In St. Moritz, Hawks welcomed many of his key crew members, including Russ Harlan, Chuck Hansen, Paul Helmick, and about a dozen others, for an initial production meeting. When the special-effects man announced that he was about to begin construction of thirty chariots for the pharaoh and his officers, Noël Howard, who was in charge of research
and historical accuracy, was obliged to inform the group that, as the wheel didn’t exist in Egypt at that time, neither did chariots. Nor, according to the hieroglyphics of the period, did horses or camels. The film’s animal wrangler was devastated by this news, and at the end of the meeting Hawks took Howard aside and said, “I’ll make a deal with you.… I give up the horses but, for God’s sake,
Noël, let me have camels.”
At the end of the stay in Switzerland, Hawks let Harold Jack Bloom go, with both realizing that the collaboration had not been a terribly fruitful one, as their sensibilities were too different. Faulkner, too, bothered Bloom for many reasons. Not only was the great writer not interested in contemporary fiction, but, Bloom said, “I couldn’t make Faulkner laugh. Only
he could make himself laugh. He also said things about blacks that were, to say the least, not very nice, although publicly he cultivated a paternalistic stance toward them.” Bloom never sensed anti-Semitism in Hawks, but he speculated, “He could have been anti-Semitic in the specific sense that he resented his bosses, who were all Jewish. On the other hand, he adored Ben Hecht.”
From St. Moritz,
Hawks moved on to Rome, where he took rooms at the Ambassador Hotel and worked further with his remaining screenwriters, who were staying on the Via Veneto and socializing with Bogart and Bacall, themselves in Rome on John Huston’s
Beat the Devil;
for his part, Hawks kept his distance. Not only had Hawks frozen the celebrated couple out after their work together was completed, but he disapproved
of their political activism during the blacklist period.” Dee reported her husband saying, “Howard
hated
it,” she told Bogart biographers A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax. “He was violently non-political, and every time something came up in the Bogarts going to Washington, he would just throw up his hands.” On January 25, Hawks dispatched another revision of the script to Warner, one in which the story
was more fleshed out and the dialogue more colloquial, and on February 10, he and his closest associates made the flight from Rome to Cairo.
Hawks and the other company VIPs lodged at the luxurious, touristic Mena House at Giza, some forty-five minutes from downtown Cairo. Built in the nineteenth century, set amid beautiful gardens at the desert’s edge, the Mena House was literally across the
street and two hundred yards away from the three great pyramids, Cheops, Chephren, and Mykerinos. There was also a huge pool, a first-class bar, and room service, major considerations for this group. Non-golfer Noël Howard was dragooned by Hawks into a round on the hotel’s nine-hole golf course. Howard duffed his way through a few holes until finally calling it quits when one of his drives sliced
violently to the side into the desert and scored a direct hit on the behind of a mangy camel, which galloped off in panic, dropping its female passenger to the ground. Fortunately for Hawks, Kurnitz, a fine golfer, was available as a replacement partner.
Hawks and Howard scouted locations around Giza and met intermittently with authorities, while Kurnitz did the lion’s share of the writing. In
the wee hours of February 15, Hawks and Kurnitz waited together at the Cairo airport for Faulkner to arrive. Alarmingly, he had drunk a bottle and a half of brandy on the flight from Paris and had to be taken directly to the Anglo-American Hospital. He was slow to recover, and after moving to the Mena House, he came down with a bad cold. Unexcited by Egypt and with other things on his mind, Faulkner
worked mechanically, feeding some mediocre material to Kurnitz, who reworked it. Kurnitz later claimed that only one line of Faulkner’s wound up unaltered in the finished film: the pharaoh asks the architect Vashtar, “So … how is the job getting along?” Realizing how unhappy and unproductive his friend was, Hawks had him polish a few sequences, which earned him an additional five thousand dollars,
then let him go on March 29 after a stay of five weeks, and just before the beginning of principal photography.
One of the most taxing scenes, involving the extraction of granite blocks from a quarry, was scheduled to be staged first, on April Fool’s Day; it was part of Hawks’s strategy to send back some amazing shots right off the bat to keep Warner Bros. off his back. Working at Aswan, they
took over an actual ancient quarry and filled it with extras for a setup of truly awesome dimensions. Repeating an effect Hawks had made with cattle in
Red River
, a panoramic shot showing three thousand extras in the enormous quarry was designed to be even more impressive by splicing together two such camera moves, the cut hidden by placing a giant plastic boulder in front of the camera mid-pan.
It took a day to pull off and lasts for only a few seconds on-screen, but it was worth it.
To get all the extras to work in unison, the assistants had to come up with little singsong phonetic phrases that the men could chant. After running through a few, such as “Lift that barge!” and “Get a little drunk!,” the three thousand sweating, nearly naked men were taught one more slogan, which shortly
came roaring repeatedly out of the quarry: “Fuck Warner Bros.!” When Hawks heard this, he nearly laughed, and his driver said that in the car on the way back to the hotel that day, Hawks smiled all the way and kept quietly repeating, “Fuck Warner Bros., Fuck Warner Bros.”
A bit later, Hawks wrote to Feldman, “A funny thing happened. Tenny Wright, who is an old friend of mine, came in the other
day and had just finished telling me he had to get back to Rome on Monday because
Helen of Troy
had their big day’s work then. They were using 800 people. My assistant came up about our next day’s call and said ‘Mr. Hawks about tomorrow … I’ve ordered 2,200 people but I think we’re a little short. What about making it 2,600?’ Tenny sat there with his mouth open and two days later
saw us use over
6,000.” Determined to break the all-time record for number of extras, Hawks pressed his lieutenants and the Egyptians and one day used twelve thousand extras, visible for just a few seconds in the finished film. Near Cairo, Trauner and Howard had located the foundation of an actual unfinished pyramid, then excavated and dressed it for use in further scenes of unprecedented spectacle. Habitually
dressed in khaki safari shirt and pants and a wide-brimmed hat, Hawks quietly commandeered his troops like a veteran general; Noël Howard noted, “He had the look, the immobility and the muteness of an Egyptian statue.” Hawks got some very impressive footage of men pulling the massive blocks around the construction site; it had taken some three million stones weighing five thousand pounds apiece—and
thirty years—to build the actual Khufu pyramid.
Uncertainties surrounding the casting dragged on even after the start date; ten days later, Jack Hawkins still had not been signed. Hawks sent Warner an urgent cable: “Hawkins agent Al Park causing great deal trouble. As each situation cleared Parker makes new and difficult demands.” If Hawkins’s arrival was delayed any longer than April 14, the
film would have to shut down. Tackling the problem personally, Warner cabled J. Arthur Rank, to whom Hawkins was under contract, and the British film tycoon arranged matters just in time for filming to proceed uninterrupted.
Despite the cooperation of the local government and the supply of upward of ten thousand Egyptian army regulars to appear as slaves, there were countless problem of heat,
language barriers, censored international communications, equipment failure, the arrival of Ramadan, and even a headline-causing incident in which Egypt accused Warner Bros. of smuggling because Trauner had bought a mummified bird and his assistant was caught with it at customs. At one point, a fight broke out among some extras, resulting in the death of one man; at another, some army extras mutinied
and charged the film crew, resulting in Hawks and Russ Harlan actually having to fend them off by throwing rocks at them; later, the threat of hostilities with Israel caused the disappearance of virtually all the extras overnight. Although the Egyptians had been granted no say on the content and story line of the picture, they proved highly sensitive in the matter of portraying themselves as
historical slaves. Furthermore, word arrived from Hollywood that the Breen Office had found many scenes in the screenplay highly “sex suggestive” and in need of revision.
The final 138-page script felt significantly overwritten, which forced Hawks to continually streamline it as shooting progressed. The story he finally settled upon was set in the twelfth year of the reign of Cheops II. To
fulfill
his obsession of building an eternal monument and resting place for himself, the pharaoh is obliged to engage the services of the architect Vashtar, a member of the defeated tribe of the Kushites. Both were good characters, and the best dramatic potential in the script as written resided in the parallel stories of these two men, master and talented slave, who were working on the same task, one
by choice, the other by command. This potential was only partially achieved, and the script and film were both pulled down from their initially intelligent level by the emphasis in the second half on the beautiful and duplicitous Princess Nellifer of Cyprus, who objects to her people being enlisted as slaves for the pharaoh’s massive project, becomes his second wife, carries on with his captain
in charge of guarding the treasure, and ultimately brings ruin upon everyone, which allows Vashtar to lead his people to freedom.
Throughout the shoot, Warner Bros. was convinced that it had an all-time winner on its hands. Studio representative Mort Blumenstock cabled Warner in April, reporting, “This footage … makes anything De Mille has done about Egypt look like child at play.” Equally excited
was Feldman, who told Hawks that he wouldn’t be surprised if the film grossed $20–30 million. The agent added, “Jack Warner is really overboard about the rushes to date. Confidentially, he feels that [it] is the greatest stuff he has seen in his life.”
None of the Egyptian footage involved the pivotal character of Nellifer, but as location work progressed into mid-May and a transfer to the studios
in Rome grew close, apprehension mounted over her casting. Early on, Hawks had actually spoken of using Dee in the part, but her pregnancy removed the embarrassing possibility of a showdown with Warners on this question. Hawks then became quite intrigued by an English model, Ivy Nicholson. A supermodel before her time, this exceptional beauty was famous all over Europe and very much in the favored
Hawksian mold—very tall and lean, with straight hair that framed her face in a way that made many think of Cleopatra. In April she flew to Cairo to shoot a test, the key scene in which Princess Nellifer seduces the pharaoh. Unfortunately, she made the fatal mistake of biting Hawkins’s hand to the bone in the scene, infuriating the actor, who had agreed to do the test with her as a favor to
Hawks. Suffering from a 102-degree fever and barely able to continue working, Hawks wired Warner: “After working with Nicholson decided too great risk personally to put in such important part.… Believe good chance of getting Gina Lollobrigida if can get your decision immediately.” Or, as Trauner less diplomatically put it, Nicholson “was very beautiful, but a little cuckoo.”
It didn’t take
Hawks long to figure out that he wouldn’t be able to effectively mold the Italian actress, but then he recalled a sexy young English actress he’d met in Paris the year before when Gregory Ratoff was casting his King Farouk picture. Joan Collins, like Jack Hawkins, was under contract to Rank, but after some initial hassles, a deal was worked out for the sultry twenty-year-old to play Nellifer at fifty-six
hundred English pounds for eight weeks, with an option to use her in two additional films over the next three years. The dark-haired Collins, who had already appeared in nine British films, usually as a bad girl, didn’t even do a test for Hawks, and her sexuality was unusually overt for Hawks’s taste. Hawks took a greater personal interest in the young starlet Luisella (Luisa) Boni, whom he
cast as Nellifer’s slave girl Kyra and whom he considered putting under personal contract; in the end, her poor command of English scotched the idea. For the first queen, Hawks used the beautiful Algerian-born actress Kerima, who had caused a bit of a stir with her debut in Carol Reed’s
An Outcast of the Islands
three years before.
On May 25, as Hawks and his crew were packing up for their departure
for Rome the next day, word arrived of the accidental death in Indochina of the photographer Robert Capa, killed when he stepped on an Vietminh antipersonnel mine while covering troop movements. Hawks had always been taken with this devil-may-care adventurer, who easily could have been a character in one of the director’s films and very nearly did become one twenty years later. Capa had even
been due to visit the Egyptian location to cover it for
Life
, before deciding, as usual, to go where the action was, whereupon his Magnum partner Ernst Haas came instead. Both Noël Howard and Trauner took their friend’s death particularly hard.
Safely installed back in Rome after the unpredictable months in Egypt, Hawks was finally able to bring Jack Warner up-to-date on the vicissitudes of the
shoot to date. Never much of a letter writer, on June 13 Hawks felt compelled to take pen in hand:
I know a couple of letters to you have been stopped because I added some things about Egypt. It happened to us all and is just another odd thing about that country.… It is the greatest place as far as photography, light and scenic values in the world but all hell to make a picture in. The last month
was the worse. What they call Ramadan was on. This means that they don’t eat or drink from sunrise to sunset and it slows them down to a walk. It naturally slowed us too or we would have been finished a week or ten days
before we did. The bad break was that it took us into a spell of hot weather and dust storms. [One] day it was so hot two camels died of heat right in a scene and 66 men collapsed
and were carried in during one hour.… Two days later a dust storm—you may have seen a little of it in the rushes. It was a funny feeling one minute looking at 3,000 men lined up for a shot and two minutes later you could only see about 50.…