Sorry if I sound a little sleepy. Watched ABC’s 4.5 hr broadcast of “The Ten Commandments” last night. Ahooga! It’s a big wacky epic, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, with a little less action but certainly more oiled up manly chests and fake beards. Best use of color film up until David Byrne’s “True Stories.” Also, best use of Anne Baxter’s ample bosom (as it was called in those days) in sheer silk veils. It did strike me that Moses and the Lord-Our-God did use pretty standard assymetric terrorist methods, relying on collateral damages, to acheive their politcal goals in freeing the Israelites from bondage. Where does Amnesty International stand on first-born smiting? Also, how great is this sequence: Moses is on top of Sinai (getting a blood test, I guess) and watches the flaming hand of God scribble in stone Thou Shall Not Kill. DeMille even emphasizes that Commandment more than the others, placing the camera in front of the stones, so that the flaming, uh, pen shoots right into our faces. Not TWO minutes later, Moses climbs down the mountain. He sees people who “will not live by the rules of our God” (let’s not get into the fact that none of them have had the time to read the rules; we’ll accept the fact that Moses is prescient.) So what does Moses do? He KILLS them! He kills them because they refuse to live by the rules. . .rules like Thou Shall Not Kill. To paraphrase Nathaniel Graves in a film directed by Kerry Douglas Dye — Moses is a chump!