Land of the Pharaohs

Why some great films don’t attain classic status is beyond me.

Land of the Pharaohs has been a unique, rich experience ever since pan-scanned broadcasts of the 1960s, sandwiched between car commercials on our 19-inch B&W televisions. When Peter Bogdanovich uses an entire audio commentary to dismiss it in bored tones, we just throw our hands up in surrender. Not every movie has to be an auteurist showcase and not every ‘giant’ costume epic is a bloated embarrassment. This intelligent look at the ancient world fascinates for multiple reasons.

After one audience-pleasing thriller after another, in the 1950s Howard Hawks lost his commercial edge but continued making superb movies. Clearly seeking a new challenge, and fleeing the interference of ever-more powerful star actors — he helped expand the sci-fi craze with The Thing from Another World. Its down-market status may have been a factor in his decision to delegate directing credit. Hawks’ frontier drama The Big Sky didn’t win the following of his John Wayne features, yet it is his best western, transcending the Taking-of-The-West genre for a major statement about nation-building and native Americans.

For Land of the Pharaohs Hawks went far afield of his Safe Zone. The epic has no bankable star. It’s set in the far past, so the dialogue can’t be slick and sly, as in Hawks hits like The Big Sleep. No Christian context can be promoted to woo the Bible Belt, a big audience factor for the success of Quo Vadis and David and Bathsheba.

If you build it, immortality is yours.

Hawks instead bases his film on ‘epic appeal,’ a sexy villainess and a solid story. He seems to have identified strongly with his Pharaoh character, a monarch who has achieved everything in human reach in the world of 2500 B.C.. There’s nothing reserved about Hawks’ approach — his obvious aim was to depict the construction of a pyramid in full detail. His designers embellish known history with architectural wizardry that could be labeled ‘historical science fiction.’

Howard Hawks’ epic was passed over in the film critics’ Auteur Rush of the 1960s. English writer Robin Wood was quick to discard it in favor of the cinematic riches of Hawks’ Scarface and Only Angels Have Wings. Pharaohs instead drew interest mostly as an inadvertent Camp classic. It billboards the English import Joan Collins, the ’70s and ’80s TV star who soon became famous for playing vixen sirens in soapy miniseries, and for constant appearances in tabloid trash gossip news.

For pure spectacle and a sense of wonder about the ancient world, few epics can compare with Land of the Pharaohs. Hawks fixates on the nature of the absolute power wielded by the Pharaoh Cheops (Jack Hawkins). A living god with a kingdom at his disposal, Pharaoh directs the energies of an entire people to his personal wishes, in a society dominated by a religion focused on Death and the Afterlife. All of Egypt will spend decades building a theft-proof crypt to safeguard Cheops’ corpse — and his riches — on their way to the next life. These are grand and universal themes: power, greed and the dream of immortality.

The epic earns top marks in all production aspects. The designs concocted to represent ancient Egypt are a major achievement of Alexandre Trauner, a master of French poetic realism and the go-to genius for masterpieces by Orson Welles, Jules Dassin,  Billy Wilder,  John Huston and  Bertrand Tavernier. Considering that so much detail had to be left to the imagination, the Egyptian interiors are brilliant — they look as if people could actually live in them. The same goes for the rich but practical costumes on view. Even Joan Collins’ abbreviated outfits, suitable for seducing a king, have a degree of taste and credibility.

Hawks’s production company filmed in Rome’s Titanus studios and on several distant locations in Egypt. The size of the crowd scenes is staggering, and so is the way they are filmed. A column of a marching army stretches all the way to the horizon. The acres of costumed extras are directed with intelligence. Hawks’ associate directors had taken on difficult location challenges for The Big Sky, but each of this film’s scores of pageant-like displays must have taken days to stage. The opening march speaks to Pharaoh’s power and majesty; Hawks records it with simple, matter-of-fact angles. Pharaoh enters on a large man-carried throne, borne by eight strong men. It in turn is held aloft by an even bigger throne-carrier borne by forty-eight bearers. The precision is breathtaking. We assume these bearers must have been Egyptian soldiers.

The scenes depicting the building of Pharaoh’s pyramid-tomb have never been surpassed. It’s all pre-CGI, and does without miniatures. A few matte paintings are employed.  (see top ↑ )  A series of giant vistas show thousands of Egyptians gathering to work, cutting stones in quarries and dragging them across the desert. These living museum tableaus deftly balance foreground action, such as a surveyor getting a reading from a plumb-line, with background action of mass labor.

A single shot will include several specific construction actions, composed and coordinated to stretch deep into the distance. The camera then pans 180° and even farther. One lengthy, fascinating pan in a quarry is actually two shots joined in the middle by a moving match-matte on a foreground stone.

Frankly, the film’s production-direction achievement is intimidating. The accuracy of these scenes was such that in the late 1950s they were excerpted to make an educational short subject. One enormous ramp descending into the ground was actually part of an existing, unfinished ancient pyramid, unearthed just for the film. This was Howard Hawks’ first and only show in anamorphic CinemaScope. Although he reportedly hated the format, it’s exceedingly good-looking.

A Pharaoh is a lot like a Big-Deal Movie director.

All that effort to carry out one man’s ‘vision’ … Land of the Pharaohs is a lot like making a movie. The consummate Hollywood director Howard Hawks called his own shots, bought his own projects and ‘developed’ his own stable of star talent. The main conflict in the building of Pharaoh’s pyramid plays as a client-vendor issue. Pharaoh (the producer) has need of an architect (technicians) to build his pyramid. In the kind of professional standoff Hawks must have frequently faced in Hollywood, the slave architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) is able to face down a master of the world:

Cheops: “Men don’t talk to me that way. I could make you regret those words.”
Vashtar: “But you have need of my talent.”

What could be more central to the Howard Hawks ethos? The men of Land of the Pharaohs are all professionals. Pharaoh is an obsessed conqueror addicted to the acquisition of gold. His high priest Hamar (Alexis Minotis) is also a pro, supporting his sovereign and guiding his decisions. He guards Pharaoh’s back against treachery, just like one of John Wayne’s gunslinger helpers in Rio Bravo. Hamar recognizes Vashtar’s engineering skills as nothing less than miraculous. The enormous stone-moving mechanisms proposed to make Pharaoh’s tomb impregnable are sheer fantasy, or very close to it: the kind of wondrous gimmick Steven Spielberg would place in an Incan treasure crypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The storyline is very close in structure to Howard Hawks’ western Red River, right down to the midpoint montage that bridges ten years. John Wayne’s Tom Dunson builds up a massive herd of cattle while a kid grows up to be Montgomery Clift, and Vashtar builds his pyramid while another kid grows up to be Senta (Dewey Martin). Land of the Pharaohs even has a Hawks sing-a-long, albeit chanted by an entire nation when working happily to build their leader’s tomb.

This picture’s cattle drive is delayed until the ‘The End’ credit comes up, when Vashtar’s people begin their trek home. Many another 1950s movie would have brought in a Cold War anti-Red theme, but Vashtar’s enslaved foreigners are not specifically identified. Are they supposed to be Jews?  Phoenicians?

Like the cattle drive, Pharaoh’s grand mission sours only later, when he ignores his people’s happiness and dotes on his second wife, the firebrand Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins). Just as in Red River, a charismatic woman shows up in the second half of the story to confuse the obsessed leading man. Pharaoh already has an ideal wife in Nailla (Kerima of Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands). To provide balance in the low quarters, Senta wins a dutiful slave-wife in Kyra (Luisella Boni). Involuntary bondage is a given in the ancient world, and Kyra can only gain respect via some risky rebelliousness.

Critics long ago identified the ‘Hawks Woman:’ independent, adventurous females played by Rosalind Russell and Lauren Bacall. Actress Joanne Dru’s frontier woman is strong enough to drink with the men and sass back too. She barely flinches when hit by an arrow. Joan Collins’ Nellifer is far from that Hawksian ideal, basically just a Wrong Dame on the Nile. The ads barked, “Her Treachery Stained Every Stone of the Pyramids.” She uses sex as a bargaining chip to wrap Cheops around her bejeweled fingers. Their foreplay consists of slapping, whipping and biting.

Joan Collins’ performance is indeed a ripe one. Her veddy crisp enunciation of ‘enmity’ and ‘mutual’ matches James Robertson’s terrific work with the word ‘piddimid.’  Princess Nellifer spends most of her time slinking around in killer costumes. She struts the right stuff to make Cheops come apart at the seams. It’s the 1950s yet filmic femme fatales were still not allowed to have navels. Nellifer is made to wear a big jewel in hers.

Nellifer gets the recurring Howard Hawks dialogue line, “Don’t ever do that to me again.” When delivered by Humphrey Bogart and Montgomery Clift, it’s followed by a ‘trembling trigger finger’ gesture, and the statement, “See how close you came?”

Collins’ Nellifer is a different kind of coiled snake. A Surgeon General’s health warning ought to be tattooed on her stomach. Her grossly perfidious sexuality didn’t have to be discovered by latter-day critics — ‘every stone of the pyramids’ sounds fairly accurate.

For your sake we hope the sex was good, Treneh.

The muscleman Mabuna (Carlo D’Angelo) serves as Nellifer’s personal slave and obedient bodyguard; he sleeps on the floor by her bed, like a guard dog. She uses her wiles to turn Pharaoh’s top guard Treneh into her pawn as well. The unlucky Treneh is played by Sydney Chaplin, later Barbra Streisand’s original costar in the stage musical Funny Girl.  Priest Hamar’s accusations of treachery are well-deserved — Nellifer brings down 2/3 of the royal family before falling into her own greedy trap. The awesome, richly deserved finale is one of the most satisfying expressions of anti-female payback ever. Did Hawks have any ex-wives he resented?

Some of the critical dismissal of Pharaohs stems from Howard Hawks’ vocal disappointment with the result. It was apparently a nightmare to film. He didn’t get the cast he wanted — Joan Collins was a replacement for a Hawks discovery, a Vogue model who proved too troublesome during filming. His famous quote is, “we never figured out how a Pharaoh should talk.”  Did anyone really expect to bridge 27 centuries to get up close & chummy with that Dude Cheops?  The moment that ancients speak in English, a movie is already working at a stylistic remove. Pharaohs follows the standard practice of casting historical figures with cultured English actors. Their more formal, grammatical speech sounds agreeably foreign — at least to American ears.

Hawks’s quotes likely came in the wake of news that his full-time effort for two years had fallen a full half-million dollars short of recovering its production cost. Both Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins dismissed the movie as terrible, likely reacting to the box-office reports as well. Pharaohs now plays as superior to all but a few super-Epics, which prompts us to second-guess its ‘failure’ to a couple of simple miscalculations. It should have been a Road Show picture, at least a half-hour longer with an intermission, etc. Marketing of 1955 often impressed (intimidated?) audiences with claims of ‘bigness,’ but Pharaohs was sold as an ordinary ‘A’ production. Instead of a high-toned theme, the ads displayed prominent images of a bikini-clad Joan Collins.

Warners moved into TV production in 1955. They should have paid more attention to how Walt Disney promoted 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: an infotainment TV show previewing the pyramid-building spectacle would have distanced the show from cheapie costume movies, and alerted every parent to Pharaoh’s educational potential.

We also can’t help noting that Pharaohs, for all its realism and intelligence, doesn’t deliver enough of what audiences expect in a costume epic: big-scale action. The fault comes when Pharaoh merely tells Hamar about the war he almost lost, the one in which he witnessed Vashtar’s ‘moving stone’ inventions used to alter the terrain of a battlefield in mid-battle. Commercially speaking, the movie needs some kind of battle, not just the one swordfight in Nellifer’s boudoir.

Land of the Pharaohs presents one wondrous scene after another, backed by one of Dimitri Tiomkin’s brassiest, most dynamic music scores. Tiomkin had made a splash with his epic music for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. As an aggressive promoter, he pushed to include profitable title songs in his movies. Some of his early- 50’s movie scores were too bombastic. His over-the-top music for the noir D.O.A.  may have been a case of a producer with screwy taste.

Tiomkin would later develop some of the biggest epic scores ever — The Guns of Navarone,  The Alamo,  55 Days at Peking,  The Fall of the Roman Empire — but his Pharaohs music stands apart. The cues convey Pharaoh’s militarism, the wonder of a man believed to be a living God, and a giant national undertaking. Choral visions suggest the Afterlife, with a creepy entombment curse that outdoes Edgar Allan Poe.

Vashtar’s self-sealing tomb is nothing short of brilliant. Its planning must have fully involved Hawks, designer Trauner and Warners’ ace editor Rudi Fehr. All of those massive stones sliding into place enforce a chilling sense of finality, absolute Doom. Even the all-powerful Pharaoh must play his part in a culture designed as a Death Pact with the gods.

That leaves the perfidious Queen Nellifer in a pretty pickle, with only the disapproving Hamar and thirty tongueless priests to keep her company. It’s like the ultimate bomb shelter fantasy, only 2500 years in the past. Thirty people would use up all the available oxygen mighty fast. With Hamar gone, who is running the country, and advising the new young Pharaoh?  Perhaps the all-wise Vashtar should apply for the job.