Lesley-Anne Down stars as Erica Baron, an intrepid English rose Egyptologist who stumbles on a priceless statue in a seedy Cairo bazaar run by wily curio dealer Abdu Hamdi (Sir John Gielgud) and then comes up against a gang smuggling artefacts from the Valley of the Kings.
Rarely since The Perils of Pauline has so much been endured by a heroine as by Down here in this £6 million suspense thriller.
After witnessing John Gielgud’s demise (he is sliced in two by sword-wielding grave robbers), she’s shot at, nearly raped, attacked by bats, thrown into a dungeon of rotting corpses and has a tomb cave in on her. As a result, she screams a lot, though co-star Frank Langella seems not to hear.
Director Franklin J Schaffner, who made Patton(1970), takes this nonsense far too seriously.
Lesley-Anne Down married one of the assistants on the film, Henri Gabriel, five-weeks after meeting him in Budapest.
Erica Baron
Lesley-Anne Down Ahmed Khazzan
Frank Langella Yvon
Maurice Ronet Abdu Hamdi
John Gielgud Khalifa
Vic Tablian Stephanos Markoulis
John Rhys-Davies Gamal
Nadim Sawalha Selim
Saeed Jaffrey
Director
Franklin J Schaffner
Related Posts
Inseminoid (1981) Unfairly dismissed on its release as a low-budget imitation of Alien (1979), Norman J. Warren's Inseminoid follows an archaeological expedition by the space…
Lion of the Desert (1980) This epic portrait of resistance hero Omar Mukhtar - the titular "Lion of the Desert" - was funded by Libyan…
Purple Rose of Cairo, The (1985) The title of Woody Allen's 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo refers to the movie-within-the-movie, a sleek and sophisticated black and…
Hawk the Slayer (1980) Lord Grade's ITC gave director Terry Marcel a modest budget of less than a million pounds to throw his hat…
Skull, The (1965) An antique collector named Christopher Maitland (Peter Cushing) has a particular interest in rare and unusual objects of the occult. He…
Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1981) This made-for-TV thriller starred Bernard Cribbins as the titular policeman investigating the cold case file of the rape and murder…
Z for Zachariah (1984) This two-hour feature was one of the last productions of the BBC's Play for Today and depicted events in a Welsh…
Troll (1986) The Potter family - Father Harry Snr. (Michael Moriarty), Mother Anne (Shelley Hack), Son Harry Jnr. (Noah Hathaway) and daughter…
