The first time Cecil B. DeMille parted the waters of the Red Sea, to film the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, he did it at Seal Beach, CA, just 30 miles down the Pacific coast from Santa Monica.
Three decades later, when Paramount Pictures decided to remake the Old Testament tale in Technicolor and VistaVision, the same director returned to do it again, only this time on location on the Sinai Peninsula with thousands of extras provided by the Egyptian army — no matter that the country’s military was rather busy with urgent geopolitical matters at the time.
Both versions were massive hits, with the remake serving as the capper to DeMille’s illustrious career. Of course he didn’t know it at the time, but novelist Peter Blauner was introduced to a significant part of his future when, at age 6, he saw DeMille’s 1956 blockbuster for the first time.
Notable memories implanted at that age rarely vanish entirely — and so it was for Blauner, who used his lifelong fascination for this Technicolor celebration of God’s will in action as inspiration for a shrewd and impressively detailed novel.
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