I relaxed somewhat with Charles and we hit the video collection for what looked like it would be the final movie of the Conlan-Nelson Video Theatre for 1998: The Mummy’s Hand, one of the better “New Universal” horror films. It wasn’t near the 1932 Mummy with Boris Karloff, and Karl Freund’s stunningly moody direction, but it was a lot of fun, with campy performances by Wallace Ford and Cecil Kellaway for comic relief — indeed, the first half of the film is more comedy than anything else — and a fine (as usual) job by George Zucco as the principal villain, who in the opening sequence inherits the mantle of the priests of Karnak, charged with keeping the mummified Kharis (played by Tom Tyler in this one — a former cowboy star, he was billed eighth! — and Lon Chaney, Jr. in the three sequelae) alive with the sacred (and carefully preserved, since the plant had long since become extinct) tana leaves (brew the fluid from three leaves and the mummy remains alive in suspended animation, brew nine leaves and he gets up and moves, brew any more than that and he becomes an uncontrollable monster). Alas, the tape we were watching was a dub from an old Beta recording I made in the mid-1980’s, and the visual and especially sound quality left a lot to be desired (though even through the haze of an old tape one could note that Elwood Bredell’s photography, as good as it was, didn’t have the atmospherics of Charles Stumar’s work in the 1932 film, much of which was spliced into this one as stock footage to pad it out and make it look like it had bigger production values than it did). Still, it was a lot of fun, and the Mummy’s appearance (Karloff biographer Donald Glut has suggested Tyler was cast because he was about the same height and build as Karloff and therefore could more convincingly “double” for him in a new film built largely around the available Karloff footage from 1932) was properly frightening even though Jack Pierce did his face with a phony-looking mask (one could see a shadow between the eye socket and Tyler’s actual eyes, which gave it away) instead of the eight-hour collodion build-up job he’d put Karloff through eight years earlier — and the Mummy didn’t appear often enough to outstay his welcome, but was wisely deployed sparingly by scenarist Griffin Jay and director Christy Cabanne (this may be Cabanne’s finest film ever, not that that’s saying much for it). — 12/31/98
•••••
At 9 last night Charles and I took a vacation from watching
the news and I ran him two of the films in Universal’s 1940’s Mummy cycle, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb. Neither of these movies comes anywhere near the
quality of the first (and best) Mummy movie, the 1932 classic directed by Karl Freund from a script by John
L. Balderston and starring Boris Karloff as a revivified Egyptian mummy,
Imhotep (depicted in the film as a commoner who fell in love with a princess
and for his lese-majesté was
sentenced to be mummified and buried alive, only an inept anthropologist
revived him by reading him the Scroll of Thoth, though the real Imhotep was the
architect who designed the pyramids and was the only human other than the
Pharoahs the ancient Egyptians elevated to godhood), who spends most of the
movie disguised as an Arab trader, Ardath Bey, who attempts to revive the mummy
of his one-time love, Princess Anckesenamon (an equally marvelous piece of
acting by Zita Johann, who should have had much more of a film career than she
did). The Mummy’s Hand is often
listed as a remake of the 1932 version, but it’s really what would now be
called a “reboot” rather than a remake. This time the mummy is named Kharis and
is played by Western star Tom Tyler (who apparently was picked largely because
he was the same height as Karloff and would therefore match the stock clips
director Christy Cabanne spliced in from the 1932 version) and he was a prince
in love with the Princess Ananka, only she died and he stole the Scroll of
Thoth to revive her — only he got caught at it and, like Imhotep in the
original film, he was sentenced to be buried alive and the slaves assigned to
do this were themselves killed so they couldn’t reveal the original location of
his tomb. The good guys are anthropologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran), whose
remarkable list of previous accomplishments includes finding Inca ruins in
Mexico (a neat trick, since the Inca lived in what is now Peru) but who’s now
adrift and unemployed in Cairo with
his comic-relief partner Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford).
The two stumble
across a broken vase which supposedly contains a clue to the location of
Princess Ananka’s tomb, but they’re kept under surveillance by a supposed
beggar who’s actually an agent of Andoheb (George Zucco). We first see Andoheb
walking through the Egyptian desert wearing a fez and looking like he was on
his way to the set of Casablanca
but got lost along the way. It turns out he’s the apprentice to the High Priest
(Eduardo Ciannelli — I was trying to figure out if this is a promotion or a
comedown from Ciannelli’s best-known role, as the Lucky Luciano-like boss of
all New York’s rackets in Marked Woman) of the Temple of Karnak in the Egyptian desert. The High Priest is
about to croak, but before he does so he reveals to Andoheb the secret of the
living mummy Kharis, who’s been kept in suspended animation for 3,000 years by
the regular administration of tea brewed from the sacred tana leaves, which were produced by a tree that has since
become extinct (though the on-screen props looked like eucalyptus leaves to
me). The High Priest explains to Andoheb that a tea from three tana leaves will keep the mummy in suspended animation,
while one brewed from nine leaves will allow him to move. Give him more than
nine leaves and he will become an uncontrollable monster. After we get that
exposition out of the way, we get a series of scenes from writers Griffin Jay
and Maxwell Shane that are closer to screwball comedy than horror film; the
intrepid archaeologists get backing from a stage magician whose real name is
Tim Sullivan but who performs as “Solvani the Great” (Cecil Kellaway, who 13
years later played the idiot scientist who wanted to keep the monster alive for
research purposes in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) despite the conviction of his daughter and stage
assistant Marta (Peggy Moran) that they’re swindlers.
Banning and Jenson show
their broken vase to Professor Petrie (Charles Trowbridge) of the Cairo Museum,
who pronounces it authentic but wants to get a second opinion — only the
Egyptian professor at the Cairo Museum turns out to be Andoheb, and he not only
denounces the vase as a fake but breaks it still further and warns them that
all the members of the previous expeditions that sought Ananka’s tomb were
killed. Despite the warning, Banning, Jenson, both Solvanis, Petrie and their
native guide Ali (Leon Belasco) set out on the expedition — only the tomb they
find is not Ananka’s but Kharis’s, and Andoheb revives the mummy and sends it
out to kill everyone on the expedition. Kharis takes out Ali and Professor
Petrie but in the final confrontation (set on an elaborate stage set built for
James Whale’s 1940 film Green Hell
and reused often by Universal — including as a Tibetan temple in the serial The
Adventures of Smiling Jack) Jenson shoots
Andoheb (who takes a spectacular fall down a flight of stone stairs — most of
the fall is obviously doubled but the real Zucco tumbled down the last three
steps so director Cabanne could dolly in for a close-up) and Banning burns up
the mummy with a torch. The End. The Mummy’s Hand is actually a quite capable movie, lacking the
beautiful air of doomed romanticism of the 1932 version (in which Karloff’s
delivery of his dialogue is utterly heartbreaking and makes us feel sorry for
the poor guy) but fun in its own way even though so much of it is played for
laughs one could readily imagine Bud Abbott in Dick Foran’s role and Lou
Costello in Wallace Ford’s (and Abbott and Costello’s last film for Universal
was 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, which was surprisingly good, genuinely funny and genuinely scary). —10/30/19
