Meantime, Vashtar's aging eyes begin to fail, and he is forced to rely his son Senta for help with the supervision of the construction, teaching him its secrets. She plots and schemes to become his heir her attempted assassination of Khufu's young son instead claims the life of the boy's mother, Queen Nailla, when she shields her son from a deadly cobra with her own body. The province of Cyprus, however, offers the beautiful Princess Nellifer to him in lieu of taxes, and Nellifer eventually becomes his second wife.

Yet Khufu presses on, levying high taxes on tributary states to continue financing his tomb. After much thought, he comes up with an ingenious design that seals the labyrinth to the burial chamber after burial via an ingenious system of jars filled with sand which, when broken, will release huge blocks of stone to slide into place and close the labyrinth.Īs the years of construction pass, Khufu's subjects who once joyously viewed the building of the pyramid as holy work become disillusioned by decades of misery and drudgery. Dissatisfied with the unoriginal plans of his architects for his tomb, he offers Vashtar, a brilliant slave, a bargain: freedom for his enslaved people if he can design a robber-proof pyramid however, Vashtar will be killed once it is completed, so the secrets of the design will die with him. He wants to be entombed with it when he dies, free from the threat of grave robbers. Throughout his reign, Pharaoh Khufu amasses a great treasure. Land of the Pharaohs had a cast of thousands – Warners' press office claimed there were 9,787 extras in one scene – and was one of Hollywood's largest-scale, ancient world epics, made in the same spirit as The Robe, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner was one of the film's three credited screenwriters. The film is a fictional account of the building of the Great Pyramid. The cast was headed by Jack Hawkins as Pharaoh Khufu and Joan Collins as one of his wives, Nellifer. Land of the Pharaohs is a 1955 American epic historical drama film in CinemaScope and WarnerColor from Warner Brothers, produced and directed by Howard Hawks.

Treasure of the Pharaohs 1950s movie