Extravaganza and Simple Truth

Samson and Delilah is vintage DeMille, made in 1951—but I had not seen a DeMille picture since my mother took me in corduroy knickerbockers to see the silent Ten Commandments at Tremont Temple. (That Baptist stronghold did not open its gates to the secular film, but DeMille’s semi-clerical status allowed him an exception.) Actually I had intended to see The Big Fisherman, but I flipped a coin and Samson and Delilah won. It was worth seeing—a pure DeMille confection, glittering as a giant-size package of detergent, with antlike extras DeMilling about, great stucco columns tickling the sky, and of course the old-time orgy.

Samson, as played by Victor Mature, who had obviously been stuffing himself with pizzas for the part, is a young Judean-about-town in love with the blonde Angela Lansbury, the Philistine who had the Toni. Delilah, who covets Samson to his eventual crew-cut destruction, is played by our duenna friend Hedy Lamarr Kessler, whom I last saw as an ingenue floating belly upwards in Ecstasy. All the DeMille females have their Old Testament midriffs bared to the winds, but time—the meany—has put a few sags in Hedy’s. Still it’s quite a sight to watch her with Samson, dragging across the California desert in a two-seater sports chariot, and I for one enjoyed seeing Samson kill the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion— Adolph, I believe his name was—with his bare hands.

FR

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Francis Russell

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Samson and Delilah is vintage DeMille, made in 1951—but I had not seen a DeMille picture since my mother took me in corduroy knickerbockers to see the silent Ten Commandments at Tremont Temple. (That Baptist stronghold did not open its gates to the secular film, but DeMille’s semi-clerical status allowed him an exception.) Actually I had intended to see The Big Fisherman, but I flipped a coin and Samson and Delilah won. It was worth seeing—a pure DeMille confection, glittering as a giant-size package of detergent, with antlike extras DeMilling about, great stucco columns tickling the sky, and of course the old-time orgy.

Samson, as played by Victor Mature, who had obviously been stuffing himself with pizzas for the part, is a young Judean-about-town in love with the blonde Angela Lansbury, the Philistine who had the Toni. Delilah, who covets Samson to his eventual crew-cut destruction, is played by our duenna friend Hedy Lamarr Kessler, whom I last saw as an ingenue floating belly upwards in Ecstasy. All the DeMille females have their Old Testament midriffs bared to the winds, but time—the meany—has put a few sags in Hedy’s. Still it’s quite a sight to watch her with Samson, dragging across the California desert in a two-seater sports chariot, and I for one enjoyed seeing Samson kill the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion— Adolph, I believe his name was—with his bare hands.