Sphinx

Tomb With A View

Sphinx
United Kingdom 1981
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
Orion/Kin Lorber
Blu Ray Region A

Sphinx was a bestselling novel, which I quite liked in my early teens, written by Robin Cook. Now, the book was originally published as Tombs (I am just finding out now) but, although it took me a few years to finally catch up to the movie version, the paperback I read in the early 1980s had a film tie-in cover and was definitely titled Sphinx... a title which has been kept through subsequent printings to this day, it would seem. Now I always liked Robin Cook and I think this was the third of his I read, after first buying a new copy of a later book, Brain, cheaply from a coastal town’s book spinner in the early 80s. I followed it up with second hand copies of Sphinx and then with what is still probably his most famous book, Coma (which was turned into a great film).

Now, I absolutely loved all the Robin Cook novels that I read but I remember being somewhat disappointed with this movie when I first saw it on TV in the mid to late 80s. It didn’t help that it was shown on ITV, mutilated by slight cuts and further destroyed by the insertion of commercial breaks... which, as any right minded individual would recognise, is one of the great blights and evils of modern day living. Don’t watch the ads folks... they’re bad for your health.

Anyway, over the years I’d put down my initial disappointment with the movie version as being due to just the ads and so on... so I was glad to discover a Kino Lorber Blu Ray of the movie at this year’s London Film And Comic Con. I was really looking forward to seeing the movie again and I looked forward to hearing composer Michael J Lewis’ score again in the context of the picture (more on that a little later).

Catching up to it again now I can tell you that, despite the book being absolutely brilliant, I was hugely disappointed with this. Considering both the source material and the fact that the director is none other than the legendary Franklin J. Schaffner, it’s a considerably dull film... although it still looks great. The cinematography on this, where Shaffner and a couple of DPs use mirrors and make use of divisions to give the actors interesting angles and divided screen space (such as square openings in a lattice like room divider in the lead actress’ hotel room) all contribute to a visually arresting film and, normally that would be enough for me. However, this element alone does not help to stop the tedium setting in fairly early on and then continuing for a gruelling two hour running time (give or take the odd minute).

Okay, there are some great actors and they all do a fine job... such as Lesley-Anne Down as main protagonist Erica (although, I’ll come to the tone of that performance in a minute, convincing as it is), Frank Langella as another main protagonist who might possibly be an antagonist (or is he?) and there are even four actors from Raiders Of The Lost Ark from the same year in common with this film. In the shape of the great but, severely underused here, John Rhys-Davies, the brilliant William Hootkins plus Vic Tablian and Tutte Lemkow. The slight Indiana Jones connection is further enhanced by a hotel bellboy played by Kevork Malikyan, who was of course the leader of the Brotherhood Of The Cruciform Sword in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (not to mention being a regular on ITV sitcom Mind Your Language). The film even has Sir John Gielgud in it although, his character really doesn’t last too long, it has to be said (not really a spoiler, you’ll see it coming from a mile off).

Okay... so the actors in and of themselves are not the problem... it’s more to do with the way the thing has been written, I think, other than anything else. The performers are totally credible but the characters they play aren’t. Not as the way they are written and, well, the easiest target here is Erica, played by the lovely Lesley-Anne Down. She’s supposed to be a professional Egyptologist, who gets embroiled in a plot to do with a missing statue, the black market trade and a lost tomb. Well, maybe I’m being a little naive here but, shouldn’t an Egyptologist be able to speak a little of the native language, rather than running about aimlessly trying to stumble onto someone who can speak English? And stumble about is right. Considering she’s the sole protagonist who is supposed to be effectively carrying the movie, she does not in the slightest play a strong woman. This lady falls over at the drop of a hat and screams her way through even the most simple of reveals. I mean, why is an Egyptologist screaming at the sight of skeleton? But then again, why is a grown lady screaming at the sight of a minor wound on someone’s face after they rip a plaster off? This has got to be the least interesting, damselly damsel in distress they’ve written to carry a movie for a long time. Trust me, if you were tasked to break into a lost tomb with an expert in the field, you would not want this Erica woman with you... you’d probably wind up dead fairly quickly, I reckon.

So yeah, it’s kind of an extended damp squib of a movie, truth be told and, although all the actors are trying their best, they lost out to their dialogue and directorial instructions big time when an audience is asked to view the final product. There is, however, one really good element to this movie which has sadly been overlooked, possibly because... I suspect, at least... this movie possibly didn’t make a large dent in the box office take when it was released.

That element is the wonderful American Egyptianese sounding score, richly orchestrated and coloured by one of my favourite musical instruments, the cimbalom. Michael J. Lewis’ astonishing score is absolutely brilliant and is great as a stand alone listen. I know that last fact because, although the score to this one has never been released commercially, the composer did press a promotional CD to tout his work to future clients and I was lucky enough to acquire one of these CDs at a soundtrack specialist shop in Rye on holiday a decade or two ago and, I have to tell you, it’s another crime against filmanity that this particular score has never had a proper commercial release because, yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

However, it has to be said that, as astonishing as Sphinx is both visually and by way of its score, these elements sadly fail to lift the movie over the various problems it manifests. It’s still a very dull watch and... well... at least I saw it again, I guess. So there’s at least that. Sphinx is little more than a curio these days and, my guess is this movie won’t be rediscovered and hailed as a classic by anyone, anytime soon and... that’s not an especially bad thing, I would say.

Egyptomania Goes To The Movies

Tut N’ Come In

Egyptomania Goes to the Movies:
From Archaeology to Popular Craze to Hollywood Fantasy
by Matthew Coniam
McFarland & Co
ISBN: 978-1476668284

Wow, this is an awesome book. I’ve always had a low level fascination with the plundered artefacts and bandaged, monstrous, vengeful hellspawn of this far off accursed land, especially in connection to movies inspired by such but, it wasn’t until I saw Valerie Leon, glamorous star of Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (reviewed by me here) tweeting about this book that I even knew of its existence... nor of Matthew Coniam’s existence either, it has to be said.

Well, I went out on an unbandaged limb and added Egyptomania Goes to the Movies: From Archaeology to Popular Craze to Hollywood Fantasy to my holiday reading (via the US Amazon shopping cart, which was somehow cheaper than a UK resident such as myself ordering it from the UK Amazon at the time... go figure) and embarked upon a somewhat irreverent, thoroughly entertaining and surprisingly knowledgeable encapsulation of all that stuff it says on the subtitle of the book above. I’m now very pleased I took that leap of faith, kickstarted by a knowing social media wink from the reincarnated Queen Tera to the physical manifestation of Matthew Coniam’s sacred text, as soon as possible.

And he had me right from the start, as the book begins with a wonderfully comic ‘Dramatis Personae’ of all the important movers, shufflers and shakers who feature in the book, acting as a glossary for those readers who are unfamiliar with the identity of such luminaries as Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter, Tutenkhamon and, of course, Karloff the Uncanny.... to name but a few. And it’s in this light hearted spirit in which he manifests all his ideas and research for the book, starting off with an introduction which references a recent archaeological excavation of artefacts from the desert that some readers may remember being in the news a few years back... the various sets from Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, buried in the sand over time and becoming almost as ‘sought after’ as the real artefacts that inspired DeMille’s two versions of the film in the first place.

Another thing which won me over straight away on Mr. Coniam’s behalf was the delightful use of BC and AK... where AK stands for Anno Karloff. This is the way to suck me into a book which is, at the very least, as much about the actual events and history of Egypt that inspired various movies as it is the films themselves. Coniam appears to be something of an expert in the subject and his enthusiastic filling in and way of completely enlightening those readers who are alarmingly ignorant of such matters (a list in which I count myself, having proven myself a thoroughly ignorant reader on more than one occasion), like the basics of Egyptology and mummery and such like, is done in a way that’s extremely informative.

For instance, I had no idea that for many centuries, excavated mummies were ground up and consumed by many people for their medicinal properties... even finding their way onto the dinner table with the other condiments in later centuries. Indeed, the tradition of consuming portions of powdered mummy was so popular that supply could not keep up with demand and fresh killings were being carried out and then ‘processed’ as a trade in bootleg mummy remains also surfaced, it would seem.

I also didn’t know certain things about the ‘not so aptly named, it turns out’ Cleopatra’s Needle, which now famously resides in London. Such as the problems with shipping it over to my rainy capital, how a cylinder was constructed to float it to the United Kingdom, how it got further ‘lost at sea’ for quite a while and how, after languishing in its own country after the British ignored it for centuries, we only got interested in shipping it back to England after we found out the French had their eyes on it too. All very illuminating.

Of course, Mr. Coniam also says a lot of good and interesting stuff about various selected movies inspired by Egypt and, especially, the mummies... including many films that never got before the cameras or were lost soon after. Not to mention the latest, far from accurate but nevertheless entertaining novelty songs and dance crazes inspired by what he calls Egyptomania.

A few things made me sit up and take note when the author has his ‘film head’ securely screwed on... and I was pleased that he acknowledged that the one bandaged scene, lasting not very many seconds, of Karloff slowly opening his twinkling eyes... is a subtle moment which rivals the best of Val Lewton’s rival/antidotes to the success of Universal Horror. I was also very pleased that he makes note of the absolute insanity of the four ‘sequels’ to the movie, in terms of both their timelines (where years and even decades pass between films but they are all set contemporary to their release within a year of the last one) and also the fact that Kharis the mummy sinks into a swamp in one country at the end of one film and then, timelessly over the decades, re-emerges from the same swamp which has bafflingly been relocated to New Orleans while he slept. I’ve never understood how the writers let these huge continuity errors exist but I’m glad Mr. Coniam seems as baffled by them as me.

Coniam also talks about Universal maestro of make-up Jack Pearce's influences on the medium and, interestingly, points out that the antagonistic creature in the much later Hammer movie, The Mummy's Shroud, actually has the most accurate make-up in terms of being compared to those specimens found on archaeological digs, although he also points out the movie is problematic in terms of accuracy for other reasons. He also kept me happy by mentioning neglected movie gems like The Awakening (another adaptation, starring Charlton Heston, of Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, which Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb was based on) and both the book and movie version of Robin Cook’s Sphinx (which has a gorgeous soundtrack that should be commercially released... at least I have a promo copy).

So, yes, a wonderfully informative book by someone who really seems to know what he is talking about... which isn’t always a given thing for some writers of recent years, I’ve noticed. As an added extra, after the writer’s epilogue, we are treated to a section of, quite humorous, pocket reviews of a large list (not quite exhaustive, I fear... it seems a little Santo/Blue Demon light although, to be fair, although some of the mummies they fought may have been Aztec rather than Egyptian) of Egyptomania movies, including a wonderful Paul Naschy one, Vengeance Of The Mummy (which I reviewed here). He also includes some of the Egyptian themed porn movies made and I was especially taken with his rather cheeky, two sentence review of the 2004 film Attack Of The Virgin Mummies... "Undead Egyptian hotties revived in a future where sex is illegal. Two directors were necessary to bring it off."

And that rather concludes my look at Mr. Coniam’s truly wonderful book Egyptomania Goes to the Movies: From Archaeology to Popular Craze to Hollywood Fantasy. Well written, blisteringly entertaining and an absolute must read for fans of Egyptology, cinema and, of course, that thrilling combination of the two. I can’t wait to track down one of the writers other books on The Marx Brothers at some point in the near future. Awesome stuff.