Cheap Land of the Pharaohs (Video) (Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins) (Howard Hawks) Price

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Customer Reviews of Land of the Pharaohs

Joan Collins Rocks The Planet!!!
This film is too long and often boring...BUT a young and beautiful Joan Collins, puts both ss's in SASS with her innate ability to spout bitchy dialogue better than any other star. She makes the movie, as she does in most of the crap she had to make for FOX in the fifties. She made films with Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Ray Miland, Jayne Mansfield and Richard Burton and all of them were less than masterpieces. It's too bad that the greatest star ever didn't make it until years later, but at least she did!

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Music is what makes a good motion picture.
Dimitri Tiomkin's composition and theme song of "Land of The Pharoahs" trully encaptures anyone who appreciates good music. Some of the actors cannot elevate their talents to that of Jack Hawkins, the Pharoah, especially Joan Collins, early in her career, but basically the movie is very entertaining. Watch and listen carefully to the music and enjoy its beauty and gone talents of Dimitri Tiomkin. His music imagination will envelope you into a time long past but really fascinating.

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Dry Gulch
Here's a case of a serious mismatch between a director and his material. As interested as the great Howard Hawks might have been in Egyptian history, he should have had enough self-awareness at age 60 to know the story just didn't suit his style. The result is a laborious and unconvincing tale, stretched over 20 years, about the building of the Great Pyramid. The basic concept is that the real burial chamber of the late Cheops has never been discovered because it was cleverly concealed by a hydraulic system built into the pyramid. Some of the history worked into the story has now been refuted by archeologists, such as the idea that people were forced to work on the building. One of the first things to go when a director gets older is his sense of pacing and you begin to see that here for Hawks. Several of the players are seriously miscast, including Joan Collins, who deserved to be buried alive in the last scene for this performance, and Hawks contract player Dewey Martin, a perennial stiff. James Robertson Justice redeems it a little with a dignified performance and Jack Hawkins brings real likeability to the role of an absolute despot; not easy.