Every time I open up the Watch TCM app, I look for movies about to leave the app. With this past month being dedicated to Warner Bros.' 100th anniversary, there are quite a lot of movies that I've already blogged about, but even then I can still find a movie or two that I haven't seen before, much less blogged about. For today's post, I recently watched the epic Land of the Pharaohs.
The pharaoh in question is Khufu, also known as Cheops, and played by Jack Hawkins who is oh so obviously Egyptian. Khufu is one of the pharaohs known for having a great pyramid built in his honor, which also served as his burial place. Ancient Egyptian tradition had powerful figures like pharaohs buried with a substantial amount of their stuff to accompany them into the afterlife (or the "second life" as it's referred to in this movie). As a result, and from past experience, Khufu is terribly worried about the thought of grave robbers. That's part of the reason later pharaohs like Tutankhamen were buried in much more non-descript places, as it would be more difficult for grave robbers to find the graves.
Anyhow, the question for Khufu is just how to make that grave impregnable to would-be grave robbers. To that end, he asks his chief architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice), who just happens to be a slave in addition to Khufu's architect. Vashtar had been captured in one of Khufu's many wars of conquest, prized for his skill. Vashtar might be willing to help Khufu, but at a price: he wants the group of slaves captured alongside him to be freed upon completion of the pyramid. Vashtar knows he's going to be killed anyway since Khufu isn't going to let anybody with the secret to the security measures remain alive, so what difference does it make if Khufu says no and kills him now, or kills him at the end? Besides, Khufu needs Vashtar's knolwedge.
The other problem is that it's pretty darn expensive to build a pyramid. Oh, Khufu seems to have enough slave labor for now, but it's sitll going to cost to get the stones, and there's all that stuff that he wants buried with him. He's already raised taxes on his subjects, and they're bristling at that, so he needs to go on more conquests to be able to spread the tax levy across more people. In one of those wars, in Cyprus, the defeated side decides to give their most beautiful princess away to become one of Khufu's queens. Khufu, obviously thinking with the wrong head, accepts, and Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) goes to Egypt.
Nellifer immediately finds out about all the stuff Khufu is going to have buried with him and gets jealous, understandably wondering what the use of all that stuff is just buried underground, she obviously not believing in Egyptian religious traditions about the second life. But Khufu doesn't trust anybody, not even Nellifer, to go into the treasure room.
The other problem for Khufu is that with it taking so long to build the pyramid, Vashtar is getting old, and going blind. He may not be able to complete building the pyramid and overseeing the security measures before he goes blind, but that entails the danger of letting somebody else, such as his son Senta (Dewey Martin) in on the secret.
Parts of Land of the Pharaohs are lovely to look at, and there's certainly a fair bit of spectacle here. But other parts of the movie are bogged down by an uninspired story. It's another one of those movies where everybody does the best they can with the material they're given, except that it's subpar material. Jack Hawkins is the best of the actors here, although even he doesn't have all that much to do. It's as if Warner Bros. spent a ton of money going over to Italy and Egypt to get permission to do all the filming and so much on the would-be epic sets that they didn't have money left over to get a story that really works. Or if they did, they spent it on too many screenwriters. Three, including William Faulkner, are credited.
But if you want to see what Hollywood was doing in the mid-1950s to try to compete with television, a spectacle like Land of the Pharaohs is a good example of that.
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