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Their symmetry gets right inside me
Last night we reconstructed our Linux-driven pseudo-TV and tried it out; tonight we had a full-fledged movie night complete with movie cat and I feel the fact that we have just finished Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs (1955) proves that I will put up with almost any amount of soap in exchange for some decent engineering, although it was a close thing. Alexis Minotis as a wry and honest High Priest of Amun helped. Joan Collins made up like Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus (1947) did not. According to TCM, Hawks really wanted to make a movie about the building of a pyramid and was obliged to come up with a plot to justify it and the order of importance shows; the best scenes look like Cinemascope translations of double-page spreads from David Macaulay's Pyramid (1975) complete with thousands of extras and location shooting that verges on the Fitzcarraldo—one exterior set involved redressing the Unfinished Northern Pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan—and then the palace intrigue is pasted on with lines of dialogue like "Even a queen may be lonely" and gratuitous misrepresentation of cobras. The finale is spectacular and ironic and the film doesn't quite seem to realize just how powerful it could have been if thematically rather than moralistically built up to. Afterward in trying to find an article about the labor strike at Set Maat I was reminded of the Shit Pyramids of Sneferu, which cheered me up considerably. I can't believe I have finally seen an Egyptian epic that made me feel better about Cecil B. DeMille.
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Thank you! I am glad to have spread the word of the Bent Pyramid.