Land of the Pharaohs
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Land of the Pharaohs is a 1955 Cinemascope epic film made by the Continental Company, Ltd and presented by Warner Bros. It was directed and produced by Howard Hawks from a screenplay by Harold Jack Bloom, Harry Kurnitz and the novelist William Faulkner. The film score was by Dimitri Tiomkin.
The film starred Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins, with Dewey Martin, James Robertson Justice, Kerima and Alexis Minotis. It is a fictional account of the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, remembered in Greek as "Cheops". Collins, just 22 during production, played a beautiful greedy woman, a role she would repeat many times over a very long film and television career.
It literally had a cast of thousands (Warner Bros. claimed there were 9,787 extras in one scene ) and was one of Hollywood's largest-scale, ancient world epics, in the spirit of The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur and others. The film was shot on location in Egypt and in Rome's Titanus studios.
Existing prints such as the U.S. Warners DVD run 104 minutes but there are unsubstantiated reports of a 144 minute version.