Land of Pharaohs Review

A preview as a prologue. We are going to talk about a film in which the plot contains passionate love, devious characters, jealousy, intrigue, betrayal, ambition, violence, revenge... Said like this, it seems like a synthetic description of a soap opera, right? This is Land of the Pharaohs, which tells of the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the truth is that, like many other period films, the plot was that of a simple soap opera . If not, they will tell me what, in essence, Gone with the Wind is.

But of course, all these elements, seasoned with the Macgufian ingredient of the pyramid and properly combined, form a splendid cocktail . It is the same thing that happens with many poisons, that everything depends on the proper dosage; The curare used by some Amazonian tribes can kill but also save lives (it is used as anesthesia in surgical operations). And it turns out that here we have a bartender as exceptional as Howard Hawks , with whom I already warn that I am not neutral: he is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time.

There is his filmography , of which the most select are The eternal dream, To have and not to have, The beast of my girl, Red River, Scarface, Gentlemen prefer blondes, Sergeant York, Hatari!... A genius who practiced almost all genres (including horror, with El enigma de otro mundo , although his name did not appear in the credits), who made a remake of one of his own masterpieces reaching the same level of quality (El dorado, new version of Río Bravo) and who, perhaps for all this, never received an Oscar.

Now put one genius together with another: William Faulkner , one of the greats of literature, who had just won the Nobel and signed the script, although there would be much to point out there because they say that he hardly contributed more than some dialogue, being uncomfortable with a period plot (he complained about not knowing how a pharaoh spoke) and that, on top of that, it wasn't his (the story is based on the novel The Daughter of the Nile , by Margaret Lawrence).

But Land of the Pharaohs needed something else to become what it is today, a classic. It required time to rest and mature, like a good wine, to obtain the perfect bouquet. And it is that if Faulkner skipped over it -in fact, it seems that he hated cinema in general , perhaps because he had to write impossible plots for third-rate movies, as the Coen brothers reflected in Barton Fink (although beware, he also wrote the adaptations of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not )-, Hawks himself considered it one of his failed works (he wasn't self-demanding or anything, since the others he included in that derogatory qualification wereThe Big Sleep, Sergeant York and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ).

The fact is that, now that the film is sixty years old , it is exciting and fun in equal measure. Exciting because, as I said before, all its elements work like a gear even though separately they could be impressive: the brightly colored photography, the somewhat topical music by Dimitri Tiomkin (which was highly criticized at the time), the interiors clearly shot in papier-mâché sets, that operetta-like wardrobe, the 1950s haircuts, the stereotyped characters, the white extras playing Egyptians (thousands, by the way, as was done in pre-digital times) etc.

Special mention for the unavoidable anachronisms . The first of them just started, with a camel included in the parade when they still did not know each other. The director insisted on putting it when they told him that there were only donkeys and that it was the Hyksos who introduced the horse in Egypt, at the end of the Middle Kingdom).

Another is to place the pyramids of Giza in Memphis so that they can be seen, something that is almost an obligation because, after all, in 1955 there was no Internet and tourism was not so widespread, so most people associated those monuments to the country iconographically. Also erroneous are the diplomatic relationship with Cyprus (much later actually), the allusion to granite as material for the Great Pyramid (it is made of sandstone), the presentation of Cheops as a warrior king (he barely organized a few expeditions to Sinai), the judaizing air of the architect's people (the Hebrews are not associated with Egypt until the New Kingdom), the straight swords ...

Now, in other respects the film is not so badly set. The scenes that show the construction of the pyramid are acceptably truthful and do not fall into absurdities like that of Exodus: gods and kings, in which elephants were seen dragging the blocks ( I'm not even talking about the mammoth of 10,000 ). Nor is the frequent mistake made of attributing the jobs to slave labour , which there was not in the Old Kingdom. Khufu's fight with a bull could represent (with quite a bit of imagination, mind you) the Heb Sed festival , a ritual to celebrate the reign of the pharaoh.

The labyrinths inside the pyramid do not exist (at least not that extensive) but they are rather a resource of the script to justify the original way of sealing them (an unheard of sand mechanism) and provide a shocking ending to the evil Nellifer : buried alive next to Cheops. Since this was Joan Collins, she must have survived; she's still out there, cool as a cucumber.