YES, MR.DEMILLE (1959)

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"B" AS IN BARNUM 287 "movie for DeMillions if there ever was one," and went on to say "it has more chariots, more temples, more peacock plumes, more beards and more sex than ever before." In time DeMille inverted the precept; when a writer who had helped on the script told him the picture would receive good notices from the critics, DeMille drew back in feigned shock. "Just a minute!" he cried, Tve got a lot of money tied up in this thing." "The critics say my pictures are full of hokum. Well, what is hokum? It is pure and simple emotion. Christ making the blind girl see, I suppose, is hokum. They say my pictures are spec- tacles. Was the crucifixion a spectacle? That had a lot of people. Was Guadalcanal a spectacle? There were a few in that one, too/' This philosophic note crept into his thinking as he became hardened to criticism of this type. He was impressed with the possibility he may have inherited this tribulation. A few years back he showed Frank Freeman, Paramount studio head, a re- view written by a Chicago critic. Freeman read it and said he was puzzled, that he did not recall DeMille having made a picture of that title. DeMille was entranced. It wasn't a review of one of his pictures but of a play written by his father. "They treated him just the way they're treating me, and his plays were always successful/' However he may have felt deep inside, the money-making potential of his pictures was a soothing balm. The hostile arrows of critics broke harmlessly on the armor pkte of golden box- office returns; and not even the critics cared to contest his skill for giving the public what it liked. Of all the bolts hurled by