stands out as the most crowded crowd scenes in movie history,” Louvish writes, noting that some 20,000 or 30,000 costumed extras – real people, not computer-generated images – are visible in the great overhead crane shot in which the freed slaves move out below the stone gods of Egypt into the desert.

Script researchers examined hundreds of sources, including many of Jewish provenance, but the shooting script added much Hollywood claptrap to the biblical tale. One of the six scriptwriters, Jesse Lasky Jr., claimed he was regarded as “the company Hebrew,” even though he knew more about Christianity than his own birth religion.

“I want you to write me the first feast of Passover,” DeMille would tell him. “Write it from the heart of a Hebrew…  You’ve got to dig. Into yourself. Your ancestors.” DeMille was not always pleased at the result. More than once, he accused Lasky of reducing a great moment in the saga of mankind to Hollywood theatrics as he angrily tore up pages of script.

The director’s niece, Agnes de Mille, once observed of him, “He prided himself on being a profound biblical scholar, and a great part of his career was devoted to dramatizing and propagandizing the Old Testament, but he never once cast a recognizable Jew in any role except to portray villainy.”

The 16 cameras used during production churned out enough footage for 10 pictures. The finished product was an extraordinary three hours and 39 minutes long, but only four of the 10 plagues – blood, hail, darkness, and the death of the first-born – appeared on screen. The “coup de cinema,” of course, was the parting of the Red Sea, achieved using a tank at the Paramount Pictures lot with ramps of cascading water, superimposed with matte paintings and clever miniatures. Louvish called it “a state-of-the-art cinematic miracle.”

The film has grossed $838 million to date, making it the fifth-highest grossing movie made in the United States. Astonishingly, it won only a single Academy Award, for visual effects. The 1956 Oscar for best picture went to Around the World in 80 Days, while the Oscar for best director went to George Stevens for Giant.

Film buffs will enjoy Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf for its insights into the career of a great director and the vanished age of the Hollywood epic.

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Tis the season of Chanukah – a time, if not for gift-giving, then at least for catching up on your reading with some recent titles from the season’s rich literary bounty.

Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce (Viking Canada), which won the $50,000 Giller Prize in November, offers a remarkable saga of aboriginal life in the bush country of northern Ontario. The first chapter, in which the narrator describes the crash of a small plane that he is piloting, hooked me instantly. A strong and genuinely Canadian voice, Boyden uses some simple yet remarkable narrative devices to keep up the momentum.

Nino Ricci’s The Origin of Species (Doubleday Canada), which just won a Governor General’s Award for fiction, is a tale set in Montreal in the 1980s from “one of Canada’s most profound interpreters of the human heart.” If this book is only half as heartfelt as Ricci’s first novel, Lives of The Saints, for which he won a previous Governor General’s Award award, it’s bound to be amazing.

In the realm of non-fiction, Kenneth Whyte’s The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst recounts the powerful saga of the great newsman who built one of America’s great media empires. Whyte’s sympathetic portrait of the man who served as the model for Citizen Kane makes for fascinating reading. The author surely knows something about the magazine and newspaper biz, being editor-in-chief of Maclean’s and a former editor of Saturday Night and the National Post.

Christie Blatchford takes us to remote Afghan battlefronts in Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death From Inside the New Canadian Army (Anchor Canada). A recipient of a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, the book focuses on the ugly realities of war, an unsavoury subject at best. However, considering our brave Canadian soldiers are risking their lives over there, reading this engrossing account seems almost like a patriotic duty.