Parker Lewis
It's hard to believe it was over 60 years ago that Land of the Pharaohs was released, and it's definitely worth watching along with say Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments - sort of like a special movie festival based on the Egyptian theme as reimagined by Hollywood of course, with British and American actors.Joan Collins (sister of famous author Jackie) was at her best in this epic, and I remember the final scene when she ended up being entombed in a dreadful way. I also remember the crocodile scene, where people were being thrown into a pit of crocodiles. I can't recall why this happened, but I guess justice was rather swift in the Land of the Pharaohs.
jllewell
The one thing I did like about this was what everybody else hated... that there was no obvious good guy! That's what I loved when I first saw it at 7yrs old, and that's what I love now... all the 50's spectacle and nonsense, glamour and spangles, without the very 'disturbingly obvious' one faceted good guy.I found these silly people with their silly dialogues more real, as a consequence, even at that tender age.And I always was attracted to the macabre and gruesome, so the ending was perfect for me; I found it totally satisfying at the time. So much so, that I remembered the film and it's title for many years, after other, more polished films had faded.Silliness on a grand scale, and yet there is quite a dose of REAL flavour in there.
chaos-rampant
All you need to know about this is that it's about a pharaoh, the building of his pyramid to house his gold and vanity, and the scheming femme fatale that wants it for herself. And that it's dreadful as a film, the camera is lifeless, the story is a cartoon.Only in Hollywood could they afford a hubris of this sort; huge resources mobilized to prop an empty monument, flamboyant people in dresses pose, mingle and scheme, and no one here minded, going on the thought that the size of the thing will be enough for posterity to remember.The only upside is that Hawks wasn't an overly pious guy like DeMille so we have his overblown spectacle and camp but not the pontificating.
bkoganbing
Land Of The Pharaohs will go down in cinema history as Howard Hawks's attempt to out DeMille, the great Cecil B. in DeMille's own territory of cast of thousands spectacle. Hawks got a rather mixed reception for his film in that regard.In its way Land Of The Pharaohs is as campy a film as any DeMille ever gave us even without the arcane writing that typifies a DeMille product. Jack Hawkins as Pharaoh Khufu is the ruler that stretched Egypt's hegemony over its widest area and he's decided that he's going to have the biggest tomb around to symbolize his glory. To design such a tomb he drafts James Robertson Justice who is an architect among the prisoners of a recently conquered people. In a package deal Hawkins gets the son as well who grows up to be Dewey Martin and who during the course of the film incurs a big debt from Hawkins.The biggest problem in this film is that ultimately the subject of the film is ego and vanity. Hawkins with his bloody conquest and his desire to have a monument to stand for all time to his ego and vanity is just not a terribly sympathetic figure. But he's positively heroic to the vixenish young Joan Collins who starts out as a Cyprian princess given to Hawkins in return for tribute of a few thousand bushels of wheat. Right there Hawkins should have sent the baggage packing, trophy concubines he can get anywhere, but that grain was to feed his army of workers on that tomb.Once in the palace, Collins starts intriguing in her best Alexis Carrington manner, but she gets a rather fitting fate in the end.Land Of The Pharaohs does have some nice crowd scenes that DeMille might have envied. Some of the best scenes show the ancient methods of construction of the tomb with nice Dimitri Tiomkin music accompanying.But story and characters are the base of a really good film and Jack Hawkins is not a heroic Khufu by any means.
AD
