The opening title credit reads "Warner Bros. Pictures Presents Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs." Voice-over narration by Alexis Minotis as “Hamar” is heard intermittently thoughout the film.
       As depicted in the film, Khufu, who was known by the Greeks as Cheops, was the second ruler of Egypt’s fourth dynasty and the builder of the Great Pyramid of Ghiza, in the necropolis of ancient Memphis, not far from Cairo. The pyramid, which took over twenty years to build, originally reached a height of 481 feet and, until the 19th century, was the tallest manmade structure on earth. Named one of the Seven Wonders of the World, it is the only one of those wonders still in existence. Although some modern sources suggest that the pyramid was built by slave labor, others theorize that workers were paid to build it during the flood season when flood water could be used to move the stones over great distances. Because the pyramid’s contents had been looted before archaeologists discovered it, the genesis and purpose of the structure has been open to speculation. However, the generally accepted belief, based on hieroglyphics found on its walls, is that it was built to be Khufu’s tomb. Solar boats, which were discovered in 1954, may have been used to carry Khufu’s body to the burial site or, as the film suggests, placed there for Khufu’s use in the afterlife.
       In a Sep 1954 NYT article, producer-director Howard Hawks said that he vacationed in Europe after completing the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and was trying to develop a story idea “about manpower” that would “prove an ideal subject for CinemaScope.” While yachting near the south of France, he met an Egyptian archeologist who told him stories about Cheops. After hearing how the pharaoh demanded the work of 100,000 men for twenty years to build his tomb, Hawks interested Jack L. Warner, whom he encountered on the Riviera, with his idea for a film about the building of the Ghiza pyramid. Although Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Faulkner, Harry Kurnitz and Harold Jack Bloom are credited onscreen with the screenplay, a Jun 1955 Sat Rev article reported that Faulkner, Kurnitz and Hawks worked together on the script. Faulkner claimed that he had “merely sketched scenes in his dialogue, expecting Hawks and the actors to work it around to their liking on the set." A Jan 1954 DV news item noted that “in a reversal of the pix-to-tv trend,” Hawks hired the entire television camera crew from Meridian Pictures, headed by co-director of photography Russell Harlan, all of whom were granted a leave of absence for several months so they could shoot Land of the Pharaohs overseas.
       A Jun 1954 HR news item stated that portions of the film were shot in Rome. According to various articles and HR production charts, the majority of the film was shot in Egypt, in the area around the real Pyramid of Ghiza, which appears at the end of the film as itself, in the scenes showing the completed tomb. A Jun 1955 HCN article describes how special effects man ronald Chiniqui supervised a crew of ninety-seven Egyptian laborers, who scrubbed the western face of the pyramid to make it appear new. The crew also plastered and painted framework to hide broken and missing stones that were lost to looters over the past centuries. For scenes showing the pyramid under construction, the film crew dug a ninety-foot deep pit at the site of an unfinished excavation. Elsewhere they built a ramp and foundation the size of the original pyramid, where thousands of extras were filmed pulling huge stone blocks, according to a NYT article.
       Other scenes were shot at a limestone quarry at Tourah, near Cairo, and at Aswan, a granite quarry located 500 miles away. At these sites, according to the NYT and Var reviews, 9,787 actors were filmed in one scene. The NYT article stated that Hawks had between 3,000 and 10,000 extras working each day during the fifty-plus day shooting schedule. The government supplied the extras, half of whom were soldiers in the Egyptian Army, according to a Dec 1954 LAT article.
       Several reviews noted that the cast was mostly unknown to the American public. Of the leads, only Dewey Martin and Sidney Chaplin were from the United States. Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins, James Robertson Justice and James Hayter were British. Luisa Boni was Italian, Kerima was French Arabian, according to the NYT article, and Alexis Minotis was a star of the Greek National Theatre. HR news items add David Muss, Paul Steffan, Valerie Camille and Bud Thompson to the cast, although their appearance in the film has not been confirmed.
       The HR review praised Dimitri Tiomkin’s score by stating, “…it is doubtful if this Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. CinemaScope epic would be nearly as exciting without the tremendous symphonic background…it is almost impossible to separate the story from the music.” According to a Dec 1954 HR news item, Tiomkin included reproductions of musical instruments used in the era of the Pharaohs, but in an article in Film Music, he stated that he did not try to recreate the music of that time. The orchestra was augmented with a chorus of eighty singers, who were individually handpicked by Jester Hairston, the noted Los Angeles choir director.