Are They Camp, Cult, or Classic?
Warner Home Video has it three ways with four new box sets.
Glenn Kenny's "The Discophile"
(posted 06/26/07)
"This picture probably plays better in France because it's dubbed," Peter Bogdanovich wryly notes in his commentary to Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs, out today on DVD from Warner Home Video in a context you don't normally associate with Howard Hawks's movies.
That context is Volume 4 of Warner's series of three-movie box sets they've put under the umbrella of "Cult Camp Classics." Volume 1 collects "Sci-Fi Thrillers"; these are the far-more-tedious-than-its-title-implies Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958); the perhaps deliberately hilarious Queen of Outer Space (1959); and the sub-par prehistoric-monster-on-the-loose-in-today's-world The Giant Behemoth (1959).
But let's get back to Volume 4 — "Historical Epics" — and Pharaohs for a minute. Hawks' 1956 film, which he asked to have withdrawn from a 1963 retrospective, failed because, as he put it, "I didn't know how a Pharaoh talked." Apparently neither did William Faulkner, one of the picture's screenwriters — but how could he, or Hawks, really? I mean, when you think about it? In any event, the point of interest that Hawks hooked into was linked to the director's early training as an engineer — he was fascinated by trying to work out the mystery of how the Pyramids were built. And indeed the sequences dealing with that are among the most impressive things about this attempt to make a higher class of DeMille film. DeMille seemed to have had it right all along in going for the brash and vulgar, because most of Pharaoh's stabs at conspicuous intelligence are stilted indeed.
Bogdanovich's commentary mixes the director-historian's overwhelming respect for Hawks with an honest attempt to come to grips with the film's shortcomings. Bogdanovich also adds long passages of his own decades-old interviews with Hawks (which sound remarkably good) wherein Hawks speaks not only of the picture but the commercial concerns that spurred its creation. (And if you're worried that the failure of Pharaohs put Hawks off his game, don't — his next picture was the great Rio Bravo.) Those who don't care much for auteurs might get a kick out of Pharaohs anyway, given that a young, heavily made-up Joan Collins is the female lead, a princess offered up to Pharaoh Jack Hawkins. But those who do care much for auteurs and auteurism will be thrilled that the "Historical Epics" set also contains the first feature directorial credit for one Sergio Leone: his rarely seen The Colossus of Rhodes. It's a fascinating picture made all the more so here via the commentary by Leone biographer Christopher Frayling — relatively informal but confident and information-packed. (The box is rounded out with the most genuinely campy picture of the bunch, The Prodigal, one of two Lana Turner–starrers in the series. Poor woman.)
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