Он Бұйрықтардың Ізімен: Екі Әлемнің Тағдыры

1923 film by Cecil B. DeMille

The film has two parts: the Prologue, the epic tale of Moses; and the Story, in a modern setting and involving living by the Ten Commandments.

The opening statement explains that modern society mocked Judeo Christian morality until it witnessed the horrors of World War I; it then beseeches the viewer to return to the Commandments, calling them "the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws—they are the LAW." From there, the Book of Exodus is recounted, starting just after the ninth plague. After their flight from Egypt, and the Crossing of the Red Sea, Moses climbs Mount Sinai and witnesses the Commandments given as writing in the sky, which he then carves into stone tablets. When he returns, he finds the Israelites have fallen into debauchery and built a golden calf to worship. Furiously, he smashes the Commandments, deeming the Israelites unworthy. An Israelite man and woman seducing each other find, to the horror of both, that the woman has hideous sores covering her hands and is unclean, prompting her to beg Moses to be cleansed. Moses calls on God's power and lightning destroys the calf.

Two brothers, John and Dan McTavish, live with their mother Martha, a believer in Biblical inerrancy. The two brothers make opposite decisions; John follows his mother's teaching of the Commandments, becoming a carpenter living on meager earnings, and Dan, now an avowed atheist who is convinced the Commandments offer him nothing, vows to break every one of them and rise to the top. Martha evicts Dan from her house. He stops at a lunch wagon. There, Mary, an impoverished but beautiful young woman, steals a bite of Dan's sandwich, triggering a madcap chase after her. She takes refuge in the McTavish house, where John convinces his mother to take Mary in for the night. John also convinces Dan to set aside his grievance and stay; he introduces Dan to Mary. Dan quickly wins Mary over with his freewheeling ways. Martha's strict observance of the Sabbath causes friction when Dan and Mary dance on Sunday, and, although John tries to convince his mother to show grace, Dan and Mary decide it's time to run off together. Three years later, Dan has become a corrupt contractor. He earns a contract to build a massive cathedral and decides to cut the amount of cement in the concrete to dangerously low levels, pocketing the money saved and becoming very rich. He puts John, still a bachelor, in charge of construction, hoping to use him to provide his mother the gifts that she refuses to accept from Dan. Dan cheats on Mary with Sally, a Eurasian adulteress. One day, Martha visits John at his work site; a wall collapses on her. Fatally injured, with her last words, she tells Dan she spent too much time trying to teach fear, not love, of God. Now out of money, Dan learns a muckraker tabloid threatens to expose his operation. His business partner recommends a $25,000 bribe to stop publication, but lacking the funds, Dan instead attempts suicide – his partner stops him, solely because he refuses to take the fall alone, and demands the money. He goes to Sally's brothel to take back expensive pearls he gave her, but Sally refuses, revealing she smuggled herself into the country from Molokai through a contraband jute shipment and is thus infected with leprosy, likely infecting Dan as well. In a rage, he kills Sally and attempts to flee to Mexico on a motorboat (Defiance), but rough weather sends him off course and he crashes into a rocky island. His dead body is among the wreckage. Mary, fearing herself also infected, stops by John's office to say goodbye, but John insists on taking her in. As he reads Mary the New Testament story of Jesus healing the lepers (re enacted on screen, with Jesus shown only from behind), a light shows Mary's hands not to be scarred at all, and that her perceived scars had disappeared in the light. Throughout the film, the visual motif of the commandments' tablets appears in the sets, with a particular commandment appearing on them when relevant to the story.

The idea for the film was based upon the winning submission to a contest in which the public suggested ideas for DeMille's next film. The parting of the Red Sea scene was shot in Seal Beach, California.

The Ten Commandments became the highest grossing film of 1923. The film's box office returns held the Paramount revenue record for 25 years until it was broken by other DeMille films.

DeMille directed a second, expanded version of the biblical story in 1956. For the later version, DeMille dropped the modern day storyline in favor of profiling more of Moses' early life. In 2006, the 1923 film was released on DVD as an extra feature on the 50th Anniversary DVD release of the 1956 film. In the DVD commentary with Katherine Orrison included with the 1923 film, she states that DeMille refilmed several sequences nearly shot for shot for the new version, and also had set pieces constructed for the later film that were near duplicates of what he had used in 1923. On March 29, 2011, Paramount released a new Blu ray Disc with the 6 disc box set.