New Print In The Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty, Cecil Blount De Mille made yet another stab at turning the greatest book on earth into the greatest show on earth. ("Give me a page of the Bible, and I'll give you a picture," quoth he, and many times: The Ten Commandments, King of Kings and The Sign of the Cross preceded Samson and Delilah; another Ten Commandments would follow.) De Mille may be one of the cinema's greatest exponents of The Eternal, as a Cahiers du Cinéma article by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, recently reprinted in Wide Angle, professes. But he always managed to turn the Good Book into Forbidden Fruit, and that was the secret of his success. Indeed, he seems to know something about the Bible that few care to admit; the Old Testament is pure spectacle, and it has to be read, as it were, in Technicolor, with costumes, sets and outrageous animal entertainment that are Babel incarnate. Victor Mature as Samson seems to hit his stride; he's not half bad, and the half that's bad is so bad it's good, as in his hopelessly phony battle with the lion. Caught between the lion and the loin, Samson incarnates the Judeo-Christian rebellion against paganism, but Hedy Lamarr's brand of heathenism has its more powerful attractions...otherwise, there would be no movie. George Sanders wraps his sinister ennui around the role of the Saran of Gaza, and only Angela Lansbury seems a tad out of place in blonde plaits. It's lots of fun, so, ready when you are, C.B.!