The biggest and most expensive Polish film of the 60s, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh is also the downbeat and literate response to the spate of epics about antiquity in the early 60s – meaning everything from Spartacus (1960) and Cleopatra (1963) on down to the Italian ‘peplum’ genre movies like the Hercules series. Pharaoh – (based on Boleslaw Prus’ book) – tells the story of the fictional Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnik) in the 20th Dynasty, who inherits the throne of Egypt at age 22 and immediately announces a variety of progressive reforms, most of which are met with concern, if not sedition, by the military and religious leaders who surround him. Not unlike Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) in its sober study of Machiavellian power plays, Pharaoh does not demonstrate the typical heroism that always wins out in such movies, but the methodical way that power is wielded and preserved in virtually all times and cultures. As Ramses squares off with the generals and the priests, who (among other things) send a look-alike into the Pharaoh’s home to assassinate him, it becomes clear that the victors in such battles are not always the brash or the righteous, but those with a careful understanding of the workings of politics. (The 1895 novel upon which the film is based was supposedly Josef Stalin’s favorite.) On a purely sensory level, the film is so satisfying because it provides the scope and drama of an epic without the accompanying romantic and heroic clichés of Hollywood movies.
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