I’d forgotten that in my last year at Junior School, I’d produced this Cecil B. de Mille inspired version of The Book of Exodus.
Growing up in a then rather grimy pre-smokeless zone little town, with our regular entertainment provided by a 12 inch Bush black and white 405 line television, it’s hard to exaggerate the impact that seeing Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments had on me.
Supreme Being
Trying to explain the significance of the Old and New Testaments on a visit to our class, Father Seebold, our local vicar, asked:
“When you go to the cinema, what do you see first?”
My hand shot up: “Sir, The Ten Commandments!”
Father Seebold was not impressed: “A terrible film: I heard that God had an American accent!”
He explained that what he had in mind was the trailer for a forthcoming movie. The Old Testament, in his opinion, was a trailer for the main event: The New Testament.
I was, of course, mortified and rather confused, and I still think that an American accent works well for the epic scale of the action. An English accent fits better for a character like Sir Ralph Richardson’s ‘Supreme Being’ in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, who is beginning to lose his grip on the day to day workings of the Universe but is a little slower to anger.
The threat in my caption: ‘The last [plague] was the worst. You had to put blood on the door unless you wanted your first born to be killed.’ isn’t one that you’d attribute to Ralph Richardson’s avuncular Supreme Being.
