A new biography of British film icon Jack Hawkins relives the actor’s work in Egypt making Land of the Pharaohs, a Cinemascope epic shot on location about the building of the Great Pyramid.
For millions of cinemagoers, Hawkins was known as the living embodiment of ruggedness, resilience and humour, an imaged forged in classics like ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, ‘Zulu’, and ‘Ben-Hur’.
In 1955, Hawkins accepted £30,000 to play Pharaoh Khufu and jetted to Cairo aboad a BOAC Comet.
However, when shooting finally got underway, the sixteen-week project proved hard going under the Egyptian sun, where temperatures topped 40 degrees.
“Worse still, there was no escape from the sand—the insidious, all-pervasive dust that crept ghostlike into costumes, seeping through cracks in the cameras, microphones, lights, and sets—covering everything in a mantle of mustard coloured powder,” says Nathan Morley, author of Jack Hawkins: A Biography, the first ever portrait of the actor.
According to Morley, strong gusts often darkened the sun for several days and buried the main road with 8 inches of drifting sand.
Worse still, on arrival in Luxor, as Hawkins leafed through the pencil-scrawled shooting script, he found flaws at every turn. His memoirs describe a ‘perfectly ridiculous’ plot littered with ‘frightful lines’.
However, Jack’s faith was lifted after he viewed rushes showing hordes of soldiers and camels and teaming vistas of slaves hauling blocks over the sand at the pyramid of Baka—all moving to a background score by Dimitri Tiomkin. The shots were starkly beautiful, capturing the blinding blue sky, the red-hot sun and baked desert in stunning Technicolor.
“To create such magic, the director Howard Hawks had engaged 9,787 extras, many Egyptian Army conscripts,” Morley says. “Other scenes were shot at a quarry at Tourah, near Cairo, and at Aswan, a granite mine located 880 kilometres away.”
Seen today, the film has the scope and flavour of a Hollywood spectacular, including thrilling crowd scenes, glorious sets, and strong acting. In fact, on the other side of the Atlantic, Warner Brothers, the studio behind the film, were convinced they were putting a blockbuster in the can. ‘This footage … makes anything DeMille has done about Egypt look like a child at play,’ studio representative Matt Blumenstock cabled Jack Warner.
But whatever the cause, and no matter how much Warner Bros flogged Land of the Pharaohs, it was a commercial failure and made just $2.7 million, a loss of $200,000.
Dumbfounded by the press reaction, Hawks disowned the picture and as his bitterness deepened, he eventually requested its omission from the retrospective at the National Film Theatre.
“Nowadays, the film holds up well, I think,” says Morley. “In fact, I recall reading it was Martin Scorsese’s favourite movie”.
Jack Hawkins: A Biography includes contributions from Virginia MacKenna, Peter McEnery, Derren Nesbitt, Michael Jayston and many others and is published in November by Fonthill Media.