Truly Dreadful Film

Lack of good storyline.

Excellent but underrated film

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

All you need to know about this is that it's about a pharaoh, the building of his pyramid to house his gold and vanity, and the scheming femme fatale that wants it for herself. And that it's dreadful as a film, the camera is lifeless, the story is a cartoon.Only in Hollywood could they afford a hubris of this sort; huge resources mobilized to prop an empty monument, flamboyant people in dresses pose, mingle and scheme, and no one here minded, going on the thought that the size of the thing will be enough for posterity to remember.The only upside is that Hawks wasn't an overly pious guy like DeMille so we have his overblown spectacle and camp but not the pontificating.

Colorful spectacle is widely panned but has some merits. The Technicolor is gorgeous and the sets are impressive. A sexy young Joan Collins provides most of the film's personality, though she doesn't appear until over forty minutes in. The movie is a delight to look at, though the script is weak and the performances are stuffy...by everybody but Collins, that is. Jack Hawkins plays the part of Pharaoh Khufu like this is Macbeth. The scene where he fights a bull to impress Collins is hilariously out of place and campy, but it's my favorite scene in the film. The ending you see coming but it's still well done. I would say that if you go into this with a low expectation on historical accuracy and an appreciation for the campy you might enjoy it.

This film manages to combine the worst of the 1950s bloated historical epic: cheesy dialogue, stilted acting, and spectacle over substance.Everyone gives an uninspired performance. You have Jack Hawkins struggling to make his self-obsessed pharaoh credible while Joan Collins vamps it up as the femme fatale who seeks to usurp his throne and his treasures. Her performance is terrible but also absolutely hilarious, melding together sensuality with unbridled kitsch.The sets and spectacle are impressive, to be sure. I can see why director Howard Hawks was proud of that. However, he rightly regarded The Land of the Pharaohs (1955) as an embarrassment. Only lovers of camp will get a kick out of this.

It may take a nation to build a nation, but it takes 40 minutes for anything substantial to occur in this epic of boring exposition. O.K., we get it. The ancient pharaohs were obsessed with the after-life, and according to this, the most materialistic people until Imelda Marcos built pyramids out of shoes. But for the first quarter of this eternal movie, we get seemingly endless shots of the thousands of extras carrying the stones for the pharaoh's resting place and the gems he will go to eternity surrounded by. Until Joan Collins enters the scene, that's all that pretty much happens, and after that, you will be distracted by her frequent decrease in her vocal pitch.You have to give Collins' character a ton of credit. She knows how to make an entrance. Her neighboring princess from a near-by poor country sends her in place of monitory tribute and her scheming nature has her instantly after his eternal treasure and plotting to get rid of the pharaoh's wife in a truly sinister manner. But no matter how close she gets to her goal, the pharaoh's loyal men have their silent eyes on her and a scheme to make her as immortal as she wanted to be, albeit much sooner than she expected.An ambitious attempt to dramatize early Egyptian history, it partially succeeds as a view of how things could have been. Then, there's the scenes inside the pyramids where traps for future invaders literally are set in stone. And then, Collins gets so many evil looking close-ups that you can't wait for her come-uppance. This truly is a camp classic if you can stand the boring bits surrounding it.