The Egyptian

Sinuhe, egyptiläinen / Sinuhe, egyptiern. US (c) 1954 Twentieth Century Fox. P: Darryl F. Zanuck. D: Michael Curtiz. SC: Philip Dunne, Casey Robinson - based on the novel by Mika Waltari (1946). DP: Leon Shamroy - DeLuxe - CinemaScope 1:2,55. M: Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann. Starring: Edmund Purdom (Sinuhe), Jean Simmons (Merit), Peter Ustinov (Kaptah), Michael Wilding (Akhenaten), Bella Darvi (Nefer), Victor Mature (Horemheb), Gene Tierney (Baketamon), Anitra Stevens (Nefertiti). 139 min. New 1:2,35 print from 2oth Century Fox: "We recently made new separation masters and fully retimed this new print" (Kevin Barrett). Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 6 March 2008. Curtiz wanted Brando to star as Sinuhe but got Edmund Purdom, instead, and the picture lost the electricity typical of Curtiz when he had a star like Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart or Elvis Presley. Jean Simmons, Gene Tierney, Peter Ustinov, Michael Wilding and Victor Mature are fine, the production values are superb, the cinematography is wonderful, the score majestic. But the picture lacks depth and urgency. The novel by Mika Waltari is an allegory of disillusionment after WWII. Waltari had already written the play Akhnaton, auringosta syntynyt [Akhenaten, Born of the Sun, 1937]. The novel has deep links to the Akhenaten speculations of the previous decade by James Henry Breasted (The Dawn of Conscience, 1933), Thomas Mann (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933-1943) and Sigmund Freud (Der Mann Moses, 1939). In contrast to them Waltari bypasses Judaism and invents a direct link from Akhenaten's Monoteism to Christianity. However, the philosophical wisdom attributed to Egyptians by Waltari is based on the Torah, passages such as The Ecclesiastes and Solomon's Proverbs, and already presented by Waltari in his first published work, the collection of poems Sinun ristisi juureen [Beneath Thy Cross, 1927], in the poem "Salomon saarnaaja" ["Solomon the Ecclesiast"]. There are no Jews in Waltari's novel, but he gives a clue that they are referred to as the Khabir people. Before Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, The Egyptian was the best-sold foreign-language novel in the US according to Wikipedia. The new Fox print is brilliant.