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The first word that comes to mind when on the subject of Samson and Delilah (1949) is “ridiculous.” Using a screenplay from Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Fredric M. Frank, and Harold Lamb, Cecil B. DeMille’s adaptation of the biblical story looks beautiful; its Technicolor photography gives the colors of the lavish sets and period costumes a candy-shop pop. But it also has the dramatic proficiency of a high-school production at worst and the try-not-to-laugh barely-seriousness of a group pact to commit to the bit at best, made worse by the refusal of nearly all its cast members not to sound like they aren’t retreating to American life circa 1949 the second DeMille yelled his final “cut” of the workday. 

Samson and Delilah isn’t averse to impressiveness. So it goes for most of DeMille’s epically mounted movies, which tend to have at least one major set piece with which it becomes forever associated and which provides the majority share of that impressiveness. (There’s Reap the Wild Wind’s giant squid fight; Unconquered’s Fort Pitt attack; The Ten Commandments’ parting of the Red Sea.) Samson and Delilah has two: a brawl with a lion showing off Samson’s brawn that’s mostly unsimulated; a climatic collapse of a colosseum. DeMille’s movies are barely more than decoration getting us amped up for bursts of spectacle; when spectacle isn’t happening, the film offers about as much interest as visually stunning TV static. 

With an exception in Angela Lansbury, who understands what she needs to do as a doomed love interest for Samson and delivers well, the cast is just as vacant. It’s movies like this that make you get what the critic David Thomson was talking about when he said that Victor Mature, comically ponytailed Renata Adler-style as Samson, calls to mind the crude headiness of ketchup, and why Hedy Lamarr (who plays Delilah) is today not appreciated much for her acting even though it was the thing to which she dedicated most her life for almost 30 years. (That isn’t to say she’s bad as Delilah, just underserved by a meat-and-potatoes script that shrinks her into a gorgeous symbol.) 

Much like The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah bespeaks DeMille’s well-suitedness to the biblical. That isn’t because he’s great at enriching much-preached-about dramas, but because his sensibilities are of a piece with the wider cultural consumption of the religious text: both are remembered less for their nuances than for the big, iconic moments that have a way of making everything else feel so much smaller that you tend to forget anything portrayed that doesn’t tower.