The Ten Commandments/Trivia


 * Actor Allusion: On behalf of the two main leads.
 * Charlton Heston's other role also has him playing a Jewish character, who returns after being years away to set things right.
 * In Yul Brynner's case, it's good to be the king. Prior to this role, he's running Siam and wooing the English tutor in both the Broadway musical and later the film.
 * Adored by the Network: ABC has shown this on either Easter Sunday or the the day before every year since 1973, according to The Other Wiki. The one year they didn't air it, they received more complaints for that than for anything else they did the season.
 * Enforced Method Acting: Of a sort. Heston, many years later, told of how on one location shoot, many of the locals were rounded up to serve as a huge crowd of extras... many of whom didn't even need to be dressed up as they were still wearing that sort of clothes today, and didn't really have the scene explained to them other than very basically. As Heston walked through the crowd in costume during the scene, he heard many of them whispering "Mosah! Mosah!"... and realized they thought that he actually was Moses.
 * De Mille, normally very kind to his actors, said mildly nasty stuff to Deborah Paget before the scene where she becomes Dathan's sex slave, so she would be appropriately distraught.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: Judah Ben-Hur is exiled to the desert by his brother, The King of Siam. He also hooks up with Lily Munster. Oh, and Vincent Price (yes, that one) is the master builder.
 * Originally DeMille wanted William Boyd to play Moses. Boyd declined, not because he didn't like the script, but he had been so solidly associated with the role of Hopalong Cassidy for so long that he was afraid that audiences wouldn't be able to take Moses as seriously if he played the character.
 * It didn't hurt that old Heston bore an uncanny resemblance to a statue of Moses by Michelangeo (whom Heston himself later played in The Agony And The Ecstasy).
 * Playing Against Type: Interestingly enough, Charlton Heston. Prior to this old Chuck had mostly played tough, cynical men, while this gave him his first real chance to play a truly wise and noble hero.
 * Real Life Relative: Moses as an infant was played by Charlton Heston's real life son, Frasier Heston.