Land of the Pharaohs (1955)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) Years after the disappointing release of Land of the Pharaohs, director Howard Hawks admitted that he had taken up the job for the opportunity to work in widescreen CinemaScope. He did have a point—it’s impossible to watch the film and not be impressed by the sheer large-scale cast-of-thousands scope of the entire production. The story takes us to the construction of the pyramids, and it practically recreates the effort at scale: the making of the film involved official cooperation from the Egyptian government to unearth the foundations of an unfinished pyramid, and secured the cooperation of the army for the in-camera recreation of sequences with up to ten thousand extras. It’s a mind-boggling production story, one that will never be repeated considering CGI economies of scale, and an effort that is immediately visible on-screen. And yet, despite Hawks orchestrating such a production, Land of Pharaohs feels like a miss—by itself, but also as a piece of Hawks’ filmography. Gone is the whip-fast dialogue, the competent heroine and the sense of urban sophistication: this is a film that, in keeping with the sweeping historical epics of the time, deals in arch fake-profound dialogue, a very conventional role for the heroine, and a weird sense of historical recreation that never feels too far away from Hollywood’s sense of history rather than any real effort to commit to the historical era. The plot, about the pyramid’s architect trying to find a way to make the pyramid robber-proof while escaping being executed to keep its secrets, is fine without being as good as the setting. The eye-popping presentation of the pyramid’s construction far outshines anything in the plot, which doesn’t give as much weight to the rest of the film. The best-known star here is Joan Collins as the female lead, and while she’s very attractive, she’s not that good of an actress. While you can easily justify watching Land of the Pharaohs for its visual aspect, the rest of the film is a disappointment, and perhaps even a double disappointment considering the rest of Hawks’ filmography. This being said, I did find one aspect of the film amusing: as someone whose day job consists of managing “architects” of sorts, I had a load of fun passing on some of the film’s most pretentious lines of dialogue: “I do not intend to punish you, architect, but to reward your skill,” “Work swiftly, architect,” “Well, architect, you sent word you had a plan,” “I did believe in you once, architect,” “You have served me well, architect,” “I will not bargain with you, architect,” “Architect, I understand that you’re ready to start work on the inner labyrinth…”…