King Tut: The Face Of Tutankhamun

Rushed to video shortly after its debut on the Arts & Entertainment cable network, King Tut: The Face of Tutankhamun is a sprawling mess of archaeological history and tabloid-style titillation concocted and presented by Professor Christopher Frayling, as he traces the steps of renowned archaeologist Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tutankhamun's tomb. Divided into four parts, King Tut gets off to a rather slow start charting Carter's early forays into Upper and Lower Egypt at the dawn of the century. Frayling, along with archaeologist Donald Ryan, examines minor digs and minor finds which, for most audiences, provide minor interest. The second part, however, picks up considerably as the story chronicles the events surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in November of 1922 and spotlights the incredible riches found within. Part 3 toys with the "evidence" relating to the supposed curse of Tut's tomb, a notion which took hold following the death of Carter's patron and compatriot Lord Canarvon (the story of Canarvon's death is pointlessly told twice). In the middle of speculating on the curse, the program shifts to a modern and fascinatingly bizarre small business in Salt Lake City, where people are paying big bucks for personalized sarcophagi and the promise of mummification on their demise (this would have made an intriguing documentary all by itself). The third part concludes with a look at the Tutmania craze that swept Europe and America in the late 1920s, and was reborn in the late 1970s when the King Tut exhibit toured the U.S. (thanks to Nixon, incidentally). There's even an old "Saturday Night Live" clip of Steve Martin performing his one and only Top 40 hit "King Tut." The final part opens with the boy King being re-exhumed in the 1960s and subjected to a battery of tests made possible by advances in technology. Various scientists comment on the probability of inbreeding, the doubts of tuberculosis being the cause of death, and the possibility that Tutankhamun was murdered, and the program shows repeated close-ups of the emaciated face, dismembered limbs, and rotting bones of the ancient corpse, while dropping ghastly tidbits (the re-exhumation in the 1960s revealed that someone in the Carter entourage had filched the King's penis). The last half-hour is devoted to the disturbing condition of Egyptian antiquities housed in Egypt today, where shoddy restoration work combined with the crush of tourism, has given rise to a uniform cry of alarm from the academic/museum community. King Tut is a strange hybrid at odds with itself. It's no accident that the lurid aspects of the story are delivered during the opening 15 minutes of each program--television audiences are notoriously fickle beasts which must be wooed at the beginning of a show or quickly lost. Yet, there are also whole stretches of serious, and even engaging, ruminations about Egypt, past and present. Too TV-sensitive to be a really good documentary, but not gossipy enough to be a wholesale hit with the National Enquirer crowd, King Tut: The Face of Tutankhamun straddles the fence. Purchase according to demand. (Available from most distributors.)