It’s funny how Land Of The Pharaohs (1955) is better known today as a favorite film of a celebrated auteur rather than as the lost masterpiece of one of the great auteurs of Hollywood’s golden age. Land Of The Pharaohs is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films and, if one is to trust user reviews on Letterboxd, the sole reason that most people seek the film out. It can be difficult for some to appreciate what filmmaker Howard Hawks accomplished with his film Land Of The Pharaohs when that film’s genre has changed and transformed beyond almost all recognition in the intervening sixty years. Land Of The Pharaohs is a great film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as His Girl Friday (1940) and Rio Bravo (1959).
Unlike many of the other historical epics that Hollywood produced in the fifties, Land Of The Pharaohs goes back further than the spectacles of Cecil B. DeMille to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). Howard Hawks doesn’t just mix contemporary fashion trends with historical record to fabricate a fantasy of ancient times, he attempts to construct a convincing setting that is equal parts an idealized representation of the ancient world as it is an assertion of Hollywood’s power to weave dreams. The low angled shots in Land Of The Pharaohs reveal ceilings and other aspects of these structures that set them apart from the wholly theatrical operations of DeMille. Hawks trades in tangible fantasies just as Griffith did before him and Fritz Lang would after him with his renowned Indian Epic diptych.
The characters and language that fill these spaces of visceral fantasy are likewise at odds with the Shakespearean posturing and theatricality of films like The Robe (1953), Quo Vadis (1951), and The Ten Commandments (1956). In Land Of The Pharaohs the expressively flowery language of the stage is uniquely counterbalanced with the pulpy language of melodramas and latter day Film Noir pictures made in the fifties. For the screenplay for Land Of The Pharaohs, Howard Hawks turned again to novelist William Faulkner to imbue the film with a degree of relatable humanity that is seldom a part of such epics. Pharaohs, priests, queens, slaves, soldiers, and architects are all humanized in an effort to immerse the viewer not only in the world of the film, but also in the emotionally rich inner lives of these larger than life characters.
The story that is told through these aesthetic machinations is as grand and romantic as DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934); a boiler plate epic about the inevitable corruption of power by greed and the inherent nobility of self-sacrifice. Land Of The Pharaohs is in essence a morality tale warning against avarice. Joan Collins’ turn as the scheming second wife of Pharaoh Jack Hawkins was career defining in its perfect balance of fragile tragedy and high camp. The gestures of the cast as they perform their roles mirrors the contrasting dichotomy of the visual design of the film. Jack Hawkins’ Pharaoh can be the bold, ruthless tyrant in one scene only to play his character as a flawed and fearful man in the next.
What Hawks does in Land Of The Pharaohs is to deliver a thoroughly enjoyable historical spectacle that is simultaneously subversive in its subtle revisionism. The prestige of the Playhouse 90 drama is filtered into the scope epic of Hollywood in an attempt to strike a balance and reinvigorate a cinematic form that, at the time, seemed endanger of going extinct. Hawks succeeded in this brilliantly but at the cost of an audience and critical reception that would make epics like Land Of The Pharaohs the new norm.
