The movie was Producer and Director Howard Hawks' first commercial failure. It caused him to take a break from directing and travel through Europe for a few years. His next movie, Rio Bravo (1959), was the longest break between two movies in his career.
Producer and Director Howard Hawks had between three thousand and ten thousand extras working each day during the fifty-plus day shooting schedule. The government supplied those extras, half of whom were soldiers in the Egyptian Army.
According to the liner notes of the soundtrack CD, the lyrics of most of the choruses heard throughout this movie, often thought to be Asian, Semitic or Egyptian in origin, are actually gibberish that Composer Dimitri Tiomkin concocted to evoke the period and sound like ancient Egyptian, and are actually meaningless.
Howard Hawks had a mostly bad time making this epic, a most untypical film for him. The part of Nellifer was originally to have been played by the fashion model Ivy Nicholson, whom Hawks hoped to turn into a film star; but her behavior led him to fire her almost as soon as filming started. He wasn't very happy with Joan Collins, who has reported that she expected for several days to be fired as well; but she stayed in the film. He claimed that his real problem with the subject was that he "didn't know how a pharaoh talked" - William Faulkner claimed that he could make the character "sound like a Kentucky colonel", whilst Harry Kurnitz said he'd try to "make him sound like King Lear". Neither idea proved satisfactory. Hawks also didn't like working with CinemaScope, although he told interviewers that his chief interest in making the film had been using the new process.
The movie was never released in Egypt because, according to the authorities, Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) looked like a Jew.
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