Land of the Pharaohs *** (1955, Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins, James Robertson Justice) – So Bad It’s Good Movie 1

The laughable 1955 ancient Egyptian historical epic Land of the Pharaohs is a total misfire. It’s very, very bad indeed, but nevertheless great, camp fun for collectors of terrible movies and those who like to laugh at them.

Jack Hawkins (born Wood Green, London) is risibly cast as the glum and self-obsessed Pharaoh Khufu, or Cheops, an Egyptian pharaoh of the fourth dynasty. He’s remembered as the geezer who built the Great Pyramid of Giza in the 26th century BC, the only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Khufu is desperate to leave his mark for posterity in the Egyptian sands by building the greatest pyramid of them all. When he dies, he plans to take all the gold he can lay his hands on along with him into his second life and so he takes on captured master architect Vashtar to build a robbery-proof tomb for him. In return, Khufu will free Vashtar’s enslaved people.

But, alas, while the pyramid is being built, Khufu makes the mistake of taking a cute, young Cyprian princess as second wife. But Khufu doesn’t take account of the evil Princess Nellifer’s ambitions, passions and naked lust for gold. She wants his gold in this life and plots to help him a little bit quicker than he planned into his second life. She certainly doesn’t fancy eternity with him in his tomb.

The 22-year-old Joan Collins (born Paddington, London) is equally bizarre casting as Princess Nellifer, but that’s nothing compared with James Robertson Justice (born Lewisham, London) as the Master Architect Vashtar, James Hayter as his servant Mikka, Sydney Chaplin as Captain of the Guard Treneh, Dewey Martin from Texas as Vashtar’s son Senta and Alexis [Alex] Minotis from Greece as the High Priest Hamar.

The great Howard Hawks (Scarface, Rio Bravo) directs and the famed novelist William Faulkner was one of the three writers (along with Harry Kurnitz and H Jack Bloom, let’s name and shame them), so it should have been a contender. But they’re way out of their depth, with the wrong material for them. The direction and screenplay are just a mess. And there’s virtually nothing valuable here or anything of any quality whatever.

The tale is meandering and ponderous and the incredibly costly $3 million production shamefully wasteful (with a huge number of extras and an army of technicians to pay for). The dialogue is banal, the acting is low-grade and the makeup and costumes are just plain tacky.

But let’s be kind. In its favour are the impressive sets built at the Titanus studios in Rome and created by the esteemed production designer Alexandre Trauner, the authentic Egyptian location filming, Dimitri Tiomkin’s majestic score and Lee Garmes and Russell Harlan’s eye-catching cinematography. And the crowd scenes are spectacular in best Hollywood style, with hundreds of marching trumpeters, drummers, pipers and maraca players, 1,600 cavalry camels and 10,000 extras supplied by the Egyptian government.

And, after whimpering along for an hour and a half or so, Land of the Pharaohs does manage to end with a bang. The film has a satisfying (though totally invented) climax. But, by then, it’s too late and all the good work is virtually all lost among all the movie’s crazy excess and kitsch histrionics.

Land of the Pharaohs unsurprisingly flopped at the box office, taking only half its cost back and becoming Hawks’s first failure.

However, it impressed the then-13-year-old Martin Scorsese: ‘When I first saw it as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favourite film,’ he says. Yes, but he was 13 at the time!

Also in the cast are Luisa Boni [Luisella Boni] as Kyra, Kerima as Queen Nailla, Piero Giagnoni as Xenon, Carlo D’Angelo as Nellifer’s bodyguard Nabuna, Vittoria Febbi as Mea, Ferruccio Amendola as Egyptian architect, Gianfranco Bellini as Captain of the Guard, and Diego Carlisi as Priest.

© Derek Winnert 2013 So Bad It’s Good Movie 1

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