Jack Hawkins is suitably regal as the Pharaoh obsessed with creating the ultimate tomb and Joan Collins deliciously villainous as Princess Nellifer in this Hollywood epic about pyramid building and palace intrigue in ancient Egypt. The occasional stiff dialogue prompts the conclusion that co-writer William Faulkner would have been better off sticking to novels. But director Howard Hawks, the master storyteller, found it hard to make a bad movie and, all in all, this is a handsome and very serviceable historical melodrama, conceived and realised on the grand scale.

A captured architect designs an ingenious plan to ensure the impregnability of the tomb of a self-absorbed Pharaoh, obsessed with the security of his next life.