Howard Hawks was always embarrassed by Land of the Pharaohs, considering it a lumbering spectacular compromised by his inability (and that of his scriptwriters who included William Faulkner) to imagine how the ancient Egyptian royalty actually spoke and comported themselves. But critics have seen beyond the failures to the intent and given Hawks an A for effort. Martin Scorsese put the film at the top of his “Guilty Pleasures” list in Film Comment some years back, calling it one historical epic that “gave the sense that we were really there. This is the way people lived....” And critic John Belton fits it neatly into the Hawks oeuvre: “Drawn to builders, fabricators and men of action, Hawks naturally turns his entry in the fifties cycle of Biblical spectaculars into an epic celebration of the men who built the pyramids and lavishes screen time and CinemaScope space on a quasi-documentary study of the actual construction of the monuments.” Not everybody appreciated CinemaScope, however; cinematographer Lee Garmes has this to say about the making of Land of the Pharaohs (shot in Egypt and Rome): “I found working with CinemaScope a horror. Shallow focus, very wide angles, everyone lining up: awful.” (in Hollywood Cameramen, C. Higham, ed.)