Synopsis
The Ten Commandments (1923) is Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic, free to watch online on iFILM. It splits into two halves — a biblical retelling of the Exodus, then a moral parable dropped into 1920s San Francisco.
The first half goes for sheer spectacle. Moses leads his people out of bondage, the Red Sea pulls apart, and the tablets are handed down on Mount Sinai — staged with thousands of extras and a few sequences shot in early two-strip Technicolor. Then the film jumps to the present. Two brothers, John and Dan, love the same woman, Mary. John keeps faith the way their mother taught him; Dan throws the old rules out and cuts corners, including the cheap concrete he uses to put up a cathedral. DeMille lets that choice run all the way to its consequence rather than preaching about it.
DeMille would remake this story in 1956 with Charlton Heston, but the silent version is the one that wrote the rulebook for the Hollywood biblical blockbuster. If you watch old cinema for raw visual scale with no dialogue to lean on, this one delivers. Stream The Ten Commandments (1923) online on iFILM.
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