with extreme taste

MINISTER: Who plays Christ? EDDIE: A kid we’re all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, in a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly, and with extreme taste…. We saw in a previous post how earnest Cecil B. deMille was about his religious beliefs. But in Hollywood, then and now, DeMille is the great showman, the great manipulator, the master of the cheap thrill. Through the first half of his career, DeMille may have put more nearly-naked women on screen than any other filmmaker. In The Sign of the Cross (1932), DeMille’s first biblical film of the sound era, Claudette Colbert’s milk bath, in which she is obviously naked, may be the most pornographic scene of its era — unless it’s the one in which the Roman official Marcus Superbus, unsuccessful in seducing the virginal Christian girl Mercia, gets Ancaria, “the wickedest woman in all of Rome,” to perform the “Dance of the Naked Moon” around her to “warm her into life.”…