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The picture's plot would perhaps be easier to decipher if patrons were handed pocket models of the Rosetta stone at the door. Ostensibly, the No. 1 digger (Robert Taylor) is out to find the tomb of the first Pharaoh to believe in only one God—the one influenced by the Biblical Joseph. But as the story goes on. the moviegoer gets an uneasy sense that he is being asked to swallow an ideological camel (with Eleanor Parker on top) about the Americans and how they alone shine like good deeds in a naughty world. ("I am afraid," sneers a callow young Menjou-type, obviously a foreigner, "in all the hustle and bustle [in America], the spiritual might have been somewhat neglected.'' True-blue Robert snaps back: "When were you last in the States?")
The foreign fellow is scragged in due time, but not until the screen has been traversed by sandstorms, scorpions, Tuaregs and an epic cooch in which Samia Gamal, the unfrocked Texan-by-marriage, gongs it around pretty effectively.
Actor Taylor, who has learned history the hard way (Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table), performs like a student fresh out of a cram session, stunned but effective. He even manages to sputter a little Arabic, or words to that effect—"umptu niagda brruschk!"—when the occasion requires. Comes time for the concluding festivities in the Pharaoh's crypt, Taylor seems so tired of it all that he hardly bothers to respond to Actress Parker's subterranean snuggling—a fact which at least spares the moviegoer a sort of petting party in a coffin.
Johnny Dark (Universal) makes only two demands on moviegoers: they are asked to believe that 1) Tony Curtis is an engineering genius, and 2) Piper Laurie is capable of designing a sports car. For the rest, it is a routine, summer-weight Technicolor film that spends most of its time following a road race from the Canadian border to Lower California. Sidney Blackmer and Paul Kelly huff and puff at each other as a pair of old-crony businessmen; Piper Laurie, a talented exponent of the bosom-and-pout school of acting, stamps her foot occasionally and flirts tamely with Villain Don Taylor; Actor Curtis runs into a hero's usual hard luck in the race—he loses his way, cracks an engine block, is clearly out of the running. But to no one's surprise, he wins anyway.