The New Pictures

The Solid Gold Cadillac (Columbia), on the perilous trip from Broadway to Hollywood, made a major change of drivers, but moviegoers will be pleased to discover that it did not run out of gas. Judy Holliday is sitting at the wheel instead of Josephine Hull, and though she can scarcely hope to achieve in the part what one critic called "the ineffable waddle of Mrs. Hull's Schraffterpiece," Actress Holliday demonstrates again that, pound for pound, she is one of the best comediennes in the business. Add to that the fact that she is paired--for the first time since 1946, when both of them made the big time in Broadway's Born Yesterday--with Paul Douglas, who sometimes even steals a march on Judy herself with his uncanny ability to lose the laugh but win the scene.

In the screenplay by Abe Burrows, breezily adapted from the original farce by Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman, Actor Douglas plays a lion of industry. Actress Holliday the thorn in his paw--an unemployed actress who has ten shares of stock in his corporation and nothing better to do than come to stockholders' meetings and ask awkward questions ("What does a chairman of the board do?"). Pretty soon she begins to make downright distressing suggestions ("I move that the salaries are too big''). Before long, the self-appointed stockholders' watchdog has nipped so many corporate ankles that the alarmed directors decide they had better throw her a bone. They offer her a job as "Director of Stockholder Relations."

Judy is delighted. "What do I do?" she asks. Says the president: "Oh--er--uh.v Judy takes that to mean she can do just about anything that comes into her busy little mind, all the way from writing cozy letters to stockholders in Texas ("That's a big state. People there must be very lonely'') to blackmailing the board of directors. Conclusion: Judy wins control of the whole shebang in a proxy fight, marries the chairman of the board and has herself elected executive vice president, secretary and treasurer. Moral: businessmen who want to stay in business had better learn the difference between stocks and blondes.

The Ten Commandments (Paramount], the 70th motion picture produced by 75-year-old Cecil B. DeMille. is the biggest, the most expensive, and in some respects perhaps the most vulgar movie ever made. In it DeMille has told the story of the Book of Exodus at a length of three hours and 39 minutes, and at a cost of $13.5 million. To break even, Producer DeMille may have to gross as much as $25 million. But shrewd old "Mr. Movies," the man who in 40 years has lured more than 3 1/2 billion customers past the wicket, is calmly confident that he will do a great deal better than that; that he will, in fact, do something in the neighborhood of $100 million.

DeMille doubtless has good reason to be confident. In five previous attempts, from the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments down to Samson and Delilah in 1949, he has made a lot of hay in the religious field. But DeMille has not been content to trust merely in God. He has crowded the giant Vista Vision screen with such stars as Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner. Anne Baxter. Edward G. Robinson. Yvonne de Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Judith Anderson, Vincent Price. Moreover, DeMille spent ten years in planning the picture, three years and $300,000 in research. After that, he spent almost three months in Egypt and the Holy Land, shooting his key scenes "in the very places where"-so the picture's publicity puts it--the episodes of Exodus transpired. In the flats back of Cairo, DeMille built the biggest movie set in history, a 60-acre mockup of the traditional "treasure city" of Per-Rameses that probably constituted the biggest piece of construction work undertaken in Egypt since the Suez Canal. For one scene alone, the beginnings of the Exodus, he used more than 20,000 extras --at least twice as many people, according to the generally accepted estimate, as were involved in the actual historical event.

Back in Hollywood, the producer discovered that the Paramount lot (35 acres) was not big enough to contain his other big scene: the crossing of the Red Sea. He therefore demolished the intervening buildings, joined Paramount and RKO territory, built a 200,000 cubic-foot swimming pool, installed hydraulic equipment that could deluge the area with 360.000 gallons of water in two minutes flat. This scene alone cost more than a million dollars and took 18 months to shoot.

And the result of all these stupendous efforts? Something roughly comparable to an eight-foot chorus girl--pretty well put together, but much too big and much too flashy. And sometimes DeMille is worse than merely flashy. It is difficult to find another instance in which so large a golden calf has been set up without objection from religious leaders. With insuperable piety, Cinemogul DeMille claims that he has tried "to translate the Bible back to its original form." the form in which it was lived. Yet what he has really done is to throw sex and sand into the movie goer's eyes for almost twice as long as anybody else has ever dared to. He throws it very cleverly indeed. The dancing girls are numerous, nubile and explicitly photographed. Yul Brynner. as the Pharaoh, swaggering barelegged across the screen, will delight his millions of feminine admirers. Even Moses, a part in which Charlton Heston is ludicrously miscast, looks less like a man who staggers into the desert to find God than one who flies to Palm Springs to freshen up his tan. According to the script, that was the kind of fellow Moses really was, at least as a young man. There are moments, in fact, when it seems that the Seventh Command ment is the only one DeMille is really interested in; to the point where the Exodus itself seems almost a sort of Sexodus--the result of Moses' unhappy (and purely fictional) love life.

Is this blasphemy? Technically not; but it is sometimes hard to determine where the fine line between bad taste and sacrilege is to be drawn. When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, out booms a big, creamy bass voice that sounds like nothing so much as a TV announcer making a pitch for a local funeral home. At such moments it is impossible to avoid the impression that the moviemaker, no doubt without intending to, has taken the name of the Lord in vain.

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