The New Pictures

The Egyptian (20th Century-Fox), based on Mika Waltari's bestselling novel of Egypt in the 14th century B.C., is described in studio releases as a "$5,000,000 CinemaScope De Luxe Color picturization . . . with 67 major sets, seven stars, two dozen featured players, 87 other speaking roles and over 5,000 extras." Authenticity is rampant in every scene. All 5,000 extras, for instance, have brown eyes, because the research department read somewhere that "there were no blue-eyed Egyptians in the 14th century B.C." Furthermore, the "5,000,000 objects" of Egyptian antiquity in the film were imported or reconstructed from the originals--including reasonable facsimiles of Tutankhamen's and Nefertiti's thrones.

This is the picture that Actor Marlon Brando, after signing to play the title role, ran away from just as the cameras were about to start grinding at him, shouting over his shoulder that he had to see his psychiatrist in a hurry. Still, for moviegoers who feel hardier than Brando and can stand up to the broadsides of grandeur, The Egyptian has a kind of blurby, big-adjective poetry about it.

In the main, the story follows the book. Sinuhe (Edmund Purdom), infant son of the Pharaoh's wife, is set adrift in a reed boat on the Nile, victim of a palace plot against his mother. Rescued by a childless couple, he is raised as their son, learns the healing arts of his stepfather, a physician. Coming of age, Sinuhe meets a young soldier (Victor Mature), and together they save the life of the new Pharaoh Akhnaton (Michael Wilding) when he is attacked by a lion in the desert.

Prospering in the Pharaoh's favor, the soldier aspires to the hand of the Pharaoh's sister (Gene Tierney), but the young physician cannot heal himself of his lust for a whore of Babylon (Bella Darvi). In time, Sinuhe is cured by the love of a servant girl (Jean Simmons).

Edmund Purdom, as the Egyptian doctor, gives as good as he got from Author Waltari. Jean Simmons, as his bright angel,' looks pretty carrying a jug on her head. As his dark angel, Bella Darvi manages, even while wearing green nail polish and a wig like a blue floor mop, to stave off the horselaughs--no mean accomplishment. Gene Tierney models some fetching Egyptian clothes, and Victor Mature's chief contribution to his role is the strength to carry 65 Ibs. of armor on his back.

The technical departments are, of course, the true stars of such an overwhelming spectacle as this, and Director Michael Curtiz (Captain Blood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) deserves to be ranked for his managerial marvels with the general contractor who put up the pyramids.

Her Twelve Men (M-G-M). In Mrs. Miniver (1942), her greatest hit, Greer Garson helped convince the U.S. public that the English middle-class family, with its back to the wall of a rose-covered dream cottage, was manning--and womaning--the front line of freedom. In Her Twelve Men, which is perhaps the most Greerily effective Garson picture in recent years, she does the same kind of job for the teaching profession.

Teachers are such decent sorts, this picture seems to say, so thoughtful and tweedy, that everyone really ought to do something nice for them. The trouble is--to judge from the picture's sets--that teachers live in such wealth and mansioned ease that it is hard to imagine what they could possibly need, unless it were legislation to cut their salaries.

Actress Garson plays a widow who hires on as a teacher at a tony boys' school just to "do something with my life," She falls first for all the old schoolboy tricks, from the frog in the bed to the "fangs--you're welcome" routine. Then she falls for a colleague (Robert Ryan). Greer unties all the emotional knots of her pupils so well that Teacher Ryan suggests a marital knot. The end of the picture would seem to indicate that, histrionically speaking, this is where Actress Garson came in, 15 years ago, as the teacher's wife in Goodbye, Mr. Chips..

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