Samson and Delilah (1949)

(archive.org streaming, May 2022) Director Cecil B. DeMille could be counted upon to deliver quality spectacles throughout most of his career. Samson and Delilah is no exception… as long as you’re willing to be patient, that is. Anticipating the biblical adaptation craze that would dominate the 1950s box-office in an attempt to convince people to watch something other than TV, this colourful adventure goes back to the ancient Middle East to tell us about the Samson and Delilah of legend – he is a strongman without peers; she is a rare beauty with a duplicitous streak. DeMille fans are liable to be disappointed by much of the film, as very obvious studio sets act as unconvincing background to several endless discussions. There’s a lion-wrestling sequence to keep things going, but otherwise much of this biblical epic is talk-talk-talk. Let’s not be overly critical: this is a 1940s film after all – decades before the Hollywood spectacle formula was revised to include a big jolt every twenty minutes. It’s not as if there’s nothing to admire in the interval – after all, Delilah is played by none other than timeless beauty Hedy Lamarr, and Victor Mature incarnates Samson… alongside such notables as George Sanders and Angela Lansbury. And then, well, there’s the temple-shattering climax of the film’s conclusion, in which full-scale sets and big models are used to portray the complete collapse of a Philistine temple. If you’ve been waiting for this long, you deserve the treat at the end of the film. I would not recommend Samson and Delilah as one of DeMille’s best films, though – too talky, too fake, too unbalanced in its structure. But it’s watchable – Lamarr and colour cinematography help a lot – and it offers an interesting object lesson in how Hollywood was ready to go for even bigger spectacles in the years to follow.