Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" (1923)

Cecil B. DeMille and screenwriter Jeanie MacPherson's unusual two-part screenplay is a biblical prologue, and a modern story demonstrating the consequences of breaking the Ten Commandments. The main characters in the modern story of The Ten Commandments are four people that view the Commandments in four different ways. There is Mrs. McTavish, the mother, who keeps the Commandments the wrong way. She is narrow. She is bigoted. She is bound with ritual. She is a representative of orthodoxy, yet withal she is a fine, clean, strong woman just like dozens we all know. There is a girl, Mary Leigh, who doesn't bother about the Ten Commandments at all. She is a good kid, but she has spent so much time working that she hasn't learned the Ten Commandments. Dan McTavish knows the Ten Commandments, but defies them. John McTavish is a garden variety of human being, which believes the Ten Commandments as unchanging, immutable laws of the universe. He is not a sissy or a goody-