Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile

It was the birthday of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee a few days ago, so I decided to look out for a movie from either of them that I haven't seen before. Turned out that Amazon Prime has the 1961 Italian produced historical movie Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile, featuring Vincent Price. So naturally I picked that one, excited to see Vincent in another historical epic.

Right from the beginning you get a feeling that this is a (much) cheaper knock off of Cleopatra (1963). 

You might be fooled by the fact that Nefertiti came out in 1961, two years before Cleopatra, but let's look at the production dates more closely. According to IMDb, Cleopatra had already been in pre-production since 1958, and filming, famously excruciatingly, between 1960-1963.  Meanwhile this slick Italian production was filmed within March-April 1963, and released the same year! But do the differences in production length show up on the screen?

They definitely do; while Nefertiti does best it can with its limited budget, it doesn't really feel like an historical epic nearly in the same scale of Cleopatra or others. But production values aside, I'm here to see Vincent Price chewing the scenery. How does that work out?

Sadly, this seems to be quite stiff and restrained performance from Vincent. Appearing without moustache, he does possess a kind of ageless Egyptian mystic aura, making him more fit the scenery better than you might guess. But the script doesn't really offer him much to work with. 

Otherwise as a movie this plays out like a pretty standard love triangle (no, Vincent is not part of the triangle), between the beautiful leading lady Jeanne Crain, and the two lifelong friends played by Edmund Purdom and Amedeo Nazzari. One of them of course is the Pharaoh, and one of them a lowly sculptor. You might guess that Crain's interest favors the lowly sculptor, and at one point of the movie the pharaoh appoints him to sculpt a portrait of Crain. Hey doesn't this sound exactly like the plot of Tulip Fever? 

The lack of budget ensures that there is no emphasis on battle scenes or crowd spectacle, instead we have pretty drawn out lengthy dialogue sequences, and a lot of badly dubbed bit players (being an Italian production).  

Recommendation:  Worth checking out if you catch it for free, but not worth paying for. Don't expect spectacle or excitement, and you might find it a decent sunday afternoon time waster.