7:00 P.M., Saturday:: It's Easter Eve, which means it's time to kick things off with ABC's umpteenth broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille's career-capping whopper of a religious epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). Back when this was a good, God-fearing nation and it was easier to think of members of this movie's cast who were still alive, it was customary for ABC to run this movie on Sunday, as the cherry on top of the Easter festivities. But now it's been relegated to Saturday evenings, which nowadays are known as the night when the commercial networks don't even bother trying. Back in the days when ABC ran The Ten Commandments in prime time on the theory that someone would watch it, the network would have confronted the issue of the movie's exceptional length by spreading it out over two nights or letting it play past eleven o'clock, forcing local affiliates to try to keep their late-night news anchors up past their bedtimes. Now, eager to just get the august programming tradition the hell over with, ABC starts the movie an hour before prime time, daring moms across the land to call their kids in from soccer practice lest they miss Moses's thrilling origin story.

As it happens, Moses (Charlton Heston) has a pretty bang-up back story. Turned loose as an infant to float down the Nile by his humble Hebrew mother (Martha Scott), Mose is claimed by the barren and widowed princess Bithiah (Nina Foch), who raises him to be the Egyptian Howard Roarke. The mature Moses, working with thousands of slaves and the combined budget of all three Lord of the Rings films at his command, erects giant, phallic obelisks and dramatically throws back curtains to reveal expensive-looking matte paintings, all of which he has done in the name of the old Pharaoh (Cedric Hardwicke), who is suitably impressed. When he's not supervising feats of construction so dazzling that Erich von Daniken will someday make a pretty penny assuring people that they must have been completed using extraterrestrial technology, Moses swaggers about the city followed by a bunch of dudes whose only mission in life is to throw back their heads and guffaw whenever he gets off a good one, usually at the expense of Vincent Price, whose performance here really puts the "super" in "supercilious." (I had a bunch of guys like this following me around during my last two years in high school. Since Vincent Price has already graduated, I used to keep them entertained them by bouncing zingers off the forehead of Jeff Faggard, who I had no role in naming. Poor Jeff later died while standing on his roof adjusting his TV antennae during an electrical storm.)

Moses's chief rival for Cedric Hardwicke's job is Rameses (Yul Brynner), whose only reaction to seeing this eagle-profiled pretender to the throne rise through the ranks is to pout, glare, and seethe, though that has to have been pretty much what DeMille had in mind when he cast the role, since pouting, glaring, and seething would have remained Yul Brynner's default approach to whatever role he was playing even if he'd been cast as Willy Wonka. As if Rameses needed another reason to drop Moses from his Christmas card list, it turns out that the first prize in the "I Want to Be Pharoah" sweepstakes is the hand of the fair Nefretiri, played by Anne Baxter in a dark-bangs-and-bangles ensemble that brings a welcome touch of Bettie Page to the proceedings even before Moses, his Hebrew parentage having come to light, is brought before Pharaoh modeling the latest in jangly bondage gear. Nefretiri makes no pretense of not having a favorite horse in the running for her favors. "You will rule Egypt," she tells Moses, "and I will be your footstool!" "A man stupid enough to use you for a footstool would not be capable of ruling Egypt," Moses replies, showing that he is so pure-hearted a good Jewish boy that her kinkier suggestions are lost on him. When a slave (Judith Anderson) hints that she knows the Terrible Secret about Moses's past, Nefretiri tells her, "Old frog, be careful what you croak about Moses," then solves the problem by throwing Anderson's sandals off the balcony while Anderson is still wearing them.

Of course, the truth has to come out, and it isn't long before Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) has traded the crucial information to Rameses in exchange for a wheelbarrow full of money, Vincent Price's house, and Debra Paget, who looks at him beseechingly and says, "If you fear God, let me go!"--I line that I've heard myself often enough to recognize it as an unfailing sign that the first date isn't going well. Moses is stripped of his royal rank and key to the Playboy Club and sent alone into the desert, where he is cleansed and prepared to do God's work with an ordeal signified by having Heston make with the clenched-jaw grimness while a lucky stagehand sprinkles sand in front of the wind machine pointed in his direction. Finally, he meets a bevy of cuties in brightly colored clothes who seem to rehearsing for a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It turns out that they are the daughters of Jethro, sheik of Medium, sophisticated international playboy and double-naught spy. When a bunch of Malchites, who seem to be what they had in the days before motorcycle gangs, show up to steal the girls' water and tease their sheep, Moses leaps out of the bushes, brandishing his staff, and demonstrates the Old Testament practice known by religious scholars as kicking ass and taking names. The next thing you know, the girls, having deemed him seriously worthy of their giggly attentions, are competing for the honor of using their precious water to wash his feet. De Mille's research for this picture must have convinced him that the footstool-fetish thing among women crossed all ethnic and class lines in those days.

Jethro welcomes Moses into his home with open arms and offers him the choice of his seven daughters, even though it's not much of a contest, considering that six of the daughters function as a sort of Hebrew chorus to the hottest daughter, played by a pre-Lily Munster Yvonne De Carlo, here completely living up to Jamie Lee Curtis's recent description of her as the Angelina Jolie of her day, minus the proficiency with light firearms. "I shall dwell in this land," Moses announces, doing his best to make it sound as if he has a whole shitload of better options. How comes the part of the story that I could never fully make sense of in Sunday school, when Moses kicks back and lets his hair and beard grow out and turn gray, starts a family, and adopts John Derek, while the Jews are looking at their watches and wondering when they're going to be led out of bondage. I remember thinking, as a kid, that if I were in charge of the spittoon at Pharaoh's place, I'd be kind of eager for Moses to get on with it, but he's determined to wait until he gets the right sign he's waiting for from God. I'll give DeMille and his casting director this: it's a lot easier to understand Moses's measured approach to tackling his mission when he's spending the time leading up to it kicking back with Yvonne De Carlo. Ultimately, however, Moses is invited to a sit-down discussion of the slavery issue with a burning bush, which has the same motivational effect as that letter from the student loan people that first raises the subject of wage garnishment.

Moses goes unto Rameses the Pharaoh, who expresses his disdain for God's messenger by greeting him shirtless while wearing his Zippy the Pinhead hat. Moses, with his special effects wizard John Carradine at his side, tries to impress upon Pharaoh the power of God by throwing his staff upon the floor, where it turns into a cobra. But then Pharaoh orders his own CGI guys to throw their staffs onto the floor, and they turn into cobras too. But Nefreteri announces that Moses's snake was so bad that he ate the other two snakes. I don't know if DeMille decided to not actually show this because he didn't have the technology, but for whatever reason, he has my gratitude. Now comes the part of the story that everybody always looks forward to, the series of anti-miracles when God turns the Nile to cherry Kool-Aid and gets all Magnolia on lower Egypt with the rubber frogs. DeMille, whose faith in the narrative power of female perfidy was forged in the furnaces of a thousand silent movies, makes it clear that what's really keeping the men from reaching a sensible truce is the manipulative scheming of Nefretiri, who's been forced to marry and have a son with a man she can't stand and now sees her old flame roll back into town, not to reclaim her, but just to start some shit about freeing his "people." Whenever Rameses is clearly beginning to think that holding onto his slave labor force just isn't worth it, she gets a bad case of the slinkies and starts taunting him in her Mae West voice.

In the end, she overreaches, because she doesn't expect God to sink low enough to play the death-of-the-firstborn-son card. When Pharaoh sees his own weird little slaphead kid laid out on his deathbed, he orders that Moses be brought to him via "my fastest chariot", adding, "He's my only son," indicating that he'd be willing to write off the loss if he had a couple of replacements cooling in the fridge. When Moses arrives, he finds a defeated man waiting for him, slumped in a chair while the cries of grieving parents are heard rising in the streets outside. Rameses makes a little summing-up speech, telling Moses that he fucked up his relationship with his father, fucked up his chance to be happy with his queen, and has now killed his son; he can't take anymore, and because of that, "I set you free." "It is not by your word or by my hand that we are free," Moses says. "The power of God has freed us." Rameses urges him to shut up and tells him to "take your people, your cattle, your god and your pestilence, take whatever spoils of Egypt you will, but go;" all he asks in return is that they be sure and take Edward G. Robinson with them. While Rameses slumps further in his throne and Nefretiri enters with her dead son in her arms, Moses, looking up to the heavens, intones, "Oh, Lord God, with a strong hand, you lead us out of bitter bondage," and slowly, slowly, slowly exits, talking all the while. At this point, I think we can all agree that Moses, in his moment of triumph, is just being a titanic dick.

As he shuffles off towards the land of milk and honey, Nefretiri hands Rameses their son, uttering the line, "He's dead", in a way that strongly implies that she's been fortifying herself with the cooking sherry, and Rameses deposits the boy's corpse before a huge statue of Sam the Eagle, and promises the most noble Muppet of them all anything if he will restore his son to life. A cut to the morning after establishes that this has worked out about as well as the time I promised God that I would grow up to be a preacher if he would keep them from canceling Holmes and Yoyo. Goaded once more by the missus, Rameses leads his men on a high speed chase after the departing Hebrews and gets to watch as his entire army is decimated in the celebrated sequence depicting the parting and un-parting of the Red Sea. Having established himself as the slowest learner in the history of religious epics, he returns home to sit beside his queen, while the screen turns red to suggest that whatever remaining time this marriage has to run will be an unrelentingly bitter series of "I told you so"s and "Moses would have known how to get a better estimate from the plumber" moments.

Moses leads his people into the desert and disappears into the mountains for forty days, a stretch of time so long that most of the people assume he is dead. They have no way of knowing that God is composing the guidelines for good behavior referred to in the title, reeling them off the top of his head and inscribing them in stone, using the time-consuming dictation-by-fireball method instead of just inventing the laptop. Only when God is finished does he think to mention to Moses that the people he left down there in the valley have gone batshit and are worshiping a golden calf under Edward G. Robinson's direction. When Moses sees this sorry display with his own eyes, he hurls the tablets at the calf, which turns out to be toxic and highly flammable. As punishment, the people are forced to wander in the desert for forty years, at the end of which time Moses slips into a white wig and ascends to Heaven. Which is nice for him, but I always feel that, without wishing this movie were any longer, the period of wandering in the desert for forty years might stand some fleshing out. There could be a sitcom in there somewhere.