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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.

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The Universal Mummy

The Mummy (1999)

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