Thursday Movie Picks #399: A Dig (Archaeology/Paleontology)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Now that we're done with February, we're also done with the romance themes, at least officially. This week, the theme is "A Dig", further specified to mean archaeology and paleontology, sorry all you grave diggers in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. This one was a bit difficult, since I was having trouble thinking of old movies with archaeological digs. Eventually, I kind of cheated, in that one movie has a paleontologist with no real professional digs, while another has an archaeologist and if memory serves no real professional digs either. The third one, however, does have digging:

Bringing Up Baby (1938). Cary Grant plays a paleontologist who finally gets that bone he needs to complete his dinosaur skeleton. However, in trying to raise money for the museum, he runs into Katharine Hepburn's self-absorbed socialite with a jaguar named Baby, proceeding to make Cary's life a living hell. Somehow, he falls in love with Kate. Sure, the movie is funny, but Hepburn needs to be shaken like Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance.

Valley of the Kings (1954). Robert Taylor, doing whatever MGM put in front of him plays a turn-of-the-century archaeologist working in Egypt trying to find royal tombs. He's approached by the daughter of his old college professor (Eleanor Parker). She has a theory about the bibilcal Joseph's travels in Egypt, and is convinced that if they can just find the tomb of Pharaoh Ra-Hotep, that hypothesis can be proved one way or the other. So the two set off to find the Ra-Hotep tomb, with all sorts of complications.

She (1965). Peter Cushing plays an archaeologist in the early 20th century in the Middle East who is approached by some strange people. They think he looks exactly like the face on an ancient pendant. She-who-waits (Ursula Andress) certainly thinks the two are one and the same, and thinks she might have a connection to the ancient past, too, so she convinces him to follow her to the desert where their eternal destiny can come true.