For decades I’d read about huge water tanks being used for the parting-of-the-Red Sea sequence in The Ten Commandments (’56), but due to laziness or what-have-you I’d never seen raw footage of these tanks, built and used on the Paramount lot, until today. Ignore the Egyptian location footage (shot in October 1954) that occupies for first 3 minutes and 50 seconds. The Paramount tank footage begins at 3:52 and goes until 5:26. Posted on 5.19.11 by Steven Willhite.

Sidenote: Nobody in the front lines of Hollywood movie journalism posts this kind of stuff except me. Right now they’re all jibber-jabbering about the $20.5 million earned last night by Suicide Squad. Only Hollywood Elsewhere dares to stand up in the face of the latest idiot lemming stampede and say, “Wait…what about the engineering and the shooting of the Red Sea sequence near the corner of Melrose and Bronson 61 years ago?”

Sub-sidenote: Marvin J. Chomsky‘s Tank was an actual awful movie. Set in Georgia, it costarred James Garner, C. Thomas Howell, G. D. Spradlin, Shirley Jones and Jenilee Harrison. Produced by Irwin “low-rent” Yablans, written by Dan Gordon and released by Universal on 3.16.84, it was a silly father-son relationship film that involved militant authority defiance with the aid of a privately-owned Sherman tank.