Il sepolcro dei re
Year:
1960
Running time:
102 mn
Nationality:
Italy
Language:
Italian
Genre:
Historical, Adventure, Romance
Director:
Fernando Cerchio
Producer:
Explorer Film '58, Comptoir Français de Productions Cinématographiques
Screenwriter/s:
Fernando Cerchio, Damiano Damiani
Cast:
Debra Paget, Ettore Manni, Erno Crisa, Corrado Pani as Nemorat, Yvette Lebon, Robert Alda, and others
Summary of the film
Nemorat, a young Egyptian Pharaoh, defeats the Syrians and kills all members of the Royal family except Shila, a beautiful girl who is to marry him. But Nemorat is killed by his uncle Kefren, and Shila is accused of the crime. She is to be buried alive…
Nemes worn by many characters (Screenshot by the author)
Fantasy hieroglyphs (Screenshot by the author)
A bed copied from Tutankhamun's furniture (Screenshot by the author)
A coffin inspired by Tutankhamun's furniture (Screenshot by the author)
Egyptomania narratives or motifs
Fernando Cerchio, scriptwriter, editor, and director, directed three Egyptian peplums (the Italian term for the “sword-and-sandal” film genre): Il Sepolcro dei re (1960), Nefertite, regina del Nilo (1961), and Totò e Cleopatra (1963). For Il Sepolcro dei re, Damiano Damiani wrote the action-packed screenplay, giving the film a social dimension previously unseen in the genre.
The plot is fanciful, as are the proper names: Pharaoh Nemorat, Syrian princess Shila, the anachronistic adviser Kephren, etc. Set in the New Kingdom at the beginning of the 18th Dynasty, the story makes ingenious use of the usual ingredients of the genre: impossible love, revenge, and a world of the dead.
Filmed at Cinecittà and on the beaches of Focene and Sabaudia (Lazio), Il Sepolcro dei re adapted its crowd scenes and some of its sets from Victor Tourjanski's production La Donna dei Faraoni, which was made at the same time. The film ends in a tomb with a secret sand mechanism, which was copied from Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1950). The filmmaker was able to give his film a singular aesthetic thanks to the sophisticated use of the colour palette and Anchise Brizzi's mannered photography.
A low-budget film, like most Latin productions of the period, the film is full of approximations: nemeses or pseudo-nemeses worn by most of the characters (fig. 1), frankly eccentric hieroglyphs (fig. 2), baroque architecture (such as a palace with a bastioned façade), an unusual sarcophagus in the embalming room, and bizarrely shaped palace columns. Additionally, a few pieces are borrowed from Tutankhamun's furniture (fig. 3, 4), and the pharaoh wears a pschent, along with a few other more ‘realistic’ crowns.
It should also be noted that the English title of the version distributed in the USA in 1963, The Cleopatra's Daughter, demonstrates an attempt at popular manipulation: Shila becomes the daughter of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony, secretly educated at the Syrian court. Here we see a shameless ruse to take advantage of the publicity campaign for the release of Herman J. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra!
The plot is fanciful, as are the proper names: Pharaoh Nemorat, Syrian princess Shila, the anachronistic adviser Kephren, etc. Set in the New Kingdom at the beginning of the 18th Dynasty, the story makes ingenious use of the usual ingredients of the genre: impossible love, revenge, and a world of the dead.
Filmed at Cinecittà and on the beaches of Focene and Sabaudia (Lazio), Il Sepolcro dei re adapted its crowd scenes and some of its sets from Victor Tourjanski's production La Donna dei Faraoni, which was made at the same time. The film ends in a tomb with a secret sand mechanism, which was copied from Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1950). The filmmaker was able to give his film a singular aesthetic thanks to the sophisticated use of the colour palette and Anchise Brizzi's mannered photography.
A low-budget film, like most Latin productions of the period, the film is full of approximations: nemeses or pseudo-nemeses worn by most of the characters (fig. 1), frankly eccentric hieroglyphs (fig. 2), baroque architecture (such as a palace with a bastioned façade), an unusual sarcophagus in the embalming room, and bizarrely shaped palace columns. Additionally, a few pieces are borrowed from Tutankhamun's furniture (fig. 3, 4), and the pharaoh wears a pschent, along with a few other more ‘realistic’ crowns.
It should also be noted that the English title of the version distributed in the USA in 1963, The Cleopatra's Daughter, demonstrates an attempt at popular manipulation: Shila becomes the daughter of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony, secretly educated at the Syrian court. Here we see a shameless ruse to take advantage of the publicity campaign for the release of Herman J. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra!
Author: Jean-Luc Bovot
Other information
Dumont H. 2009. L'Antiquité au cinéma. Vérités, légendes et manipulations:106-107. Lausanne: Nouveau Monde.
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