Moses

'We must follow' - 'Follow? Where to?' - 'To the Promised Land - where else?' This long collection of edited highlights from the 360-minute Lew Grade TV series is sunk right from the start by some of the most pathetic 'epic' dialogue since Victor Mature said, 'Bring in a woman and you bring in trouble' during Samson and Delilah. But at least DeMille's splurges had cohesion and some sort of visual unity; Moses jumbles up half-formed ideas (the Egyptians as emaciated and verbose intellectuals, for example) with patches of realism, to produce something that is totally without style. The special effects are cut-price (directed by Mario Bava, so we might have expected better) and compare poorly with those of The Ten Commandments. So when the script finally becomes interesting, pitting Moses against an implacable God, the effect has already been sabotaged - by the second-rate manifestations of His vengeance, by an unsympathetic gang of Israelites/extras, and by Lancaster's wooden performance ('The punctilious observance of the Sabbath, as you so grandiloquently term it...').