The Video and
DVD File:
Metamorphoses of
the Mummy: A Survey of Mummy Movies on Video and
DVD
Not surprisingly,
the Mummy dynasty is well represented on video.
Universal not only put out a digital transfer of Mummy 1 to promote
the latest addition to the line, but it also
offers The Mummy Collector's Set which includes
the first picture in the series packaged with The Mummy's
Ghost (1944) and The Mummy's Curse (1944). The latter
titles are also available separately as are The Mummy's Hand
(1940) and The Mummy's Tomb (1942).
The First
Generation: The whole line of screen Mummies begins with the extraordinary The Mummy,
directed by Karl Freund (1932)****. As I explain in greater detail in The Universal Mummy
this seems to me to be not only the best of the series
but one of the masterpieces of the 1930's horror genre, only
rivaled by Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
(1932). Nevertheless, the movie's strength lies in Karl Freund's
rather ascetic mise en scéne and not in its production values,
which were apparently limited by Universal's penny-pinching
policies. When the scene shifts from the Cairo Museum to a
fashionable hotel where Helen is attending a party, early in the
movie, the camera simply pans over a photograph of the city,
although what looks like bona fide stock footage shows up back
projected later in a scene in which Dr. Muller and Frank Whemple
are in a cab.
However the most striking example of the perils of
studio penury is a scene that does not occur in Mummy 1.
When Imhotep, now divested of his wrappings, reappears as Ardath
Bey in 1932 at the British Museum camp, he of course leads the
archaeologists to the site of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon's tomb.
What would have been more logical than to show the opening of the
tomb? But the film fades out just after Frank has detected the
seal of the seven jackals. Some idea of what has been lost by not
continuing beyond this point can be gained by looking at the
scene of the opening of the tomb of Genghis Khan in The Mask
of Fu Manchu*** (1932) directed by
Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor (uncredited).
A straightforward
thriller rather than a horror film--although it does star Boris Karloff as the villainous doctor--The Mask of Fu Manchu
has certain affinities with Mummy 1, owing to the strong
element of exoticism in both movies. Fu Manchu had already
appeared on the screen in several pictures produced by Paramount,
starting with The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu in 1929 in all
of which Warner Oland played the lead, but where these movies
depicted Fu as a cunning but worthy adversary, The Mask of Fu
Manchu makes him into a monster straight out of the pages of
de Sade like Saint-Fond or Minski, transforming Sax Rohmer's
detective novel into a xenophobic tirade with some dialogue that
is furiously racist even by the standards of the period. (The
film was made by MGM but was a production of William Randolph
Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures, which may explain the blatant
appeal to "yellow peril" hysteria.)
Karl Freund was a legendary
cinematographer who had worked with Fritz Lang and Friedrich
Wilhelm Murnau and it seems reasonable to assume that he was as
responsible for the look of Mummy 1
as its
nominal director of photography, Charles Stumar.
But has at its disposal all the
resources of the greatest of the studios at that
moment--photographed by Tony Gaudio
(who shot William Wyler's The Letter [1940]), with sets by Cedric Gibbons and
costumes by Adrian. And nowhere are
these resources so effectively on display as in the opening of
the tomb, easily the high point of the film. Just as in the
opening scenes of Mummy 1, it is the themes of death,
necrophilia, antiquity, transgression, repressed desire, and
fetishism which coalesce in this sequence--themes which The Mask
of Fu Manchu deploys in a wildly lurid fashion elsewhere--but
visually dramatized with a bravura that surpasses anything
comparable in Mummy 1.
2001 Note: As I noted above, Universal has
in the meantime brought out a DVD of this movie as part of its Classic Monster
Collection which was not yet available when I wrote these reviews. The
pictorial quality of the movie is quite good like that of any well-produced DVD,
but the bonus features are a different matter. In contrast to the DVD
of Dracula, which boasts an excellent commentary by David J. Skal as well
as an informative documentary, The Road to Dracula, the DVD of Mummy
1 only has a very pedestrian commentary by Paul Jensen, and the
documentary, Mummy Dearest, is primarily an opportunity for showing clips
from other pictures available from Universal Home Video. Moreover, the packaging
claims that the DVD contains the original trailer as well as some other bonus
features, but if it does I have yet to find them.
However, a few
interesting things do appear in Mummy Dearest,
the most interesting of which is the fact that Universal had originally intended
the film to contain a series of episodes taking place in different historical
periods--shades of Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921). Although these
episodes were filmed--Mummy Dearest includes stills of the material
shot--no trace of them survives in the final version, unless it is in the
strange credit of one of the performers as "The Saxon Soldier," since
no one resembling a Saxon, soldier or otherwise otherwise, appears in Mummy
1. What makes this information so surprising, however, is that one of
Mummy 1's real strengths is its narrative
economy--particularly in contrast to Dracula
and Frankenstein--and it is difficult to imagine what the movie would be
like if it had been padded out in this way.
The documentary is
introduced by Rudy Behlmer standing in the restored Vista theater in Hollywood,
whose interior sports some extravagant pseudo-Egyptian decor which had made a
considerable impression on me when I saw Sergei Eisentein's Alexander
Nevsky for the first time at the Vista while in my
teens. Today, when most older theaters are biting the dust, it is
wonderful to see a great old edifice like this restored and still functioning as
a movie house. One of the last single screen theaters in San Diego, itself
originally called the Egyptian--which has not been in use for a few years--is
about to yield to the wrecker's ball, and it will take along with it a big chunk
of viewing experience for those of us who remember it in its various
incarnations.
The Second
Generation. Universal revived
its Mummy after a long repose, in 1940, with The Mummy's Hand*.
The studio retained the basic plot line of an Egyptian prince who
had been mummified alive for trying to bring back to life his
beloved--a flashback to ancient times even incorporates some
footage from the earlier movie--but it made some changes which
were certainly not for the best. Imhotep became Kharis (Tom
Tyler), the object of his unholy passion the Princess Ananka. No
longer was he accidentally brought back to life by the Scroll of
Thoth but kept alive by the priests of an esoteric
cult--dedicated to reuniting Kharis with the princess--with the
help of a tea brewed from tana leaves. Other than launching a new
generation of Mummy movies, The Mummy's Hand is a mediocre
adventure film that more resembles George Stevens' Gunga Din
(1939)--with the treacherous priests taking the place of the
Thugees--than it does Mummy 1. (In fact, the film was
directed by Christy Cabanne who had worked mainly as a director
of programmers.)
The
sequel, The Mummy's Tomb (1942)**, brings Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.
in this and the succeeding movies) to the United States in quest of
the princess--whose remains have been transported to an American
museum by the archaeologists from The
Mummy's Hand. This film established the
plot formula that was going to be used for the succeeding productions: Each time
that a priest is dispatched to the USA to carry
out the planned reunion of Kharis with Ananka, he
falls prey to the lusts of the flesh and meets a violent end--as
foretold by the curse which is repeated mantra-like throughout
the series.
For the most part, The
Mummy's Tomb is as limp as its predecessor--enough of which
is interpolated into a recapitulatory flashback at the beginning of this picture that it is almost not necessary to have
seen the former movie at all to follow the sequel.
But The Mummy's Tomb contains some striking
compositions of Kharis' nocturnal perambulations through the
countryside and of the Mapleton Cemetery where the current priest
Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) has holed up. Directed by Harold Young,
known otherwise mainly as the director of The Scarlet
Pimpernel (1934), The Mummy's Tomb probably owes these
visual pleasures to its cinematographer, George Robinson, who
photographed the Spanish language version of Dracula
(1931), directed by George Melford, and who did yeoman service in
many of Universal's horror films of the later 1930's and 1940's,
starting with Dracula's Daughter in 1936.
The Mummy's Ghost (1944)**, however, marks a real turning point in the series.
Photographed by William A. Sickner, the film is visually on a par
with its predecessor, but narratively it makes an unexpected turn
to the left. In the small college town of Mapleton, a luckless
professor of ancient history brings Kharis back to life by
experimenting with tana leaf tea; meanwhile, a new priest, Yousuf
Bey (John Carradine), has been sent to Mapleton to reunite Kharis
with Ananka, who turns out to be reincarnated in the body of a
young college student, Amina Mansori (Ramsey Ames). When Yousef
predictably decides to derail this scheme and wants to make
himself and Amina immortal with the help of the tea, Kharis
disposes of him, carrying off the Princess--who changes into the
desiccated remains of Ananka--with him into a nearby swamp.
Continue
The Universal Mummy
The
Mummy (1999)
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