Land of the Pharaohs had a cast of thousands – Warners' press office claimed there were 9,787 extras in one scene[5] – and was one of Hollywood's largest-scale, ancient world epics, made in the same spirit as The Robe, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur.
Plot
Throughout his reign, Pharaoh Khufu amasses a great treasure. He wants to be entombed with it when he dies, free from the threat of grave robbers. Dissatisfied with the unoriginal plans of his architects for his tomb, he offers Vashtar, a brilliant slave, a bargain: freedom for his enslaved people if he can design a robber-proof pyramid; however, Vashtar will be killed once it is completed, so the secrets of the design will die with him. Vashtar agrees. After much thought, he comes up with an ingenious design that seals the labyrinth to the burial chamber after burial via an ingenious system of jars filled with sand which, when broken, will release huge blocks of stone to slide into place and close the labyrinth.
As the years of construction pass, Khufu's subjects who once joyously viewed the building of the pyramid as holy work become disillusioned by decades of misery and drudgery. Yet Khufu presses on, levying high taxes on tributary states to continue financing his tomb. The province of Cyprus, however, offers the beautiful Princess Nellifer to him in lieu of taxes, and Nellifer eventually becomes his second wife. She plots and schemes to become his heir; her attempted assassination of Khufu's young son instead claims the life of the boy's mother, Queen Nailla, when she shields her son from a deadly cobra with her own body.
Meantime, Vashtar's aging eyes begin to fail, and he is forced to rely his son Senta for help with the supervision of the construction, teaching him its secrets. One day on the construction site, Senta saves Khufu from a runaway stone block; promised any reward in Khufu's power to bestow, he chooses Nellifer's slave Kyra. When Nellifer protests, Khufu harshly rebukes her in front of the court. Humiliated, Nellifer conspires to have the pharaoh meet an early fate and ultimately manipulates him into a sword fight with Treneh, the captain of his guard, whom Nellifer has seduced. Though Khufu wins, he is seriously wounded and collapses from blood loss. Nellifer refuses his pleas for help and watches him die.
Khufu's loyal high priest and lifelong friend, Hamar, releases Vashtar's people as promised and generously allows Vashtar to join them, as the design does not have to be kept secret. Khufu's treasure is moved into the tomb so that the deceased can enjoy them in the next life. Hamar then tells Nellifer that she, as queen, must preside over the ceremony in the central burial chamber. Once she gives the order to seal the sarcophagus, the jars of sand are broken, and massive stone blocks seal the way out. "There's no way out!" Hamar tells her. "This is what you lied and schemed and murdered to achieve. This is your kingdom!" Nellifer vainly screams for mercy as she, Hamar and the priests who accompanied them are interred in the tomb.
The film ends with Vashtar, Senta and their people, on their way to their homeland, briefly pausing to look back at the pyramid as they hear the seals boom shut.
Hawks had between 3,000 and 10,000 extras working each day during the fifty-plus day shooting schedule. The government supplied those extras, half of whom were soldiers in the Egyptian Army.
The film was shot on location in Egypt and in Rome's Titanus studios. For scenes showing the pyramid under construction, the film crew cleared the sand away from a ninety-foot deep shaft that was part of the unfinished pyramid of Baka. Elsewhere, they built a ramp and foundation the size of the original pyramid, where thousands of extras were filmed pulling huge stone blocks. Other scenes were shot at a limestone quarry at Tourah, near Cairo, and at Aswan, a granite quarry located 500 miles away. At these sites, 9,787 actors were filmed for one scene.
When the Pharaoh was inspecting, and rejecting, the Egyptian architects' models for his tomb, the third model he looks at is a model of the actual interior of the pyramid built for Khufu.[citation needed]
Reception
Lacking a big name cast, Land of the Pharaohs was unsuccessful at the box office, earning $450,000 short of its $3,150,000 production budget.
A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that "while it is impressively sweeping in its eye-filling pageantry, this saga of the building of a colossal pyramid 5,000 years ago is staged on the creaky foundation of a tale of palace intrigue that must have been banal even in the First Dynasty."[5]Variety wrote, "While shy of proven draw value in cast names, the Howard Hawks production for Warners makes up for the lack of romance, adventure and intrigue played against a grandioso backdrop of actual story locales populated with teeming masses of thousands upon thousands of extras."[7] Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Hawks has invested his subject with enthralling spectacle from the first victorious march home of the Pharaoh with his captives. The actual story can hardly be designated as having an equally grand concept, and is made exceptional mainly by technical devices."[1]Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote that the technical aspects of the film "will provide moments of complete fascination," but thought that screenwriter "Faulkner, abetted by Harry Kurnitz and Harold Jack Bloom, has laid a Hollywooden egg."[8]Harrison's Reports wrote that the film "grips one's attention throughout," due to the "overwhelming grandeur and vast production values" and "fascinating story."[9]The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The attraction of such epics as Land of the Pharaohs lies almost entirely in their incidental detail, since whatever the period in time, the situation is predictable and the players are doomed to remain within the limitations of Hollywood's historical imagination. It says much for Jack Hawkins' Pharaoh (a performance of integrity and surprising vigour) that it surmounts the occasional absurdities of dress and unlikely figures of speech, even if we remain unconvinced that he is a living god."[10]
The film was banned in Egypt on the grounds of "distortion of historical facts."[11]
Land of the Pharaohs was Howard Hawks's first commercial failure; it caused him to take a break from directing and to travel through Europe for several years. Hawks made his next film, Rio Bravo (1959), four years later; this was the longest break between two feature films in his career.
Cult status
The film has drawn more interest over the years and has been defended by Martin Scorsese, French critics supporting the auteur theory, and for numerous elements of its physical production. Danny Peary in his book Cult Movies (1981), selected it as a cultclassic.[12] On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 78% rating based on 9 reviews.[13]
In a 1978 article Martin Scorsese listed the film as among his favorites
I'd always been addicted to historical epics, but this one was different: it gave the sense that we were really there. This is the way people lived; this is what they believed, thought, and felt. You get it through the overall look of the picture: the low ceilings, the torchlit interiors, the shape of the pillars, the look of the extras. There's a marvelous moment when the dead are being taken away from battle in their coffins, and someone says, "Let us hear the gods of Egypt speak." The camera pans over to one of the statues of the gods, and it talks. That's it-the statue talks! You don't see the mouth moving, you just hear the voice. Then they pan over to the other god-and now he talks. Soon there are about four gods talking. You're never told, "This is how they did it: it was a joke, a trick." In a sense, you're taken into confidence by the Egyptians; you're let in on a religion. I watch this movie over and over again.[14]
^The Times, 2 May 1956, page 3: Review of Land of the Pharaohs, which states that the film opens "at the Warner Cinema to-morrow". Retrieved from The Times Digital Archive 2013-08-09
^'The Top Box-Office Hits of 1955', Variety Weekly, January 25, 1956
