To keep a long story short, due to several factors my television recap plans are currently being rejigged. I’ll be looking at some more spooky
October-themed movies than originally planned, maybe a couple bonus episodes of
OTR, or vintage Donald Duck. I’ll do my best to
make it work and try to keep a good balance.
But enough about scheduling hiccups! Let’s talk about
something fun, like mummies!
Perhaps you’ve heard the announcement that Tom Cruise will
be joining the Universal Horror revival sparked by Dracula Untold? If not, here’s a press release.
Regardless of your feelings about Tom Cruise, how
disappointed you were in Dracula Untold,
or your general skepticism about anyone ever capturing the glory days of
Universal Monsters or early Hammer Horror again, it’s probably going to be a
solid showcase for Sofia Boutella as the Mummy Queen, and she was pretty
delightful in Star Trek Beyond. Silver
linings, I guess.
So, to get everyone warmed up and ready for the next
ill-advised excavation…
The Mummy (1932)
In the 1930’s, Boris Karloff’s career was hotter than a
Scotch bonnet pepper on the surface of the sun. Eager to cast him in follow-up
to The Old Dark House, Universal
hired magazine writer/flapper gal Nina Wilcox Putnam and paired her with
screenwriting pro Richard Schayer to come up with a story. They produced a
nine-page treatment about the infamous court magician Cagliostro, with
absolutely no elements of Egypt or mummies. In order to live through the
centuries, Putnam’s version of Cagliostro injected himself with nitrate, and
from what I gather the whole story sounds awesome and weird and more
appropriate for a 1980’s audience than a 1930’s one.
(As a quick aside, Orson Welles played a horror-movie version
of Cagliostro in 1949’s Black Magic,
with Raymond Burr in a weird framing story about Alexandre Dumas fighting with
his son. A version of Cagliostro also appeared in an episode of Boris Karloff’s
60’s TV show Thriller, “The Prisoner
in the Mirror.” The historical Cagliostro is much less exciting than either
depiction.)
Universal didn’t like a lot of the monster angles in the
Cagliostro treatment, so they brought in John L. Balderson – who at that time
was best known for his adaptation of Frankenstein,
but would later go on to earn Academy Award noms for Gaslight and The Lives of a
Bengal Lancer – to change things up. Back when he’d been working as a
journalist, Balderson had covered the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and the
curse that seemed to befall those who opened it. The real-life story of ominous
warnings on tablets and the possible reawakening of dormant, ancient evil was
widely known. Balderson decided to use it as his jumping off point, scrapping
the Italian magician angle altogether.
When everything was ironed out, the film became the tale of
Imhotep, a man buried alive over 3000 years ago for daring to challenge the
gods of death. When his mummy is discovered by gentleman archaeologists, he’s
brought back to life by the reading aloud of the Scroll of Thoth by the
youngest and least superstitious of the group. After regaining his strength, he
reappears as a contemporary Egyptian using the name Ardath Bey, and begins
leaving mysterious clues to new archaeologists about where certain tombs might
be found.
Imhotep is easily my favourite of the Karloff creature
roles. Back before Christopher Lee politely seized the crown, Karloff was the
most versatile of the horror legends. Imhotep showcases that range as the Mummy
gradually regains his strength and human form. You have everything from the
mute shambling body language that Karloff invented and is still used as monster
shorthand today, to his romantic side in the ancient Egypt sequence, and his
remarkable gift for intensity in the stillest moments.
Zita Johann plays the object of Imhotep’s obsession, Helen
Grovsner, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his tragically deceased
ancient lover Ankh-es-en-Amon (spellings on that one vary, but the character
was named after King Tut’s wife). Johann was a fascinating actress of the
period, often referred to as “The White Flame of the American Theater,” which
was apparently some kind of compliment? Jazz Age lingo is weird. Anyway, she
greatly disliked the process of making movies, and Mummy director Karl Freund
didn’t do anything to help things along. He was a gigantic jerk to all of his
actors, Johann especially.
Despite the difficult work circumstances, her performance is
one of the most nuanced and interesting of all Universal horror leading ladies.
Interestingly, she was heavily involved in the spiritualism movement of the
time, and believed in reincarnation and a person’s ability to “carry” different
souls. In the scenes where her large, glittering dark eyes seem to look
thousands of years into the past, it’s easy to believe that’s what she’s doing.
The success of The
Mummy was slow to spawn sequels, something unusual for Universal at the
time, but it was rebooted a decade later, bringing us to…
The Mummy’s Hand
(1940)
Spiderman films aren’t the only things to get started and
restarted over and over again. The Mummy franchise has always been in a similar
boat. Cast off all notions of the Mummy Imhotep being an elegant, tragic and
obsessive figure. Those traits belong to Dracula. Mummies are prototypes for
zombies now.
Imhotep is gone. The new Mummy is called Kharis and is
played by Tom Tyler, who doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do since all the
flashback scenes to Ancient Egypt are lifted directly from 1932’s The Mummy and have an uncredited Boris
Karloff in them, and for some reason most of the story is about not trusting
magicians.
(It’s weird, because the 1932 Mummy has no evil magicians in it, despite being rooted in the
Cagliostro treatment, yet The Mummy’s
Hand is loaded with modern day evil magicians. Not even corrupt ancient
magicians. Evil 1940’s magicians. I don’t know why.)
But let’s back up a little and explain how we got here.
In the early 1930’s, Universal’s horror films were finely
crafted works of art helmed by the likes of James Whale. Pioneers.
Experimenters. Meticulous artists. And, jerkiness aside, Karl Freund’s
direction in the original film is stunning. The use of atmosphere and the
composition of shadow is hypnotic, particularly in the sequence when the mummy
first awakes, and a later scene when Ardath Bey brings Helen to a fountain pond
to hypnotize her.
Then Whale’s Bride of
Frankenstein managed to be a critical and cinematic hit, and the sequel
train left the station. Everyone got a sequel. It didn’t matter if all your
characters were dead at the end, it would just be about those character’s sons
or something. No big deal.
Gradually, Universal’s interests and artistic levels slid
into B-movie territory. Then everybody met Abbott and Costello, and while that
is itself an awesomely fun movie, it also signals a change in the public perception
of horror films. They weren’t art anymore, they were now schlock.
In 1940, The Mummy got a reboot.
Not even a sequel, just a terrible rehashing of its plot, updated to be able to
create a more profitable franchise. (What’s kind of funny about this is Nina
Wilcox Putnam’s original Cagliostro idea was way better suited to having a
series. In it, instead of having one reincarnated love, the monster would’ve
been hunting the women of modern cities out of a spiteful need for revenge
against the lover who had once spurned him.)
The Mummy’s Hand
is bad.
It strips away all subtlety and ices the cake by foisting a “funny” sidekick upon
us.
Crucially, though, it’s the actual starting point of Universal’s Mummy Movie Cycle. Also, fun
fact: Tom Tyler only appeared as Kharis is this one film. Ever after, Lon
Chaney Jr. was the mummy, except when Kharis met Abbott and Costello. That was
Eddie Parker in a whole bunch of bandages.
So, after The Mummy’s
Hand we got The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost (I like that title
best because it’s so ridiculously unclear about what the monster is, like wouldn’t it just be the Ghost
of Kharis?), and The Mummy’s Curse.
None of them winners until Hammer got the rights to The Mummy’s Hand and…
The Mummy (1959)
You would think that the second best Mummy movie of all time
would’ve been a remake of the 1932 version and not of the craptacular 1940
film, but no. Due to rights issues, when Hammer finally added the Mummy to its
own stable of monsters, it was with the express understanding that they would
be remaking The Mummy’s Hand, and any
sequels thereafter would be unrelated to the Universal Mummy franchise. That
last part suited Hammer just fine, they weren’t big on sequential franchises.
Films were linked more by monster type and theme than anything else.
Despite the inelegant pedigree, not only is 1959’s The Mummy a serious contender for the
best Mummy movie, it’s a serious contender for the best Hammer Horror. (If you
ask me, the best Hammer Horror is The
Gorgon, but that’s 90% because of the fake moustaches and the part where… something
ridiculous happens. It’s a huge
spoiler. My point is that “best” is a subjective label.)
Christopher Lee plays Kharis, revived when archaeologists
read from the Scroll of Life, a made-up artifact that acts as the opposite of
the Book of the Dead. The cleverest and most likeable of the archaeologists,
and the one that happens to be married to Kharis’s dead princess, is played by
Peter Cushing. He calls everyone idiots for being murdered, and unnecessarily leaps over a desk while wearing a smoking jacket, proving yet again why you should always open-hand slap people who leave him off their lists of horror icons.
1959's Mummy a fantastically moody film, full of shimmering golden treasures
and plush Victorian furnishings. Plot-wise, it’s thin, but the photography and
performances elevate it enormously. The only downside is the swamp at the end. I like my mummies
to age rapidly and turn into dust. It’s a personal preference.
If you haven’t seen this one, most reliable movie channels
play it at this time of year, so make it your business to check it out. It
works especially well on those rainy autumn afternoons where the sky is a
muddled grey turning into early twilight, and you happen to have a cozy blanket
and some pumpkin spice popcorn.
Hammer being Hammer, there were a few sequels. The Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Shroud, and lastly Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, which is
the most quintessentially Hammer-sounding of the titles. We never got to “Seven
Golden Mummies” or “Kiss of the Mummy Swingers” which is sad. People give up on
their mummy franchises too soon.
They do run away with the trophy for quality-of-sequels, all
jokes aside. The Mummy’s Shroud is a
winner, and none of the series are as bad as the Brendan Fraser one in China.
Yeesh.
Speaking of the Brendan Fraser series…
The Mummy (1999)
You know what doesn’t suck as much as people say? The 1999
version of The Mummy. (It’s barely eligible for discussion, but 1999
does count as 20th Century, and that’s what’s in my tagline.)
Ostensibly, it stars Brendan “George of the Jungle” Fraser
as an American adventurer in 1920’s Cairo, where he meets a very likeable
librarian with cinema’s worst eyebrows. Rachel Weisz plays Evelyn Carnahan, whose
name is a combination of the names of the people involved in the discovery of
King Tut’s tomb. She takes command of the storyline in a way so far unseen
since the 1932 version of the story, and becomes the heart of the film and the
driving force of the plotline.
There are plenty of fun nods to the Karloff Mummy, many of
them more referential than practical, and the flashback sequences borrow
heavily from the Hammer films. Ultimately,
though, it feels more like adventure than horror. There are elements that echo Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as
well as several Humphrey Bogart films, but that’s not necessarily to its
detriment. It knows what it is, and it expands on the idea and embraces it.
Like its predecessors, it spawned a series of sequels. One
of them has pygmy mummies, which is the kind of thing you wonder about when
you’re drunk but don’t ever expect to actually
see in a real film, and another one has a magic pond that turns people into
dragons.
Maybe stick with the first one?
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