Movie · 1949 · Romance, Drama, History · 2h 14m · NR · English
Curator score: 4.2/10 (15.7K ratings)
HISTORY'S MOST BEAUTIFUL AND TREACHEROUS WOMAN!
Overview
When strongman Samson rejects the love of the beautiful Philistine woman Delilah, she seeks vengeance that brings horrible consequences they both regret.
Ratings
Curator score: 4.2/10
IMDb: 6.8/10
Letterboxd: 3.40/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 56%
TMDB: 6.6/10
Director
Cecil B. DeMille
Production
Paramount Pictures
Cast
Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, Henry Wilcoxon, Olive Deering, Fay Holden, Julia Faye, Russ Tamblyn, William Farnum, Lane Chandler, Moroni Olsen, Francis McDonald, William 'Wee Willie' Davis, John Miljan, Arthur Q. Bryan, Kasey Rogers, Victor Varconi, John Parrish, Frank Wilcox
Curator Review
Verdict
A lavish Technicolor biblical epic with outsized spectacle, melodrama, and a memorably seductive villainess. It’s most rewarding if you enjoy old Hollywood pageantry, camp-adjacent excess, and mythic storytelling that plays big rather than subtle.
Best for
fans of classic Hollywood spectacle
viewers who like biblical or historical epics
people drawn to glamorous villain performances
audiences who enjoy melodrama and campy grandeur
Skip if
you want psychological realism
you dislike old-fashioned moralizing
you have little patience for long, ornate epics
you prefer intimate character drama over spectacle
Overview
Cecil B. DeMille turns a familiar Bible story into a full-blooded studio spectacle, and the movie’s pleasures are exactly where you’d expect them: color, scale, costumes, and a shamelessly theatrical sense of danger and desire. It is less interested in nuance than in making temptation look irresistible and catastrophe feel monumental.
Worth noting
The film’s reputation rests heavily on its visual extravagance and on Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah, who is presented as both glamorous and lethal. Victor Mature gives the title role a blunt, physical force that fits the movie’s mythic register, while George Sanders adds the kind of polished menace that makes the whole thing feel even more heightened.
Bottom line
What lingers is the sense of a studio-era epic that understands how to stage lust, betrayal, and divine punishment as pure cinema. It can feel overblown, but that excess is the point: the movie wants to dazzle you into believing the story’s moral and emotional stakes are as huge as its sets.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Bruno Andrade (5★) · 140 likes
O imoral para nós seria retratar um mundo onde o mal não existe, um mundo onde o mal nunca seria poderoso e sedutor. Seria imoral porque estaria errado. E seria corromper a juventude ensiná-la que ela vive em um mundo onde a virtude triunfa porque ela não tem adversários.
DeMille ainda muito mais moderno que os nossos contemporâneos na arte e na cultura (ainda mais nos tempos que correm...).
É o velho ditado: quem não aprendeu até agora... etc.
Daniel (4★) · 91 likes
"Perhaps he'll fall before a woman. Even Samson's strength must have a weakness. There isn't a man in the world who would not share his secrets with some woman."
Samson (Victor Mature), a Danite Hebrew known for his extraordinary strength, is hoping to get married to Semadar (Angela Lansbury), a Philistine, the enemies of the Danites, who's also courted by Prince Ahtur (Henry Wilcoxon). Samson, however, also attracts the attention of Semadar's sister Delilah (Hedy Lamarr), who becomes jealous when… more
Blair Russell (3.5★) · 74 likes
Three notes to begin this review:
One: I’m posting this at an odd time due to my schedule; the second review likely will be real late, at least in terms of Florida time.
Second: My apologies for not spending much time viewing full-length motion pictures of this age or older as of late.
Three: Aside from a small role (as Joan of Arc!) in the atrocious The Story of Mankind, this is the first movie I’ve seen Hedy Lamarr in;… more
dirtylaundri (5★) · 70 likes
The woman with the golden hair and golden armor throwing golden spears toward a lion's skin... isn't even the true fetish object of the scene, because up there on the wall sits her sister eating fruit, already undressing Victor Mature with here gaze. (A film about toxic femininity, as someone put it after the film; about the female gaze, too, and about a woman mobilizing the forces of the peacock.)
Soon after, Mature rejects the spear because he wants to… more
Jerry (5★) · 42 likes
An authentically Old Testament movie, not because of its story or moral point of view, but because it is scripted and filmed in verse.
On the evidence of this and The Ten Commandments, I’m not sure any director understood lust, instinctively and theoretically, better than Cecil B. DeMille.