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.