Land of the Pharaohs

The pharaoh Cheops comes home from his wars with gold, and he has one concern: that the gold should stay with him after death. He wants a tomb that cannot be robbed. Among the captives he finds an architect, who offers a design in exchange for his people's freedom. The pyramid rises for years and thousands carry stone. Meanwhile a woman named Nellifer arrives at the court; she becomes the second wife and wants to learn where the treasure chamber is. Once the architect's seal closes, it never opens again. Howard Hawks directs. Harold Jack Bloom, William Faulkner and Harry Kurnitz wrote the screenplay. Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins and Dewey Martin are in the cast. It is an American production. Faulkner could not work out how a pharaoh should speak and suggested the character talk like a plantation owner; Kurnitz brought in a manner closer to the language of royal theatre instead and rewrote the dialogue. The film cost around three million dollars and did not earn that back at the American box office. Hawks counted it among his own failures in later years and said none of them had been close enough to the material. The matter it treats is an obsession with the tomb; a ruler puts a whole country to work on his own death. The crowd scenes were shot with real extras and the construction sequences are the strongest thing in the film. In its second half the narrative turns into court intrigue and the building falls into the background. The ending is built on the sealing of the tomb. Its limit is the writing; the dialogue is artificial, the characters shallow, and the story cannot reach the scale of the images. Who it is for: viewers who like old Hollywood epics and large scale production. Who it is not for: the dialogue is stilted, the film long, and the ending dark.