Pharaoh (1966): Polish epic offers a very different kind of sword-and-sandal picture (Review)

When people think of cinema made in non-democratic countries, they often imagine something austere, high-minded, and either incomprehensibly arty or intelligence-insultingly didactic. It’s almost as if we in the liberal world imagine ourselves to have invented entertainment, which simply isn’t the case as it was often easier to get a mega-budget epic off the ground in the Soviet Union and its satellite states than it was in the supposedly free, capitalist West. By some estimates, the most expensive film ever made after adjusting for inflation is still Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 adaptation of War and Peace, whose mammoth scale was made possible by the Soviet Culture Minister, Yekarerina Furtseva, decreeing that every arm of the state should lend whatever resources were necessary for the production.

If there’s something of the eat-your-greens high-mindedness of popular stereotype in these films, it’s the fact that they’re usually based on major literary epics, but so were many of the American blockbusters of the time, like Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1895 historical novel Quo Vadis?, which attracted the attention of both American and Polish film-makers. In 1951, Mervyn LeRoy’s directed the Hollywood version of Quo Vadis?, but a more recent Polish adaptation was made in 2001 by Jerzy Kawalerowicz – who was a dab hand at what were called superprodukcja. Pharaoh (1966), is an earlier epic of the ancient world directed by Kawalerowicz that’s now been released on Blu-Ray by Second Run, and if nothing else this version allows you to confirm that yes, cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik’s grand Technicolor desert-scapes are as impressive as anything coming out of Burbank in the mid 1960s.

Which isn’t to say they’re the same, as Kawalerowicz might have the same skyscraper-clearing ambition of a Lean or a De Mille, that doesn’t mean he has the same sensibility as them. Today, his most famous film isn’t one of his epics, but Mother Joan of the Angels – a stark, monochrome document of madness and official oppression based on the same historical incident that inspired Ken Russell’s The Devils. Reading Bolesław Prus’s Pharaoh (the source for this film), Kawalerowicz’s co-writer Tadeusz Konwicki said it struck him less as a historical novel, but more as a “penetrating analysis of a system of power”, and the resulting film backs him up.

This is probably a good point to mention that I’ve never liked swords-and-sandals movies. The trailer for Gladiator II at my local cinema made me remember the sinking feeling I used to get when my dad started watching a movie on Sunday afternoon, and it was one of those ones where people said “Come! I greet you, dear mother!” rather than “Hello Mum”. Pharoah allowed me a rare chance to test whether this is an aversion to stories of the ancient world, or just an aversion to the way Hollywood tells them. Part of my distaste certainly comes from seeing the strangeness and complexity of pre-Christian civilisation flattened out into conventional mainstream action, but Pharaoh isn’t a film that makes that mistake. The opening shot shows a scarab rolling a ball of clay (although you do briefly wonder if it’s something more scatological), which causes a whole army to change direction for fear of disturbing the sacred beetle, and it’s at points like this that you can easily believe Kawalerowicz and Konwicki saw this film as a satire about power.

As for that aforementioned strangeness and complexity, there’s plenty of the former to spare – with Ramses XIII’s throne room rendered expressionistically as a black void where the Pharaoh and his golden perch simply hang in space like Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. It’s a bizarre choice, but it makes emotional sense as you’re entering a new world where nothing but the King matters – a sign that although Kawalerowicz had all of the same toys available to him as Cecil B De Mille and David Lean, he made radically different use of them. His exotic locations, which were mostly in the Uzbek desert (with some trips to Egypt to shoot the real ancient monuments the plot revolves around), alienate and disturb as much as they impress. Crane shots were used to create super-sized versions of the daringly long takes and elaborate tracking shots that directors like Andrzej Wadja and Miklós Jancsó were achieving elsewhere in Communist Europe.

That’s the strangeness dealt with, and the complexity is present as well, but Pharaoh gives and takes as, although its investment in the realities of ancient geopolitics is brainier than any equivalent Hollywood film, it’s very easy to get lost in the details. A Western education will at least tell you why it matters that Ramses has a Jewish mistress, but you may wish to take notes when the plot starts to revolve around Egypt’s imperial relationship with the Assyrians. For my part, I found this deep investment in history much more laudable than the pious, dumbed-down Hollywood epics Kawalerowicz was competing with, but it also ended up replicating the self-seriousness that alienated me from those American films. The cast in Pharaoh are solid and committed, but they’re working within the very narrow band of emotions you usually find in these stories, and although the story does focus very intently on one hero as a “Man of Destiny”, it’s in a very different way to the American epics. Prus’s novel is noted for its sense of tragic inevitability, taking seriously the ancient worldview that the gods mould us as surely as those beetles do their ball of clay. Kawalerowicz’s film sticks to that long past the point when other films would abandon it as uncommercial – but then, these Communist epics were always free from that concern, at least.

The transfer is based on the Martin Scorsese Film Foundation’s 2012 restoration, which was supervised by Wójcik, and although Michael Brooke speculates in his inlay booklet that the cinematographer might have taken the opportunity to improve certain aspects, it can’t be faulted for visual dazzle. Many film websites list Pharaoh‘s run-time as somewhere between 175 and 180 minutes, which is an accurate description of the cut released at Polish cinemas in 1966, but it’s not Kawalerowicz’s preferred cut. He favoured the 152-minute version that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, which is what Second Run have presented here. Aside from Brooke’s essay (which includes a potted history of the superprodukcja era), there’s an in-depth video piece by Michał Oleszczyk, and an archive report on the Uzbekistan leg of the film’s shoot that does get across the extraordinary conditions the film was shot in. As does the film itself.

Graham’s Archive – Pharaoh (1966)