'The Ten Commandments,' 70 years old, has this North Jersey connection
Pompton Lakes is not the Red Sea. And North Jersey is not North Africa — where Cecil B. DeMille and his cast of thousands restaged the exodus from Egypt, on location, in his supreme blockbuster, "The Ten Commandments." Yet the fingerprints of New Jersey are all over the 1956 movie classic, which celebrates its 70th anniversary on Nov. 8. "The Ten Commandments" is one of the few old Hollywood movies that still command a following today: On ABC it is still a prime-time holiday tradition during the Passover season. It was in the pews of the original Christ Episcopal Church that DeMille would have first heard the story of Moses, the Pharaoh of Egypt, the enslaved children of Israel, the parting of the Red Sea, and the giving of The Law. Possibly even from the mouth of his own father, Henry de Mille — a lay preacher there. "I can remember going Sunday after Sunday to church with my father and listening to him preach," DeMille said in one interview. Book versus movie His father, of course, based his sermons in the Bible. But the Bible left out certain things — which DeMille, in his $13 million epic (about $157
