Postwar Hollywood, 1947-1967

When the costuming unit for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of his 1923 epic, The Ten Commandments, arrived in Egypt with costumes for three thousand extras, they were told these would not be nearly enough—the legendary director wanted costumes for fifteen thousand extras. To design the costumes for the film, the team of Edith Head, Dorothy Jeakins, Gile Steele, Ralph Jester, and the religious artist Arnold Friberg had drawn on sources as diverse as the Bible, the Koran, ancient Egyptian art and jewelry, and nineteenth-century paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. The result was an eclectic, if inauthentic, mix of biblical referencing, historical imagining, fashionable silhouettes, and sexual display (figure 17). A biblical spectacle on a grand scale, The Ten Commandments was filmed in Technicolor using DeMille’s dominant scheme of reds, greens, and blues, and with Paramount’s new widescreen process, VistaVision. Attention to detail counted. Dan Striepeke, who worked under Hollywood veteran Wally Westmore, was a young makeup artist on the film and later recounted DeMille’s response to seeing extras wearing hook-on whiskers: “Dissatisfied with their cheap appearance [he] shut down the movie for three days while real hair beards could be procured.