2/10
A real hoot for a lazy TV afternoon
21 January 2007
One of the most fascinating things about this film (apart from Jonathan Hyde's extraordinary resemblance with Henry Daniell)is watching how the plot meanders and wanders with no destination in sight as if it were an Art Nouveau filigrain.

I suspect that the archeology academics would seriously object at the unorthodox -but revolutionary- system that the protagonist and his buddies use to find the legendary Pharaoh's tomb, namely, by sitting in the terraces of Cairo's seediest bars and leaving them without alcoholic stock. Their interest is, however, scientific, except for the legionnaire buddy who is more interested in gold statuettes accidentally getting lost in his greatcoat pockets (Having mentioned the legionnaire, I must say that I admire the courage of the scriptwriter, who reveals to us -for the very first time- that Egypt was at the time a French protectorate, and not, as we've been led to believe by the official history, associated to the British empire)

The bad guys stick to the old, slow, boring system of studying the terrain and excavating carefully according to old Ieroglyphs, while our hero and his friends discover the tomb the legendary grave by happily throwing dynamite sticks at random: a new path is opened thus for archeology.
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