Land of the Pharaohs (1955) - film review

In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Khufu believes that the vast amount of gold he has accumulated in this life (obtained mainly by plundering neighbouring lands) will give him power in the next.  For that reason, he engages the services of a great architect, Vashtar, to build him a pyramid with a burial chamber that will be completely impregnable.   If Vashtar succeeds, his people, now held as slaves, will be allowed to go free; if he fails, they shall die.  As work begins on the construction of the great pyramid, the Pharaoh is visited by Nellifer, a princess from Cyprus who offers herself to him in place of the usual tribute.  The Pharaoh is so taken by Nellifer’s spirit that he makes her his second wife, not realising the extent of her ambitions.  Nellifer intends to succeed the Pharoah and is not prepared to wait for him to die a natural death...

It is hard not to be impressed with the sheer insane ambition of Land of the Pharaohs, which sets out to provide cinema’s most authentic recreation of how the pyramids of ancient Egypt were constructed.  Director Howard Hawks was proud of saying that one scene alone employed almost ten thousand extras.  The scale of the production is awesome and you can easily imagine that every last cent of the budget was well spent.  The lush CinemaScope photography, Alexandre Trauner’s mind-blowing sets and the meticulous attention to detail make this a visual extravaganza of almost epoch-making proportions.  Pity everything else about the production is abysmal.  Of course it was a stupendous flop.

In the face of some pretty unrelenting criticism, Nobel Prize winning screenwriter William Faulkner defended himself by saying that he didn’t know how ancient Egyptians spoke, which is probably the daftest cop out in history.  The truth is the dialogue is so risible that there is no situation in which it would have been credible.  If the characters had communicated in semaphore, they couldn’t be any less convincing than they are in this film, thanks to the hamfisted efforts of Faulkner and his co-screenwriters.  What is amazing is how the cast members manage to keep a straight face whilst uttering the most homespun twaddle you can imagine.

The mediocre script was never going to win any awards but it is at least partly redeemed by the bravura performances from the principal actors.  Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins bring a larger than life quality to their performances that suits the film’s artistic pretensions but does introduce a whiff of pantomime campness.  Even at this early stage in her career Joan Collins looks as though she had made up her mind to play scheming power women for the rest of her life.  She absolutely relishes the part and gives it far more than it deserves.  Don’t we just love it when she gets her big comeuppance at the end?   Land of the Pharaohs may not be the masterpiece that Howard Hawks envisaged making, but it is a lot of fun and even has some educational value.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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