TWENTY years ago, when Cecil B. DeMille realized he could film the destruction of a Philistine temple better than anybody else, he cast about for a story that would lead up to so magnificent a climax. Sampson and Delilah, the result of his search, has found its way back to Boston and, although the first 107 minutes pale beside the last ten, it's well worth seeing.

No one should confuse DeMille with art, but Samson and Delilah comes closest of all his films to fitting normal standards of taste. For once he departs from the archaic film-making conventions which mark his other work. Technically, The Ten Commandments is cruder than Birth of a Nation, but Samson and Delilah looks comparatively modern. DeMille's camera moves more than usual, and often beautifully. He stages Delilah's discovery of Samson's blindness with real cinematic imagination; the camera follows Samson turning the millstone as he passes by her, completely oblivious to her seductive presence. The color, while no better than opulent, is opulent indeed; DeMille makes even the sky look expensive.

DeMille's mastery of spectacle stems not only from his ability to create convincing lavishness, but from his amazing sense of detail. Few directors excel him at dressing sets; from, palaces to tents, every human habitation looks as though people had lived there for years. In the temple courtyard, hawkers sell miniatures of the 90-foot high idol within, which the audience hasn't even seen yet. The Philistine decor combines Minoan and Canaanite motifs, an archaeological accuracy that surely means little to the public, but much to DeMille.

Samson and Delilah displays all of DeMille's virtues and few of his faults. Despite a mawkish prologue ("Human dignity perished on the altar of Idolatry"), the mating of liberty with monotheism is less corny than in The Ten Commandments. The vitality of villainy provides the film's greatest fascinations; DeMille stood foursquare against sin but always loved the chance to show just how much sin he was against.

THE biggest sinner for them all is Delilah, and her characterization makes the film truly bizarre. In the classic story of good man led astray, DeMille pays little attention to the seduced here, concentrating instead on Delilah's lust for Samson. From her first appearance, as the kid sister of Samson's beloved, she is obviously excited by Samson's body, and her reaction to his outwrestling a lion is explicitly sexual. DeMille tentatively suggests Delilah's role as emasculating bitch (at one point she turns Samson into a docile houseboy), but ultimately backs away from this idea and has her "repent." Still, between DeMille's perversity and Hedy Lamarr's devastating charms, Delilah emerges as a highly unusual, if unresolved, extrapolation of the Bible.

George Sanders, as the head Philistine, delivers a beautiful portrayal of George Sanders, bringing to oily life such DeMille epigrams as, "A man who could stop the heart of a lion could still the heart of a woman." Possibly the high point of his film career comes when, playing with an enormous ant farm, he explains, "Industrious little creatures. The Babylonians call them z'vuv; the Danites call them nemlach. We call them ants."

Angela Lansbury executes the thankless role of Delilah's spear-wielding sister, looking like a porcelain Valkyrie and apparently regarding with doubt her future as a blonde bombshell. Victor Mature, who plays Samson, is quite fat and quite bad, but he pulls down a wicked temple.