As the ace director in the mid-1910s for Famous Players-Lasky, a company he had a hand in creating, DeMille was a crucial figure in the early development of the classic Hollywood narrative filmmaking style. Although less critically revered than D.W. Griffith, DeMille actually played a more important role in shaping the structure of the Hollywood system.
One of DeMille's most influential films of the 1910s was "The Cheat". Released the same year (1915) as "The Birth of a Nation", "The Cheat" was instrumental in developing the rules of classic Hollywood filmmaking. This melodrama is the story of a society woman, Mrs. Richard Hardy, who attempts to save her husband from financial ruin by borrowing needed funds from a wealthy Japanese acquaintance. When the man demands sexual favors in return, Mrs. Hardy returns the money, but this enrages him and he brands her on the shoulder with a red-hot iron. When Richard Hardy attacks the Japanese man, (his nationality was changed to Burmese in later prints to increase foreign export potential), he is put on trial. In a final courtroom sequence, he is about to be judged guilty when his wife reveals the wound on her shoulder. DeMille worked wonders with what could have been a hackneyed melodrama by giving it a unique visual style, featuring complex lighting and patterns of shadow suggestive of jail bars. Characters are surrounded by smoke, silhouetted behind screens and appear from nowhere amidst pitch black. In DeMille's hands, "The Cheat" became an intricate study of individual responsibility, handled with subtlety and sophistication. The film is entirely free of sentimentality and the acting of stars Fanny Ward and Sessue Hayakawa is remarkably modern, direct but without sweeping gestures. With this extremely profitable feature, DeMille proved his mastery of film narrative. Over the next eight years, his output would include comedies and dramas that captured American society in transition.
DeMille's initial works brought famous plays and novels to the screen for Famous Players--"Joan the Woman" (1917), "Old Wives for New" (1918) and "Male and Female" (1919). These and other films of the period starred such proven players as James O'Neil, from Broadway, and Geraldine Farrar, from the operatic stage. In the postwar period came a series of comedies, unlike "The Cheat" in story form, but very similar in faithfulness to the newly established Hollywood rules: "We Can't Have Everything" (1918), "Why Change Your Wife?" (1920) and "Saturday Night" (1922). Ernst Lubitsch, much more famous for his comedies of manners, has singled out the DeMille films from this era as a major influence.
DeMille the innovator became DeMille the moneymaker with "The Ten Commandments" (1923). Budgeted at more than a million dollars, the film proved immensely profitable for Paramount. By the middle of the decade DeMille, with his Germanic swagger, boots and riding crop, had come to represent the archetypal director to the moviegoing public. Chafing under the strictures of the studio system, he quit Paramount in 1925 to set up his own studio, buying the old Ince Studios to form Cinema Corporation of America. Later the company merged with the Keith vaudeville chain, then into Pathe.
The independent DeMille's greatest film was "King of Kings" (1927), a two-million-dollar rendering of the life of Christ. However, the company's lack of other such successes forced DeMille to sign with MGM in 1928. The contrast could not have been greater; he went from autonomy to the strict control of Louis B. Mayer and Nicholas M. Schenck. In 1932 DeMille returned to Paramount, where he would stay for the remainder of his remarkable career.
During the 1930s and 1940s DeMille was Paramount's most bankable director, turning out such hits as "The Sign of the Cross" (1932), "The Plainsman" (1937), "The Buccaneer" (1938), "Union Pacific" (1939), "Northwest Mounted Police" (1940), "Reap the Wild Wind" (1942), "The Story of Dr. Wassell" (1944), "Unconquered" (1947) and "Samson and Delilah" (1949). He was at his best with historical costume epics such as "Cleopatra" (1934) and "The Crusades" (1935). Under president Barney Balaban and studio boss Y. Frank Freeman, DeMille helped make Paramount the most profitable of the studios during Hollywood's Golden Age.
DeMille also directed and hosted a successful radio show, "Lux Radio Theatre," on CBS from 1936 until 1945, when he refused to join the radio union and quit the program instead. In the late 40s and early 50s, he would become a leader of the Hollywood right wing and the anti-communist witch hunt. His directorial career ended with his spectacular remake of "The Ten Commandments" (1956). Most of his later directorial efforts were forgettable, save for the charming "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1952), a film with an untypically contemporary--though hardly realistic--setting.
In the final analysis, DeMille's big-budget spectacles, made at Paramount from 1932 through 1956, emerge as less significant than those films he made in the pioneering days of the Hollywood studio system. If his early partner Adolph Zukor taught the world how to use movies to fashion a corporate empire, the Cecil B. DeMille of the 1910s must take credit as a key shaper of the classic Hollywood narrative film--a filmmaking form which remains dominant to this day.