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106 Yes, Mr. DeMitte tide to what extent, if any, he had had the benefit of divine guidance. His measure as a showman revealed itself; every incident at Guadalupe reached the desks of film editors over the country. He instructed his publicists to do something with the fact he was the first to re-enact the celebrated escape from the Egyp- tian hordes. Ward Marsh of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the elder statesman of film critics, went along with the boast, add- ing, "DeMille was not only the first man to divide the Red Sea in films, he was the first to do it singlehanded: Moses had out- side help." The Ten Commandments was a Christmas offering on Broad- way, opening December 21, 1923. It ran for sixty-two weeks, exceeding the fifty-nine weeks played there by Craze's The Covered Wagon and the forty-four weeks of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. A miracle perhaps more noteworthy than any presumed at Guadalupe now occurred. The picture received a favorable re- view from Robert E. Sherwood, then film critic for the old humor magazine, Life (absorbed by Time in 1936). Apologeti- cally, Sherwood wrote he had long realized that sooner or later the day would come when he would have to utter praise for a Cecil B. DeMille picture. "Even though DeMille has muti- lated the works of many writers-from James Matthew Barrie to Alice Duer Miller," Sherwood felt that this time the producer displayed "commendable originality." Some of DeMille's big- gest money-makers were unmercifully riddled by the critics, so at word of this astonishing development DeMille pursed his lips: "This means one thing, The Ten Commandments could be a failurel" Will Rogers saw the picture with a friend, who commented enthusiastically on the Biblical episodes, touching off one of Will's better remembered ripostes: "It's easy to see where God left off and Cecil DeMille began."