Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Turner Classic Movies)
Early Lubitsch is an uneasy mixture of melodrama and spectacle. An Egyptian pharaoh falls in love with a slave girl, but she is in love with a young Egyptian. The pharaoh has his way, of course, and she becomes his wife in name only. Meanwhile, an Ethiopian king who offered his daughter in marriage only to be snubbed, waits outside the gates of the city with his massive barbarian army. Only in the final two acts, dominated by tragedy and battles, do things get more interesting. Jannings is too stiff in his portrayal of the tyrant pharaoh, until he returns as a disheveled shell of his former self after being thought dead.
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