by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Depending on how you reckon
the various dates, The Mummy’s Curse is either the fourth or the fifth in Universal’s Mummy cycle and either the last or the next-to-last. The
issues are whether you count the one Mummy film made while the Laemmle family was still in control — the original The
Mummy from 1932, directed by
Karl Freund, written by John L. Balderston and starring Boris Karloff and Zita
Johann, and a masterpiece that has grown on me over the years (David Skal in
his book The Monster Show dismissed The Mummy as a rehash of Dracula but to me, despite the similarities, it’s a far finer film, thanks
mainly to the far more subtle performances Karloff and Johann give in the leads
compared to their Dracula counterparts, Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler; also a far more literate
script and more subtle, flexible direction) and also whether you count the 1955
spoof Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, a surprisingly good film for their last credit for Universal. The main
“New Universal” (the usual designation for the period between 1937, when the
Laemmles lost control, and 1946, when the then-owners absorbed Sam Spiegel’s
International Pictures and the company became Universal-International) Mummy cycle began in 1940 with The Mummy’s Hand, the film that set the ground rules for the cycle.
The mummy’s name was Kharis, and he had been condemned to death in ancient
Egypt for falling in love with Princess Ananka, third daughter of Pharoah
Amenhotep, but a cult in ancient Egypt called either Arkhan or Arkham,
depending on how each actor pronounced it, kept Kharis alive but in suspended
animation as a living mummy via a fluid extracted from a tea brewed from tana leaves. A tea brewed from four tana leaves (though in The Mummy’s Curse that number was reduced to three) would keep
Kharis in suspended animation, while a tea brewed from nine leaves would wake
him up and give him the power to move. Not that he ever moves that far — or
that fast: Kharis walks ver-r-r-r-ry slowly and has only one good arm (it swings around on its axis while
his other one is held over his chest, as if it’s broken and in a sling), and
though he’s supposed to be a lethal engine of destruction aimed at anyone who
was involved in the discovery of Ananka’s tomb and the retrieval of her mummy,
his only means of murder seems to be strangling people by cuffing them over
their throats with his one good arm.
The Mummy was the only one of Universal’s
monster character who was never combined with the others — Frankenstein’s
Monster, Dracula and the Wolf-Man — in one of the omnibus films Universal
started making in the mid-1940’s after Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man was a success in 1943 and they rushed out House
of Frankenstein and House of Dracula — apparently because the makeup took so long that
including the Mummy in one of those movies would have blown the budget. It had
taken Jack P. Pierce seven hours to make Boris Karloff up as the full-figure
Mummy in the opening scenes of the 1932 version, and even though Karloff spent
most of that film in the assumed identity of Arab mystic “Ardath Bey” snd only
his wizened face suggested living mummy-dom, that makeup took four hours. By the time of the 1940’s
Mummy movies Pierce was using masks and other shortcuts he’d previously
eschewed — indeed, by 1955 (with Pierce long gone from Universal) the
sloppiness of the Mummy costuming (merely a full-body suit embroidered and
stitched to suggest mummy-dom) itself became a gag in the film, as the living
mummy is joined by two other characters who don mummy suits to impersonate him.
The Mummy’s Ghost was made in late 1943 and
released on July 7, 1944; The Mummy’s Curse was shot just a few months later and released on
December 22, 1944. Also, though Lon Chaney, Jr. stayed on as Kharis, Virginia
Christine replaced Ramsay Ames as Princess Ananka and the director and writers
were all different — Leslie Goodwins, a “B” director from RKO whose main
credits had been the movies featuring Wally Brown and Alan Carney, two old
vaudeville comedians RKO put together to create their own synthetic version of
Abbott and Costello, replaced the marvelously named but not conspicuously
talented Reginald LeBorg, and a new writing committee — Leon Abrams and Dwight
V. Babcock (story), Bernard Schubert (screenplay) and an uncredited Oliver
Drake and Ted Richmond — replaced the one on Ghost (Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher and Brenda Weisberg).
The fact that all the writers were different
may explain why the transition between Ghost and Curse contains one of the most outrageous and hilarious plot inconsistencies ever between a series film and its immediate sequel. The
Mummy’s Ghost took place in New England
and ended with Kharis drowning himself and Ananka in a cranberry bog; somehow,
in the time between the two films, their bodies migrated over 1,000 miles under the United States (perhaps through the water
table, Charles suggested) to end up in a Louisiana bayou. Also, the films’
sense of time is almost as bizarre as their sense of space: as one “trivia”
contributor to imdb.com put it, “The Mummy (1932) was set in 1932, the year of its release.
The first sequel, The Mummy’s
Hand (1940) is also
chronologically coherent, set in 1940. The Mummy’s
Tomb (1942) takes place 30
years following the events of Hand, with The Mummy’s
Ghost (1944) approximately two
years after that. We learn that this movie is set an additional 25 years after Ghost, meaning that the events take place around 1997.”
And yet all the physical accoutrements
of the Mummy films are contemporary to the mid-1940’s: there is no attempt to show visually any of these dramatic
leaps into the future. What’s more, even though the events of Ghost took place in New England, the Louisiana natives
in Curse (a typical Hollywood mélange of Anglo whites, Cajuns and Blacks — dumb Blacks,
of course, this being the 1940’s) are fully familiar with the curse surrounding
the mummy and the mysterious deaths caused by the legendary creature dwelling
in their swamp — so much so that when the film begins they’re in open rebellion
against the crew from the U.S. government there to drain the swamp so they can
reclaim the land, irrigate it and provide the locals more and better farmland.
(Gee, back in 1944 the federal government still had an infrastructure program!)
They’re convinced that draining the swamp will only release the murderous mummy
to start preying on them again.
The swamp doesn’t get drained but Kharis comes
to life anyway, courtesy of an anthropological team from the Scripps Museum
(the same name as the one in Ghost — are we supposed to assume there’s a nationwide chain of them?) led by
Dr. James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and featuring a pair of anodyne young leads and
an undercover agent from the cult of Arkhan (or is it Arkham?), an Egyptian
named Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe, whose presence is interesting if only
because years later Edward D. Wood, Jr. tried — and failed — to get funding for
a biopic of Bela Lugosi in which Coe would have played him), who’s recruited a
local named Ragheb (Martin Kosleck, wasted here — he was a quite good character
villain whose best films are his two playing Joseph Goebbels and House of
Horrors, in which he’s a homicidal
artist who befriends Rondo Hatton and sends Hatton out to kill for him) as his
sidekick. Kharis rises from the swamp and so does Ananka, who’s played by a
different actress, Virginia Christine, than the one who played her in Ghost (Ramsay Ames) — and according to imdb.com
Christine’s biggest fear while she was making the film was the liquor she could
smell on Chaney’s breath. Chaney was already descending into the alcoholism
that marred his later career (in his Tales of Tomorrow TV appearance as Frankenstein’s Monster he was
drunk for the first 15 minutes of the live telecast and barely pulled himself
together for the second installment) and the possibility that he might fall
down and injure her. She was relieved when director Goodwins called Chaney out
of the shot and had a stunt double replace him instead.
The Mummy’s Curse showed that the people making the horror films at
Universal were beginning to look at the big grosses of Val Lewton’s “B” horror
films from RKO, which used shadows and sound effects to scare their audiences
and made artful use of music — but at the same time they were stuck with their
own formula of parading big, ugly monsters across the screen. So they tried to
copy some of Lewton’s effects — including the swamp setting and the use of a
singer as a key character (Ann Codee as “Tante Berthe,” who both owns a bar in
the neighborhood and is its principal entertainer), who opens the show with a
ribald (as ribald as the Production Code would allow, anyway) song called “Hey,
You!” (by Frank Orth and Oliver Drake) and is later the Mummy’s first victim.
What they didn’t copy was the chilling
scene in Lewton’s (and Robert Wise’s) The Body Snatcher in which the street singer we’ve been hearing all
through the film is murdered off-screen, with her demise indicated merely by
the sudden silencing of her voice. In this film Kharis politely lets Tante
Berthe finish her song before knocking her off. The Mummy’s Curse is a series of similar misfires indicating that
the people behind the cameras had gone to the proverbial well once too often
with this formula; it’s not a bad movie but it’s a surprisingly dull one, and
Kharis himself by then was a singularly unfrightening monster, looking less
like a revenge-minded killer from 3,000 years ago than an accident victim who
insisted on leaving the hospital against medical advice.
