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.
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