The pyramids were never this hard: how Land of the Pharaohs made Joan Collins and broke Howard Hawks
A cavorting Joan Collins, a drunken William Faulker, hundreds of furious Egyptians… How the 'historically accurate' epic went horribly wrong!
ByTim Robey, FILM CRITIC
In April 1954, a scorching day of slave labour was afoot, in a stone quarry near the unfinished Egyptian 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 post-haste to Jack Warner at Burbank, to show where the $1.75m budget – which would balloon to an ultimately ruinous $3.15m – was going.
The sequence was all heave-ho – the hefting of stone blocks to start work on the funeral complex of Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), the film’s dictatorial main character, whose life’s work becomes focused on building humanity’s blingest death monument. Many of the extras were Egyptian army recruits, lent to the production by the beneficence of President Neguib, as if to prove that 4,000 years of human history hadn’t wholly rearranged the country’s power structures. But the toil and boredom of these nearly naked men, after three lengthy rehearsals, was taking its toll. It was murder to choreograph them in unison.
Second unit director Noël Howard, who would write a book-length 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 sing-song phonetic phrases as they heaved and ho-ed. Few of these were words they understood – “Lift that barge!”, “Get a little drunk!”, “Smoke Chesterfield!”. But then a scurrilous mood must have taken over. To Hawks’s amazement as he looked on, the sound of thousands of Egyptians chanting “F___ Warner Brothers!” came rising from the quarry’s depths.
As Hawks took a car back to his hotel, his driver remembered him smiling and muttering this to himself the whole way. But the signs of him being in over his head, a rare event in his prolific career, were obvious to all. Newly married in February 1953 to his third wife, the TV actress Dee Hartford, Hawks was entering his late 50s (Dee was 24) and had a lot of expensive alimony to sort out.
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Howard Hawks on the set of Land of the Pharaohs CREDIT: Getty
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He struck a deal with Warner that would net him $100,000 plus 50 per cent of the profits – then an unheard-of package for a mere director – for a film of their choosing, with a Hitchcock-style possessive credit thrown in, along with $1,000 in weekly expenses, a car, and a secretary.
The trouble was picking a subject. 20th Century Fox had just had a whopping hit with The Robe (1953), the first production in ultra-widescreen CinemaScope, which broke industry records and had every studio racing to cash in. So it was that the vague idea for Land of the Pharaohs was born – not Judeo-Christian, this one, but still a sandy epic about obsession on a grand scale.
Hawks was in plaid swimming trunks, lounging around the pool of the Hotel du Cap, when he got the green light from Warner. Howard, who was soon to become his new right-hand man, remembers the director asking in what direction Egypt lay across the Med. “Noël,” he drawled, pointing towards it. “I am going to build a pyramid.”
The next months were a mad rush of getting the picture planned, designed, cast, and written, all mostly at the same time. But written last. Hawks hired the renowned Hungarian-French art director Alexandre Trauner (Les enfants du paradis) and the aspiring director Howard, a man whose greatest talent was in subterfuge – he would get the best tables at all the restaurants by calling ahead and adding a slight cough to his surname.
The script was a constant sticking point. Always much more comfortable with the wiseacre banter of cynical newspapermen or jaded gunslingers, Hawks knew next to nothing about the ancient world. “I haven't any idea of how a pharaoh talks, or behaves, or acts, eats, or makes love, or anything,” he would later admit. “I was just completely lost.”
He needed some serious weight on the page, but neither Anthony Veiller (The African Queen) nor Ben Hecht liked the look of the project. Nor did the potential godsend Robert Graves. Hawks turned instead to a triumvirate of scribes, only two of whom made significant contributions to the finished film: the divorced expat screenwriter Harry Kurnitz, seasoned veteran of Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and a 29-year-old New Yorker called Harold Jack Bloom, about to be Oscar-nominated for his first job, on Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953)
The third writer, unfortunately, was William Faulkner, a Hawks bosom buddy who’d been partially responsible for 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 for the $15,000 fee plus living expenses.
On arrival, Faulkner was dumped in Hawks’s Paris hotel suite entirely drunk and bleeding from a head wound, having over-lubricated his journey across the pond and been assaulted by thugs in a late-night bar. “Hawks – Plaza” were the only words he managed to tell the local gendarmes before collapsing in a stupor.
It rapidly became clear to Kurnitz and Bloom that Faulkner’s heart was certainly not in the actual writing. “He didn’t see movies and didn’t like them,” Bloom would recall. “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.
Amid these tugs of war, they were falling well behind the rest of the production. Trauner’s sets were good to go, after consultation with the world’s leading Egyptologist, Jean-Philippe Lauer, about the contentious question of how the world’s tallest structures were actually built, as well as the ingenious methods used to seal off their burial chambers, which would provide the film with pretty much its entire third act.
Howard, who had been put in charge of research and historical accuracy, had bad news for Hawks when construction began on 30 chariots for the Pharaoh’s entourage. According to hieroglyphics of the 26th century B.C., Egyptians didn’t have the wheel yet, so they didn’t have chariots. Nor, to the huge dismay of the film’s animal wrangler, did they have horses. Or 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!”
While Hawks burrowed down into these details, the plotting and dialogue were in a state of chaos, not helped when the director swanned off for a skiing holiday with Dee and their miniature poodle. Faulkner, meanwhile, was off on a quixotic quest of his own, to obtain as many bottles as he could of a 1949 Chassagne-Montrachet from a favourite French restaurant.
Of all the lines in the completed film, only one is thought to be his work, when Khufu checks in with his chief architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice), several years after construction has started, and asks him “So, how is the job getting along?”. Hawks finally let Faulkner go after five weeks of binge drinking, and this marked the inglorious end of the writer’s Hollywood career.
With such expense going into the set-building, there was never much in the budget left over for big-name stars. Jack Hawkins was respected at the time, but not exactly a Wayne or a Bogart, and his British military bearing gave him a hard time getting fully into character, especially given the dialogue at hand. “Some of the lines we were expected to speak were unspeakable,” he later complained, having largely signed on in the hope of having some Faulkner poetry to recite. He would call the film “perfectly ridiculous”.
For the key female role – the treacherous Princess Nellifer, a Cypriot ambassador who offers herself to Khufu and becomes his avaricious second wife – Hawks wrote to Warner that they needed “the most beautiful, sexy girl we can find.” On the strength of a screen test much trumpeted in Hollywood, they pursued the 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 some embarrassment all round. Gina Lollobrigida’s name got thrown into the hat, too. The supermodel Ivy Nicholson was flown into Cairo for a test, but when she had to act biting Hawkins on the hand, she gnashed through it right to the bone, enraging him, and was dismissed as “a little cuckoo” to be a safe bet.
With camp inevitability, they wound up with Joan Collins. Hawks had met the sultry 20-year-old brunette in Paris a year earlier, and cast her somewhat reluctantly, because her sexuality wasn’t the cool, aloof type he usually favoured. She’d played a series of bad girls in various British quickies, and continued that theme – alas, not just on-screen, but off-screen too
Straightaway, she started a fling with Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie, who was playing the Captain of the Guard whom Nellifer seduces. When the shoot moved to interior scenes in Rome, the pair would stay up all night cavorting on the Via Veneto, much to Hawks’s displeasure.
All 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 bejeweled costumes made to measure for her when she was eight pounds lighter. On one take, a fake red ruby, stuck in her bare navel to placate the censors, popped right out onto the floor. “Get some airplane glue!”, Hawks barked to the crew. “Get anything to keep the damn thing in place.”
The lovebirds found it difficult to take their ultra-solemn dialogue at all seriously. Chaplin kept corpsing when he had to declare his love for Nellifer, and soon cracked Collins up too, spreading an irreverent mood to the entire crew. Hawks was furious at this insult to his authority on set, and called off shooting for the rest of the day, warning both actors they were putting their future careers in jeopardy.
Todd McCarthy’s definitive Hawks biography has a detailed account of all the other issues that made this shoot such a nightmare. “There were countless problems of 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 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 and [d.p.] Russ Harlan having to fend them off by throwing rocks. Later, the threat of hostilities with Israel caused the disappearance of virtually all the extras overnight.”
Through all this, you might have expected rising anxiety from the executives, but the PR job Hawks kept doing with Jack Warner had been working almost too well. On the strength of his epic crowd footage, the studio was sure it had a massive hit on its hands. Charles Feldman, Hawks’s powerful 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 – his highest-grosser before that, the wartime rabble-rouser Sergeant York (1941), had netted a mere $6m. One day, Noël Howard snuck in to find him in the set of the Pharaoh’s treasure chamber, looking to and fro at the huge piles of fake gold and jewellery, until he gave a start when Chaplin, too, abruptly entered. “Sydney, look at all this,” he recovered to say to the actor. “Isn’t it…. beautiful?”
It was only in the final weeks of the shoot, when production manager Gerry Blattner calculated the final cost, 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 trying to use the CinemaScope format indoors.
Hawks was disillusioned with the wide-screen process and would never use it again, not even for the open-range safari scenes in Hatari! (1962). Because of the awkwardness of splicing close-ups and master shots together, it made the cutting process hell. The original editor, Vladimir Sagovsky, was fired. His replacement, Rudi Fehr, took one look at the assembly and pointed out that the story didn’t begin until page 54. “I tried restructuring but it didn’t work,” Fehr would recall. “Howard knew it. They never solved their problems.”
Even though test screenings of the film were apparently excellent, and even the early reviews quite kind, it slowly dawned on everyone that Land of the Pharaohs was going to be nothing like the blockbuster they’d dreamed of. It lacked the stars or Biblical prestige of rival attractions, so Warners panicked with a low-brow ad campaign trading on lurid, Duel in the Sun-style sensationalism instead: “Her Treachery Stained Every Stone of the Pyramid!”, ran one tagline.
It would never reach higher than number 4 at the US box office, and took a measly $4.2m worldwide, leaving Warners $1.5m out of pocket after prints and advertising. Going down as one of Hawks’s costliest failures, it would send him into a brooding hiatus for three years before his comeback with Rio Bravo (1959).
Watched today in the right Sunday matinee spirit, Land of the Pharaohs is a daft delight, and actually one of Hawks’s most entertaining films of that period, for a handful of intended reasons and many that were not. It’s quite apparent that Hawks’s habitual cleverness and control, which resulted in several flinty masterpieces, 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 artifact. At 107 minutes, it’s a good hour shorter than the roadshow spectaculars Cecil B. DeMille was putting out at the time, which undeniably helps.
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. With all the detail it lavishes on this one exorbitant building project, the film’s 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,” has said no less a light than Martin Scorsese, who was 13 when the film opened – perhaps the perfect age to appreciate its tawdry sense of the exotic, and Joan Collins as a conniving temptress in lashings of shiny fake fan. She looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963) – a role for which Collins would even screen-test when Walter Wanger was casting it.
If you want to look for the film’s influence in Scorsese’s later output, the place to go is Casino (1995), his own treatment of amassing a fortune, losing your soul, and marrying an exuberant, unfaithful gold-digger who wants to take you to the cleaners. It’s practically an unofficial remake. De Niro’s Ace Rothstein is an abusive tyrant cut from Khufu’s cloth, while Sharon Stone, shaking those dice and rolling around in armfuls of sumptuous Bulgari, never had a more Collins-esque 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 gaudy pile of wreckage it glitters and endures.
