RetroClips

This is the silent, biblical-prologue half of DeMille's first Ten Commandments, made three decades before his own more famous 1956 remake with Charlton Heston, and the Red Sea effect here was achieved by combining footage of real waves with a giant tank and traveling matte work that was considered borderline miraculous in 1923. DeMille buried an entire full-scale Egyptian city set, sphinxes and all, in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in California after filming wrapped rather than pay to haul it out, and archaeologists have spent decades since digging pieces of it back up.