by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a double bill of the first
two films in Universal’s 1940’s Mummy cycle, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb. The Mummy’s Hand set the ground rules for this cycle: the unnaturally
kept-alive mummy was Kharis, the former squeeze of the Princess Ananka, and he
lived in the Temple of Karnak, a remote spot in the Egyptian desert where a
cadre of priests headed by Andoheb (George Zucco) still practiced the ancient
Egyptian religion. As Andoheb was told by his predecessor as high priest of
this cult in The Mummy’s Hand
(Eduardo Ciannelli) and he himself relayed to his own successor Mehemet Bey
(Turhan Bey) at the start of The Mummy’s Tomb, Kharis is being kept alive by a tea brewed from tana leaves: a tea from three leaves administered every
month during the full moon will keep Kharis alive in suspended animation, while
a tea from nine leaves will allow him to move. The Mummy’s Tomb takes place 30 years after The Mummy’s
Hand and is set in the U.S. town of
“Mapleton” (its location is unspecified but it’s pretty clearly either in New
England or upstate New York), where archaeologist Stephen Banning (Wallace Ford
in Jack P. Pierce’s “age” makeup) lives in quiet retirement after he made his
fame discovering the tomb of Princess Ananka — which he wasn’t actually shown
doing in The Mummy’s Hand.
Andoheb
and Kharis (played in The Mummy’s Hand by Western star Tom Tyler but in The Mummy’s Tomb and the subsequent films in the cycle by Lon Chaney,
Jr.) somehow survived getting shot and burned, respectively, at the end of The
Mummy’s Hand, and an aging Andoheb sends
Mehemet to Mapleton with Kharis, instructing him to set the mummy loose on the
Americans who desecrated Ananka’s tomb. Andoheb also arranges for Mehemet to
have a cover job as assistant to the caretaker of the local cemetery, from
which he brews the nine-leaf tana
tea and sends Kharis out to kill. Banning’s wife Marta from the first film is
already dead (she’s represented by a framed print of Peggy Moran’s head shot)
but before she croaked the two had a son, John Banning, who’s trained as a
doctor and is about to enter the service as a medic. (This was 1942, after all, and with the U.S. finally involved
in World War II the studios were shoe-horning references to the war and the
military into all sorts of movies.) One warning Andoheb gave Mehemet before he
sent him to the U.S. was never to fall in love — a mistake Andoheb had made
himself in The Mummy’s Hand when
he kidnapped Marta and told her he was going to make them both into living
mummies so they could remain together for all eternity — only, wouldn’t you
know it, Mehemet gets the hots for John Banning’s girlfriend Isobel Evans
(Elyse Knox) and kidnaps her to
give her the mummy treatment before John corners him in an old house (a
standing set at Universal that when I first saw this movie in the late 1970’s I
thought had been recycled as Norman Bates’s home in Psycho — though this time around it did not look the same to me, albeit it was recognizable as
Louise Allbritton’s crumbling Louisiana manse in the far superior Son of Dracula from 1943) and both Mehemet and Kharis die — though,
of course, Kharis is only resting until the next movie in the cycle and the
next round of Universal screenwriters who had to figure out a way to rescue the
monster from the calamity that had beset him in the previous movie.
Directed by
Harold Young (not one of Universal’s stronger horror directors) from a script
by Neil Varnuck (“original” story) and Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher (script), The
Mummy’s Tomb isn’t much of a movie — it’s
only a bit over an hour long and much of that running time is taken up by clips
from The Mummy’s Hand, some of
those themselves recycled from the 1932 classic The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff
in one of the most heart-rending performances of his career (it helped that
Karloff’s version of the revivified mummy got to speak while Tyler’s and
Chaney’s were mute, courtesy of having had their tongues cut out before they
were mummified) — but according to Don Miller’s book “B” Movies it was a huge hit for Universal, grossing more than The
Mummy’s Hand and spawning two sequelae, as
well as establishing that wartime audiences wanted escapist entertainment, the
more preposterous the better. Oddly, The Mummy’s Tomb (something of a misnomer because the mummy’s tomb is
back in Egypt and the whole film takes place in the U.S.) has been the most
elusive film in the cycle for me — I had seen it only once before, in the late
1970’s on a lousy over-the-air TV connection in San Diego, and on our print the
first minute or so of the DVD was unplayable and so I didn’t get to see the
opening credits (I really miss opening credits), though we got to see enough of
the film that at least it made sense … albeit the preposterous level of “sense”
it was going to make at all!
