Scott tried to introduce me to his family's tradition of watching Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments. I've seen clips of this movie, but I've never sat through the entire movie and last night was no exception. I switched to Reno: 911! when Scott left the room.
Of course, the movie is campy and over-dramatic. We loved the narrator's description of the Hebrew's toil. We couldn't help but find the parallels between the Hebrew's slavery and his co-workers'. Haven't we all heard this narration in our jobs?:
. . . Endlessly they plod beneath the sheaves of wheat and endlessly return for more. A golden harvest to the threshers, the grain saved to feed the masters, bitterness to feed the slaves. And to feed the brick pits, straw carried on the bowed backs of women. Down into the never-ending valley of toil and agony, stretching mile after mile, an inferno of mud-soaked bodies, where the treaders' feet churn clay and straw into the mixture for the Pharaoh's bricks, and everywhere the lash of watchful taskmasters, ready to sting the backs of the weary. . . .
Blades chopping straw... mattocks chopping clay, a ceaseless cycle of unending drudgery.
From the mixing feet of treaders to the pouring hands of brick molders moves the constant stream of mud, the lowly seed of tall cities.
Day after day, year after year, century after century, bondage without rest, toil without reward. These are the children of misery, the afflicted, the hopeless, the oppressed.
(From script-o-rama.com)
Here's a funny YouTube trailer:
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