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Explicitly unhappy endings are a rarity in older American movies, especially in the 1940's, but one in which the heroine perishes and the monster apparently survives is a real anomaly. Perhaps Universal had already planned out the sequel, The Mummy's Curse***, which came out in the same year. If so, however, it is difficult to explain a major break in narrative continuity between the two pictures. The two preceding Mummy movies had been set in a small college town that seemed to be located in New England; in The Mummy's Curse, the action is inexplicably shifted to a bayou populated by Cajuns where the swamp is being drained by a construction company whose operations unearth Ananka, who returns to life for a farewell performance. Nearby, in a ruined monastery--whose sacristan is played by silent movie star William Farnum--the latest arrivals from Egypt, Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe) and Ragab (Martin Kosleck) are nourishing Kharis with nightly doses of tana leaf tea.

By all rights, The Mummy's Curse should be the worst of the second generation Mummies. It has a mediocre cast--with the exception of the ever reliable Martin Kosleck--as well as a script that suggests the writers (Dwight V. Babcock, Leon Abrams and Bernard Schubert) were at their wits' end when they cooked up this concluding episode in the saga, and, to top it all off, some really vile racial humor. No one who has never seen one of these late Universal horror productions can truly appreciate the humor of Eddie Cline's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), which is as much a satire on the studio's standard bill of fare as it is a matchless vehicle for W.C. Fields.

But one sequence, that in which Ananka (Virgina Christine) revives and wanders in a daze through the woods in broad daylight, is far beyond anything elsewhere in the series. The images here have a suggestive power--like that of the images from a great silent film--quite unusual in movies of the 1940's. The shot in which Ananka, clad only in a tattered gown, pauses next to a huge prop tree should logically belong in a much better movie. (In fact, some shots in the sequence have a certain resemblance to compositions in Jean Cocteau's contemporaneous Eternal Return, directed by Jean Delannoy.) 

Unfortunately, after this brief excursion into movie art, The Mummy's Curse returns to its vomit when Ragab gets the hots for the heroine, Betty Walsh (Kay Harding), the daughter of the construction boss. In an ending worthy of a cheap serial, Ragab shoots Dr. Zandaab before Kharis, Samson-like, brings down the walls of the monastery upon Ragab's unlucky head. Since the director, Leslie Goodwins--the director of a number of Mexican Spitfire movies, among a host of similar efforts--is obscure even by Universal's standards, I would incline to give credit for the brief serendipitous flight of fancy to the cinematographer, Virgil Miller--like George Robinson, a longtime veteran of the studios who had worked on the original Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Another influence that may have worked on the sequence at a distance is that of the psychological thriller, then moving into its ascendancy. Universal had just commenced its series of Inner Sanctum mysteries starring Lon Chaney Jr. with Calling Dr. Death in 1943. Moreover, the history of the two genres is closely intertwined during the period. While some of Universal's horror films like The Wolfman (1941), directed by George Waggner, have strongly psychological undertones, the movies produced by Val Lewton at RKO are quite evidently psychological thrillers camouflaged as horror pictures. 

One of the conventions of the former genre which Lewton by no means invented but did help to establish was that of the character who wonders about in a trance-like state, either deranged or suffering from amnesia. The prototypic example of such a character is, of course, Mrs. Holland (Edith Barrett) in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943) but Irena in Tourneur's The Cat People (1942) and Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks) in Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim (1943) fall into the same category. And Amina/Ananka in her handful of scenes would seem to belong as much to the milieu of these productions as to that of the Mummy cycle. (In 1946, Universal made She-Wolf of London, a quite unpretentious but not ineffective movie--also available on video--that falls nearly in the middle of the borderland between the two genres, even opting for a non-supernatural dénouement.) 

Universal actually had under contract at the same time it made The Mummy's Curse one of the most gifted directors who worked in the psychological thriller genre, Robert Siodmak. But Siodmak only directed one horror film, The Son of Dracula (1943), before going on to more ambitious projects such as The Strange Case of Uncle Harry (1945) and The Suspect (1945), starring Charles Laughton. Yet it is regrettable that the studio did not hand over the last of this dynasty to a director like Siodmak or Edgar G. Ulmer--who really performed wonders with such films as Bluebeard (1944) and Strange Illusion (1945) for the wretched Producer's Releasing Corporation--and whose presence might have transformed The Mummy's Curse into a far more worthy successor to its 1932 progenitor.

The Third Generation. Deliberately ignoring the unspeakable Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) and eliminating Mummy wannabes--the IMDb lists some 43 titles with the keyword "mummy" made between 1912 and 1999--there remains only one legitimate generation between the second series and the Mummy's most recent reincarnation. This is the movie produced by Hammer Films in England: The Mummy (1959)**, directed by Terence Fisher. (There is also some kind of sequel entitled The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb [1964], directed by Michael Carreras, but since Kharis' name is absent from the list of characters--the Mummy is called Ra Antef--it does not seem to be a canonical production.) 

This Mummy boasts a screenplay by Hammer's resident scribe, Jimmy Sangster, which draws upon features of the first and second generations but moves the action to Victorian England after a brief introductory sequence in Egypt. As in the second dynasty, the mummy bears the name Kharis, but as in the first he is brought to life by the reading of a scroll--now dubbed the Scroll of Life--and has been punished for trying to revive his love from death in ancient times. From the second dynasty, the movie also borrows the name of Stephen Banning (specifically, from The Mummy's Tomb), now transferred to a hapless British archaeologist who after stumbling upon the scroll and then witnessing Kharis' resuscitation, goes mad. Anyone's judgement about the 1959 Mummy will probably depend on the person's general response to the Hammer Film productions, of which this is quite a typical example.  

In their time, the Hammer horror films, particularly the ones directed by Terence Fisher, had quite a large cult following in France--I think that Positif, the rival of Cahiers du Cinema, was a Hammer bastion--but as one raised in the black and white Universal school of horror, I failed to be excited by them. Re-watching them today in good videos, I find myself a little more sympathetic to their charms, but their strong points lie in their classy Technicolor ® cinematography and well-decorated sets. The screenplay for this film certainly does not improve upon that of its distant ancestor by delaying the scene of Kharis' return to life until a late flashback and by going to some silly difficulties to land him in a swamp upon his arrival in the British Isles. 

Although some well-known figures show up in the cast, Christopher Lee as Kharis is under wraps the whole time, and Peter Cushing, as John Banning--the son of the ill-fated Stephen--and Felix Aylmer as Stephen are competent without being exceptional. Nevertheless, the film has some striking shots of Kharis on the prowl for his victims--in particular, one of him rising from the swamp. In retrospect, probably one of the best things that can be said of all the Hammer creations is that they are so emphatically studio productions--at a time when realistic location shooting, especially in Great Britain, was becoming all the rage--and in that regard they are closer to their more prestigious forbearers than in any other.  For Hammer aficionados, Universal has an excellent Hammer Collection, and Anchor Bay has also released a couple of titles as has Warner Home Video which put out the quite good and inexpensive video of this title. 

2001 Note: Not surprisingly, Universal pulled out all the stops in producing the DVD of Mummy 2--the Web site for The Mummy Returns even advertises something called The Ultimate Mummy, a two disk set whose release will coincide the debut of the sequel. Although the DVD includes all sorts of goodies like a commentary by Stephen Sommers and Bob Ducsay, its most interesting feature is a documentary called Building a Better Mummy, dealing mainly with the film's impressive use of CGI and including interviews with a number of technicians from Industrial Light and Magic who worked on Mummy 2. The people from ILM are quite articulate and provide a detailed account of how they created various effects. No one, after watching Building a Better Mummy, should be in any doubt about the profound way in which digital technology is going to transform traditional film production.

The Universal Mummy

The Mummy (1990)

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