I just watched The Egyptian, a 1954 movie. It’s very interesting in a number of respects. It’s not good — the acting is almost uniformly poor, though Peter Ustinov is enjoyable as a roguish servant — but it’s interesting. The titular character is played by a little-known English actor named Edmund Purdom, and he is boring with excellent diction. The part was originally supposed to be played by Marlon Brando, and I cannot even imagine what Brando would have done to the movie. For the moment anyway you can watch it for free on YouTube.
The Egyptian was one of the first CinemaScope movies, and the combination of the wide screen and Technicolor really is beautiful. There’s memorable shot fairly early in the picture (starting at 35 minutes) in which the director — Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame — has his camera set up facing a courtyard outside a palace. It’s night, and everything in the courtyard is tinted a deep blue. But you see through the open doorway of the palace a dancer who’s wearing bright yellow. All of the colors inside that room are yellows and reds, and everything there is brightly lit; the contrast to the dim blue courtyard is striking. The camera slowly dollies through the courtyard and into the room. Curtiz may have been a journeyman director, but he had some great moments. (Now if the lion-hunting scene just before hadn’t been hideously bad….)
Another point of interest: according to Foster Hirsch, the research that went into the making of the sets and the costumes here was exceptionally thorough and detailed — Hirsch says that the research unit of 20th Century Fox was at that time the best in the business, and I would love to know more about how that unit operated — and the sets really are feast-for-the-eyes material. Hirsch also points out that the wide-screen format with its deep-focus images allow the viewer’s eyes to wander and attend to whatever seems to reward attention. It is noteworthy, I think, that this is also how Terrence Malick tends to film his scenes, and I wonder if the big CinemaScope epics of the 1950s may have had a greater influence on him than is usually recognized.
By the way, many of the beautiful props used in these indoor scenes had a future: Cecil B. DeMille bought them when he was making The Ten Commandments just two years later.
But maybe the most interesting thing is what The Egyptian does thematically. The protagonist of the story is a physician named Sinuhe, but the ups and downs of his life — there are many of both — are largely determined by his relationship with the Pharaoh here called Akhnaton and better known as Akhenaten. I wrote about Akhenaten at some length in this post, and I pointed out that the Pharaoh’s monotheism has been linked by many with Judaism, usually in the time of Moses, though Thomas Mann makes Joseph ben-Jacob Akhenaten’s vizier.
In this movie Akhnaton (Michael Wilding, doing the best he can with a weird part) is portrayed as a dreamy mystic who cares only about his god and his family. He cannot see, and if he could see probably would not care, how profoundly he is disrupting his country with his abandonment of the old gods and their replacement by an anti-anthropomorphic sun god, Aten. In the end he does so much damage that his trusted physician Sinuhe gives him poison, which he accepts with (bizarre) good grace: he knows, he says, that he made a mess of things. But he believes that The Day Will Come when his monotheism, his belief in a single God who loves all of His creatures, will conquer the world. “My death does not matter. I was no more than a shadow of things to come. One voice that spoke for Him.”
I’m leaving out almost all of Sinuhe’s story here, in case any of you would like to watch the movie, but Sinuhe, having been moved by the dignity of Akhnaton’s death, makes a similar confession at the movie’s end. “A truth cannot be killed. It passes in secret from one man’s heart to another’s” — and he pledges himself to become to the messenger of this egalitarian monotheistic truth. “All men are equal. And no man is alone.” Cue the swelling music. (And try to say these words in Brando’s voice. Impossible.)
In the movie’s final shot, words are superimposed on the screen: “THESE EVENTS HAPPENED THIRTEEN CENTURIES BEFORE THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST.” The Egyptian looks like a biblical epic. It’s got sandals and swords and the ancient Middle East, but there’s nothing biblical about it until that last moment — and the Bible it invokes has a New Testament.
There’s no Moses here, no Joseph, no Israel. Akhnaton is the first monotheist, after which the idea runs underground, I guess, until Jesus comes along. The most surprising and disconcerting thing about The Egyptian is its complete erasure of the people of Israel. Which wouldn’t have been an issue except for that final splash of words, purporting to give relevant context, but instead offering a very misleading story indeed.
