The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Howard Hawks’ Egyptian folly
From a drunken writer to a lusty leading lady – how a Nile epic went overboard
In April 1954, a scorching day of slave labour was afoot, in a stone quarry near the unfinished pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan, outside Giza. Many thousands of extras were needed to achieve one of the grandest location shots in Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs, which had just started production in an extreme state of unreadiness.
An uncharacteristically nervous Hawks hoped to put his best foot forward by getting at least one huge money shot in the can. To court favour, he sent the rushes posthaste back to Warner Bros, to show where the $1.75million budget – which would ultimately balloon to a ruinous $3.15 million – was going.
The sequence was all heaveho – the hefting of stone blocks to build Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins) the blingiest monument known to man. Many of the extras were Egyptian army recruits, lent to the production by President Naguib, as if to prove that 4,500 years of human history hadn’t wholly rearranged the country’s power structures. But the toil and boredom was taking its toll on these nearly naked men.
Second unit director Noël Howard, who would later write a memoir in French about the shoot, Hollywood sur Nil (1978), came up with an idea. He managed the crowd by getting them to chant a few singsong phrases as they heaved and ho-ed: “Lift that barge!”, “Get a little drunk!”, “Smoke Chesterfield!” Then a scurrilous mood took over. To Hawks’s amazement, the sound of thousands of Egyptians chanting “F--- Warner Bros!” rose up from the quarry.
For the first time in his career, Hawks was in over his head. The year before, newly married to his third wife, the TV actress Dee Hartford, and saddled with expensive alimony, he had struck a deal with Jack Warner for $100,000 plus 50 per cent of the profits on his next movie – then an unheard-of package for a mere director. The trouble was picking a subject.
Twentieth Century-Fox had just had a record-breaking hit with its crucifixion melodrama, The Robe (1953), the first production in ultrawidescreen CinemaScope, which left every studio racing to cash in with a sandy epic of their own. So it was that the vague idea for Land of the Pharaohs was born. Hawks was lounging by the pool of the Hotel du Cap, near Antibes, when he got the green light. Howard remembered the director asking in what direction Egypt lay. “Noël,” he drawled, pointing across the Med. “I am going to build a pyramid.” The next months were a mad rush of getting the picture planned, designed, cast, and written, mostly all at the same time. The script was a sticking point. Hawks was more comfortable with the wiseacre banter of cynical newspapermen or jaded gunslingers. “I haven’t any idea of how a pharaoh talks, or behaves, or acts, eats, or makes love, or anything,” he later admitted. “I was just completely lost.”
He needed some weight on the page, but neither Anthony Veiller (whose screenwriting credits included Beat the Devil) nor Robert Graves (I, Claudius) liked the look of it. Hawks turned instead to a triumvirate of scribes, two of whom, Harry Kurnitz and Harold Jack Bloom, were Hollywood workhorses. The third, unfortunately, was William Faulkner, a bosom buddy of Hawks who had helped on two of his best films, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). The recent Nobel laureate needed cash just as badly as Hawks, and pounced on what he assumed would be hack work. On arrival in Paris, however, Faulkner was dumped in Hawks’s hotel suite, catatonically drunk and bleeding from a head wound, having overlubricated his journey across the pond and been assaulted in a latenight bar. “Hawks, Plaza” was all he could say to the gendarmes.
It rapidly became clear to the other writers that Faulkner’s heart was not in it. “He didn’t see movies and didn’t like them,” recalled Bloom. “He thought they were for children.” His idea to have the Pharaoh talk like a Southern plantation owner – pure Faulkner – competed with Kurnitz’s notion that he ought to be modelled on King Lear. Of all the lines in the finished film, only one is thought to be Faulkner’s, when Khufu drops by the site and asks: “So, how is the job getting along?” After five weeks of binge drinking, Faulkner was dismissed.
Howard was put in charge of historical accuracy, and had bad news for Hawks when construction began on 30 chariots for the Pharaoh’s entourage. According to hieroglyphics of the 26th century BC, Egyptians didn’t have the wheel yet. Nor, to the dismay of the film’s animal wrangler, did they have horses. Or even camels. Hawks took Howard aside and begged him, “I’ll make a deal with you – I give up the horses, but for God’s sake, Noël, let me have camels!”
With such expense going into the set, there was not much left over for big-name casting. The male lead, Hawkins, was the respected star of British war films such as Angels One Five and The Cruel Sea, but not exactly a Wayne or a Bogart. “Some of the lines we were expected to speak were unspeakable,” he complained, having signed on in the hope of having some Faulkner poetry to recite. He would call the film “perfectly ridiculous”.
For the female lead – the treacherous Princess Nellifer, Khufu’s avaricious second wife – Hawks wrote to Warner that they needed “the most beautiful, sexy girl we can find”. They pursued 17-year-old Ursula Andress, but Paramount had already snapped her up. Hawks’s wife, Dee, was briefly mooted – by him – but she was pregnant, saving embarrassment all round. Gina Lollobrigida’s name was thrown into the hat. The supermodel Ivy Nicholson came to Cairo for a screen test, but when she had to act biting Hawkins on the hand, she gnashed right through to the bone.
Hawks wound up with Joan Collins, the sultry 20-year-old brunette who had made her name as a series of bad girls in various British quickies. Straight away, she started a fling with Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie, who was playing her on-screen lover, the Captain of the Guard. When the shoot moved to Rome, the pair would stay up all night cavorting on the Via Veneto, to Hawks’s displeasure.
The pasta and red wine took their toll, and both became overweight for their parts: Collins had to suck in her stomach to fit into the bejewelled costumes made when she was 8lb lighter. On one take, a fake ruby, stuck in her bare navel to placate the censors, popped out on to the floor. “Get some airplane glue!” Hawks barked to the crew. “Get
A ruby popped out of Joan Collins’s navel. ‘Get some airplane glue!’ barked Hawks
anything to keep the damn thing in place.” Chaplin kept corpsing on set when he had to declare his love for Collins, and soon she cracked up too, with the irreverent mood spreading to the entire crew. Hawks was furious, and called off shooting for the day.
Todd McCarthy’s definitive Hawks biography catalogues sundry other reasons why the shoot was such a nightmare: “heat, language barriers, censored international communications, equipment failure, the arrival of Ramadan, and even a headline-causing incident in which Egypt accused Warner Bros of smuggling because [the art director, Alexandre] Trauner had bought a mummified bird, and his assistant was caught with it at customs. At one point, a fight broke out among some extras, resulting in the death of one man; at another, some army extras mutinied and charged the film crew, resulting in Hawks [...] having to fend them off by throwing rocks. Later, the threat of hostilities with Israel caused the disappearance of virtually all the extras overnight.”
The oblivious Warner, meanwhile, on the strength of the crowd footage, was sure he had a hit on his hands. Charles Feldman, Hawks’s agent, speculated it could make $20-30 million, and wired him to say: “Jack Warner is really overboard about the rushes… Confidentially, he feels [it] is the greatest stuff he has seen in his life.” Mirage as it was, the idea of hitting the jackpot put a gleam in Hawks’s eye. Chaplin found him in the Pharaoh’s treasure chamber, among piles of fake gold and jewellery. “Sydney, look at all this,” he said. “Isn’t it … beautiful?”
It was only in the last weeks of the shoot, when the final cost was calculated, that Warner went ballistic. “In my wildest imagination never would believe could go this figure,” he wired apoplectically to Hawks. He didn’t like the new footage he was seeing from Rome, either, complaining that the camera was too far from the actors, a problem inherent in using the CinemaScope format indoors.
Even though the early reviews were quite kind, it soon dawned on everyone that Land of the Pharaohs was nothing like the blockbuster of their dreams. It lacked the stars or Biblical prestige of rival attractions, so Warner Bros panicked with a lowbrow ad campaign: “Her Treachery Stained Every Stone of the Pyramid!” It took a measly $4.2 million worldwide, leaving the studio $1.5million out of pocket. Going down as one of Hawks’s costliest failures, it would send him into a brooding hiatus before his comeback with Rio Bravo (1959).
Watched today in the right Sunday matinee spirit, Land of the Pharaohs is a daft delight. Hawks’s habitual cleverness and control, which resulted in several flinty masterpieces, clearly deserted him on this occasion, but there’s something about the film’s combination of puffed-up spectacle and soapy melodrama that makes it a deliciously weird artefact. And at 107 minutes, it’s a good hour shorter than the roadshow spectaculars of Cecil B DeMille.
Especially hard to shake is the finale, when Nellifer realises her murderous schemes have led to her sitting pretty, atop all the untold wealth in the Pharaoh’s kingdom … until it dawns on her that she’s trapped inside the self-sealing burial chamber, just another trinket in his tomb.
The film is a folly about a folly, a monument to megalomania that gets carried away in its own right – as if Ozymandias had commissioned a commemorative poem and found himself stuck with Shelley’s.
“When I first saw it as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favourite film,” said Martin Scorsese, who was 12 when the film opened – perhaps the perfect age to appreciate its tawdry sense of the exotic, and Collins as a conniving temptress in lashings of fake tan. She looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963) – a role for which Collins would later screen test.
Scorsese’s own film Casino (1995) – about amassing a fortune, losing your soul, and marrying an exuberant, unfaithful gold-digger who wants to take you to the cleaners – could be an unofficial remake of Land of the Pharaohs. De Niro’s Ace Rothstein is an abusive tyrant cut straight from Khufu’s cloth, while Sharon Stone, shaking those dice and rolling around in armfuls of Bulgari, never had a more Collinsesque role.
The sphinx and pyramid of Vegas’s Luxor Hotel even feature in Casino’s cynical closing montage: “Where did the money come from to rebuild the pyramids? Junk bonds,” rues Ace. Hawks may have looked back on Land of the Pharaohs with a similar sense of waste, but as a pile of glittering wreckage, it endures.