OVP: Samson and Delilah (1949)

Film: Samson and Delilah (1949)
Stars: Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Art Direction*, Costume Design*, Special Effects, Cinematography, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Hedy Lamarr-click here to learn more about Ms. Lamarr (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We will conclude our month-long look at Hedy Lamarr with Samson and Delilah, by-far the biggest movie of her career.  It's hard to understand now for a film that has largely been forgotten decades later, but Samson and Delilah was a huge hit for Paramount.  It became the top-grosser of 1950 (the movie was released in December of 1949), and was for a time the third highest-grossing film ever of the Sound Era (after Gone with the Wind & The Best Years of Our Lives).  It was also something of a zenith for Lamarr's career.  At this point she was 35, a dangerous time for actresses, but particularly for beautiful ones in Classical Hollywood.  She hadn't had a major studio contract for four years, having been dropped by MGM, and had had a series of flops with The Strange Woman and Dishonored Lady after she left the studio.  It's hard to underscore, then, how much Lamarr needed this to resonate with audiences, and it did.  Samson kicked off a new trend of biblical films in Technicolor that would dominate the 1950's, making eventually for the two best-remembered movies in this genre: The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur.

(Spoilers Ahead) If you're like me and grew up in Sunday School, you don't really need to hear the cliff notes version of the Samson story, but I'll assume for a second here that you didn't.  Samson (Mature) is a noble but poor man who falls in love with a Philistine woman, here named Semadar (Lansbury).  Semadar's sister Delilah (Lamarr) lusts for Samson, and makes plots to eventually get him, but he rejects her, and in a brawl her sister is killed, for which Delilah blames Samson.  Eventually she gets her revenge when the Philistines, wanting to understand the secret of Samson's superhuman strength, promise her mountains of silver if she can stop Samson, and she does.  She seduces him, and in the process learns that his strength is tied up in his long hair, so she cuts it off.  They blind Samson and tie him up to work in a mill, but eventually Delilah helps him escape (this is not in the Bible, as an FYI-Delilah exits Stage Left after she cuts his hair in the source material).  Samson regains his strength one more time from God to be able to pull down the temple onto all of those who have captured & humiliated him, including a repentant Delilah, who cannot bare to be apart from him and so she dies with him even though he begs her to escape.  The film ends with Samson, Delilah, and all of the godless figures who turned their backs on Samson dead, with only the humble Hebrew figures who remained true (including a young Russ Tamblyn) left to remember Samson.

The movie, since it's early in a trend, shares a lot of the hallmarks of the future biblical epics, though it's not quite the template.  There's less focus on religion than you'd think (Samson is devout, but it's more a hallmark later in the film), and it's shorter than Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments at just over two hours.  However, there's a reason this was a blueprint and a colossal hit-the parts it does well, it does really well.  The costume work, which won Edith Head one of her Oscars, is sublime-Lamarr is radiant in slinky peacock gowns and a constant midriff, every color under-the-sun in use for her Delilah.  The technicolor shimmers, with each actor perfectly lit, and the action sequences are impressively mounted, particularly the scene at the beginning where Victor Mature's stunt double wrestles an actual lion (something that would never happen today, and though it's obvious in closeups that Mature is fighting a puppet of some sort, the scenes with the stunt double are real-there was an actual lion in this scene).  All-in-all, Samson and Delilah looks incredible for a 1940's epic, and the spectacle still holds up some 70 years later.

The acting is hit-or-miss, as is also a hallmark of the biblical epic.  You kind of have to grade on a curve of this genre, which values nobility and hamminess, and if you do you end up enjoying the film a lot more.  George Sanders, who plays the high-ranking Saran of Gaza, was kind of tailor-made for such a genre, his catty tongue perfect for a man you know will fall to his own hubris.  Lansbury is saddled with a throwaway part (as was her lot during this era), and is not really believable as the older sister to Delilah, considering she was 11 years Lamarr's junior when this was filmed.  Victor Mature is kind of dismissible as Samson-he's not a good actor, but he knows how to be strong, and is convincing as a man of a thousand muscles...he's just not a very good actor.

As for our Star of the Month, I thought Lamarr was the best thing about the movie.  Unlike future turns in biblical epics from Virginia Mayo and Anne Baxter, she doesn't let the hokey nature of her character overcome her performance.  Lamarr was never going to be Bette Davis (not in English, anyway), but she shows here someone who completely understands what Delilah is supposed to be-beautiful, cruel, and intoxicating, and she plays that part perfectly.  It seems mean to say someone was born-to-play a villain, but this is the role that shows off all of the gifts that Lamarr has shown in lesser parts throughout the month, and puts them front-and-center.  Delilah would bring her hosannas and attention she hadn't received in a decade, possibly not since Algiers, but sadly for her it wasn't enough to save a downward career spiral.  Within a year she'd be playing in now-forgotten flops again, and though she'd briefly foray into television, she'd be retired entirely from acting within a decade of her (film) career highpoint, though her scientific work would lead her to become an important figure in modern technology into the next century.  Next month we'll take a look at another actress whose career also took her outside of the world of acting, and who spent the 1950's as her own kind of pioneer.