Let's Recapture All the Rapture

Johnny Desmond — "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955)

Before we go back, way back into time for this next entry, let me begin by thanking all the new subscribers who have climbed aboard the good ship Jagged Time Lapse these last few weeks. There’s now over 400 of you, a nice chunk of whom have also been kind and generous enough to plunk down for paid subscriptions. (The post after this is going to be a special one for you latter lot.)

It’s incredibly heartening to have a built-in audience audience to write for. I know a lot of my readers are alerted to JTL posts via social media — but should there come a time when I get booted from any of those forums (or feel the need to bail, a la Twitter) for whatever reason, a free subscription to this Substack ensures that my posts will go directly to your inbox, with no social media middleman.

It has also been extremely helpful to have a little cash-ola coming in via the paid subscriptions, since the living I make as a writer is not exactly what you’d call “robust,” and I’m still trying to find my feet in this new chapter of my life. So if you really dig what I do here, please consider upgrading your free subscription to a paid one — for the mere price of a coffee or a pint of beer per month, you’ll support my writing AND get extra content, including previously unpublished interviews and chapters from my musical-memoir-in-progress. And if you can’t swing five bucks a month for a paid subscription (or the discounted $50 for 12 months), please do me a favor and share Jagged Time Lapse with anyone else you think might enjoy it. That would be a huge help, as well; after all, there’s nothing like a little word of mouth to take a party to the next level…

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Also, I’d like to thank Tim at Bookspin for making me this week’s featured author — you can read our short interview here. And thanks mucho to my pal Rich Kimball at WZON in Maine, for recently having me on his radio show. You can listen to our 20-minute interview here. And now, on to our featured presentation…

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Nearly two months after moving into my new place in the scenic hamlet of Kerhonkson, NY, my one box of 45s that had gone missing the move thankfully showed up here last week. Its arrival necessitated some record rearranging; I’d accumulated a new stack of old wax during my first four months as a New York resident, and now I could finally file them in their proper boxes. Of course, the filing process inevitably churned up some semi-forgotten items, along with some intense memories…

An obscure 1955 pop single released in conjunction with an infamously unsuccessful film, Johnny Desmond’s “Land of the Pharaohs” is not exactly what you’d call “collectors gold,” but it is nonetheless quite dear to my heart. That red dot sticker on the sleeve pictured above is a remnant of a massive “everything must go” sidewalk record sale I staged back in the fall of 2007, when I was desperately trying to recover from the financial and emotional fallout caused by an immensely traumatic IRS audit, which my shitbag then-accountant both triggered and then made much worse by completely dropping the ball at multiple points in the proceedings.

Rather than taking the time to price each of my thousand-or-so singles according to their specific market values, I simplified the task by stickering each single’s sleeve with a colored dot before I threw them to the record weasels: Yellow meant $10, Green meant $5, and Red meant $1. At the last minute, I plucked about a hundred 45s from the sale pile that I simply couldn’t bear to part with; these would serve as my “base” collection for the next several years until I could afford to start buying records again. Most of ‘em were things like Kinks, Who and Small Faces import 45s that I wasn’t sure I could ever recover, but I pulled Johnny Desmond to safety as well.

I hung onto that single because it reminded me so vividly of the cold, rainy, yet perfectly wonderful San Francisco afternoon when I found it. This was early 1997, my time in SF since I was a kid, and I fell really hard for the place during this visit — especially its old restaurants and watering holes, and the Bay Area’s plethora of great music stores. The thrift shops I hit on that trip were far less bountiful, but I was just as pleased to walk out of a Mission District one with “Land of the Pharaohs” as I was to walk out of Rasputin’s in Berkeley with Sun Ra’s 2-CD singles collection.

While I had never actually heard Desmond’s “Land of the Pharaohs” before I picked it up that day in 1997, I was already a big fan of the film of the same name. I love sword n’ sandal epics of the 1950s and ‘60s, especially ones that take place in ancient Egypt and the Middle East, and especially ones that were filmed in gloriously gaudy widescreen Cinemascope. The Howard Hawks-directed Land of the Pharaohs may be my favorite of them all, despite the fact that it was considered a commercial and critical disaster at the time of its release in 1955.

Taken at face value, Land of the Pharaohs is indeed a mess. Wildly inaccurate historically, it also features some pretty absurd dialogue — William Faulkner gets a co-writing credit on the script, though one suspects (indeed, almost hopes) that the rumors about him being too drunk during the making of the film to contribute much to it are true — and a hilariously unconvincing performance by English actor Jack Hawkins. As the eternity-obsessed Pharaoh Khufu, who is desperate to build an impenetrable tomb so that he may enjoy his “second life” without fear of disturbance, Hawkins possesses neither the charisma nor the physical presence necessary to pull off the role of a “living god”. Frankly, he looks incapable of making it through a warm afternoon of badminton, let alone a three-month military campaign in the desert.

On the other hand, the film is filled with really impressive parade and pyramid-building sequences, which were shot on location in Egypt with a literal cast of thousands. And I agree with Martin Scorsese, who in a 1978 Film Comment interview praised Land of the Pharoahs for the sense of realism that manages to come through despite its rampant ridiculousness and botched historiography. “I'd always been addicted to historical epics,” he said at the time, “but this one was different: it gave the sense that we were really there. This is the way people lived; this is what they believed, thought, and felt. You get it through the overall look of the picture: the low ceilings, the torchlit interiors, the shape of the pillars, the look of the extras.”

Best of all, Land of the Pharaohs also features a bronzer-lathered Joan Collins, whose knuckle-bitingly hot Princess Nellifer weaves a web of treachery so vile, she makes Collins’ conniving Dynasty character Alexis Colby look like a kindly and slow-witted grandma. Collins amps (and vamps) up the camp factor tenfold in every scene she’s in, including the completely gratuitous one where she’s whipped for her “insolence”; despite the film’s poor reception at the box office and among critics, her sizzling performance resulted in a seven-year contract from 20th Century Fox, and rightly so.

Land of the Pharaohs also features an evocative score composed and conducted by the legendary Dimitri Tiomkin. But the title theme used over the opening and closing credits doesn’t feature Johnny Desmond; in fact, his voice is nowhere to be heard on the soundtrack. Though longtime Tiomkin collaborator Ned Washington — “Town Without Pity,” “Rawhide,” “Wild is the Wind,” etc. — cooked up some lyrics to go with the theme, no English words are actually sung in the film; instead, Tiomkin had his vocalists in the chorus-oriented numbers intone “exotic” nonsense syllables. Hey, nobody knows what Ancient Egyptian singing really sounded like, right?

That left it up to Desmond to bring Washington’s lyrics to life, and he does just that in two-and-a-half minutes of campy Egypto-exotica bliss. Released shortly before the film, his recording got a positive write-up in the July 2, 1955 issue of Billboard:

Unfortunately, there’s no clip of the song currently available on YouTube, so I’ve uploaded a file of it for your listening pleasure:

Following a heavily reverbed, wordlessly moaned intro that’s supposed to sound mysterious — but to my ears sounds more like Scott Walker stumbling drunkenly around the bottom of an elevator shaft — Desmond croons an ardent case for romance, Old Kingdom style:

By the pyramids/There were moments like this/Lovers warmed their lips/With the fire of a kiss…

Tiomkin’s orchestra swells, and Desmond lays his invitation on thick:

Come, love/To the Land of Pharaohs/Let’s recapture/All the rapture/That the Ancients have known…

I mean, who could resist, right? Never mind that romantic rapture of any sort is almost entirely absent from the film, unless you count the High Priest Hamar (played by Alexis Minotis) becoming visibly turned-on at the mention of being entombed for eternity with his best buddy Khufu. Life in the Ancient Egypt of Land of the Pharaohs seems brutal and highly regimented, even for those in the ruling class; Khufu bestows lavish feasts upon the high priests who oversee the installation of his burial chamber, but also has their tongues cut out so that they cannot reveal its location to anyone.

But c’mon, Baby — let’s get smoochy in “a mystic, fatalistic, little world of our own”. Nobody can see us here in the shadow of the pyramids, save for the tortured souls of the countless men who died building them, and maybe a few vengeful, animal-headed gods, as well…

Born Giovanni De Simone, Desmond was a singer and sometime actor who was fairly popular from the late 1940s to early 1960s. Kind of a poor man’s Tony Bennett, or a maybe a moderately wealthy man’s Buddy Greco, he’d already scored eight Top 20 hits by the time he recorded “Land of the Pharaohs” — but this single missed the charts entirely. Still, its failure didn’t seem to do Desmond’s career any damage; while Hawks wasn’t able to shake off his pharaonic curse until 1959’s Rio Bravo, Desmond bounced right back with his next single, 1955’s “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which hit #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went all the way to Number One at Cashbox.

But like Khufu’s Great Pyramid, Land of the Pharaohs endures — as does Desmond’s recording of its title theme. And while my inner amateur Egyptologist still hopes to see the pyramids in person before I shuffle off to my “second life,” both the film and the song are thankfully here to “recapture all the rapture” for me whenever I need it.

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