I recorded the 1944 Universal horror film The Mummy’s Ghost, either the third or fourth film in the Mummy cycle (depending on whether or not you count the original 1932 film, The Mummy, which starred Boris Karloff and Zita Johann, was subtly directed by Karl Freund and had a literate script by John L. Balderston that resorted to supernatural intervention for an ending but otherwise actually made dramatic sense within the limitations of the form — but in that one the mummy’s name was different and there wasn’t the gimmick of tana leaves supposedly needed to keep him alive). The Mummy cycle of the post-Laemmle, pre-International Universal extended to four films: The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) and The Mummy’s Curse (also 1944, and reportedly padded out with outtakes from the earlier films — I wouldn’t know because it’s the one film in the sequence I haven’t seen). While at least they didn’t stick the Mummy into the middle of the multi-monster fests they also made during this period (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula), they made the Mummy a considerably less interesting character than he’d been in the Karloff film, in which he doffed his bandages, put on Arab street clothes and spent most of the film as the mysterious “Ardath Bey,” with a wizened old face (thank you, make-up genius Jack P. Pierce) and the Karloff voice.
In the later Mummy films he had a new name (Kharis, instead of Imhotep — the true identity of the Karloff character and actually a real person in Egyptian history, though far from dying in disgrace the real Imhotep was the architect who designed the pyramids and was the only human being other than the Pharoahs whom the Egyptians later declared a god), was mute, and was the creation of the cult of Arkhan, which kept him alive with tana leaves (a tea brewed from four of these leaves would keep him in suspended animation, while a tea brewed from nine leaves would allow him to move). The original Mummy’s Hand, with cowboy star Tom Tyler playing the Mummy, was actually quite entertaining, accurately described by Leslie Halliwell as “start[ing] off in comedy vein [not the campy black humor of the James Whale films, but charming boob humor and slapstick], but the last half-hour is among the most scary in horror film history.” The Mummy’s Tomb introduced Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Mummy (Chaney was actually the only actor to play all four of the big Universal horror characters: the Frankenstein Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, Dracula in Son of Dracula, the Mummy three times and the Wolf Man, which he originated, five times if you count the spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). It was pretty tacky — Wallace Ford and Dick Foran, in unbelievably sloppy old-age makeup that Jack Pierce should have been embarrassed to take screen credit for, reappeared in a story that took place 20 years after The Mummy’s Hand and got killed for their pains, before the Mummy himself was burned to death (presumably) in what on my first viewing of this film I thought was the old haunted-house set on the Universal backlot that Alfred Hitchcock would use, much more famously, 18 years later as the home of Anthony Perkins and his “mother” in Psycho. (It didn’t look that much like the Psycho house the most recent time I saw The Mummy’s Tomb: more like the set used for the decaying plantation where Louise Allbritton’s vampire-obsessed character lived in Son of Dracula a year later.) Halliwell calls it a “shoddily made sequel to The Mummy’s Hand, with much re-used footage; astonishingly, it broke box-office records for its year, and provoked two more episodes.”
The Mummy’s
Ghost (we actually got
there!) was the first of these, and though Halliwell calls it “a slight
improvement on its predecessor” it’s actually a pretty dreary film, with Robert
Lowery (a future Batman!) pretty dumb and hopeless as the romantic lead and
Ramsay Ames reprising Zita Johann’s role from the Karloff Mummy as a modern Egyptian woman who is the
reincarnation of the Princess Ananka, Kharis’ main squeeze back in his days as
an ordinary person in ancient Egypt until they were caught together and
sentenced to death by being buried alive in a tomb (screenwriters Griffin Jay,
Henry Sucher and Brenda Weisberg borrowed this gimmick from Balderston’s script
for the Karloff film, and I suspect Balderston in turn ripped it off the
Mariette Bey/Camille du Locle/Antonio Ghislanzoni libretto for Verdi’s Aïda). Though she’s hardly in Johann’s class
as a screen presence, she’s just about the only person in this movie who even attempts to act — and there’s an odd gimmick with
her makeup; early on
in the film she develops a grey streak in her hair (as if she’s become a
regular patron of the Bride of Frankenstein Salon), and in the climax (when
John Carradine, who took over from George Zucco as head of the cult of Arkhan,
has decided he wants the girl for himself instead of giving her to the Mummy)
she gets a matching streak on the other side of her face, and by the time the film has ended (in a
surprisingly bleak final scene in which the Mummy kills Carradine, carries the
girl into a swamp — a surprising phenomenon given that until the swamp appears
we’ve been told this film takes place in a college town in New England — and
drowns both her and himself) her hair has gone stark white and her face is all
crinkled and grey to suggest instant old age. With mediocre direction by
Reginald LeBorg (Stuart Timmons mentions him in his Harry Hay biography as one
of Hay’s 1940’s boyfriends, but as a Gay horror director he’s as far from James
Whale as Ed Wood was from Orson Welles as a straight director — only LeBorg’s access to a
major-studio infrastructure kept this film from achieving a truly Woodian
tackiness), generic photography and a really overbearing musical score, The
Mummy’s Ghost was far
from Universal’s best in the horror field. — 10/22/98
•••••
Last night’s
“Schlock Cinema” entry at the San Diego Library was The Mummy’s Ghost, a 1944 series entry from Universal
(actually filmed in the fall of 1943 but not released until June 1944) that
depending on how you reckon it was either the third or the fourth in
Universal’s original Mummy
cycle. I say that because the first entry, The Mummy (1932), was very much an outlier: it was
as much a reworking of Dracula
as a mummy movie (as David J. Skal wrote in The Monster Show, “virtually every plot element as well as
key performers [notably David Manners and Edward Van Sloan] … were recycled
from Dracula,” as was
the Swan Lake-derived
theme music which opens both films), though I regard it as a superior film to Dracula, partly because of Boris Karloff’s almost
romantic intensity in the title role (after the famous opening scene of the
mummy coming to life, he’s in “drag” as a normal human, Egyptian mystic Ardath
Bey, throughout the rest of the film) and also Zita Johann’s deep, rich
performance as the modern-day woman (a half-British, half-Egyptian girl) whom
the mummy realizes is a reincarnation of his long-dead forbidden love, far
superior to Helen Chandler’s wooden acting in the counterpart role in Dracula. Written by John L. Balderston and
directed by Karl Freund, The Mummy
is much more a romantic fantasy with a supernatural element than an out-and-out
horror film, and Karloff is not only fully articulate but he has some of the
best dialogue of his career — when he pleads with Johann to join him in eternal
(mummified) life, his line readings are so heart-rending one practically feels
for him.
The later Universal Mummy
cycle really started with the 1940 film The Mummy’s Hand, which liberally used footage from the
1932 film (the actor who played the Mummy, Western star Tom Tyler, was even
cast largely because he was the same height and build as Karloff so his footage
would match the stock from the older film) and set up the rules and character
names for the subsequent three: the mummy’s name was Kharis, he’d been
sentenced to living mummy-hood as a result of his forbidden love for the
Princess Ananka, and a cult of Egyptian priests who were keeping Egypt’s old
pagan religion alive (one could watch all these movies and have almost no idea
that contemporary Egypt was a mostly Muslim country!) maintained Kharis’ mummy
in a permanent state of suspended animation by repeatedly giving him a tea
brewed from four tana
leaves — coming from a shrub long since extinct — while if they used nine
leaves to brew the tea, the mummy would regain the power to move but not the power to speak (which disappointed
me when I first saw these films — though given how much less talented the
writers on these were than John L. Balderston, maybe it’s just as well these
mummies didn’t have
any lines). The Mummy’s Hand
did well enough (and it’s a charming film in its own way, emphasizing campy
comedy in the first half and effective horror in the second) that Universal did
a sequel in 1942, The Mummy’s Tomb,
though this time out they put Lon Chaney, Jr. into the mummy’s wrappings and
mask-like head.
The Mummy’s Tomb
was supposedly set 20 years after The Mummy’s Hand and showed two people from the earlier
film’s cast, Wallace Ford and Dick Foran, in heavy age makeup; it posited the
King Tut-derived idea that there was a curse on the mummy’s tomb and that
Kharis was marking for death anyone who had been involved in the expedition
that opened the tomb of his former beloved Ananka, and as a result Ford and
Foran were both murdered by the mummy before it was supposedly burned to death
along with a house which when I first saw The Mummy’s Tomb I thought looked like the exterior
Alfred Hitchcock picked out for Norman Bates’ creepy old house in Psycho. The Mummy’s Tomb was an even bigger hit than its
immediate predecessor, so of course Universal and particularly its head horror
producer, Ben Pivar, naturally commissioned another series entry. It opens in
Egypt, where the high priest of the cult of Arkham (did writers Griffin Jay,
Henry Sucher and Brenda Weisberg deliberately appropriate the name from H. P.
Lovecraft?), Andoheb — played by George Zucco in heavy age makeup in what’s the
best performance in the movie: though he disappears after the first reel, Zucco
is absolutely convincing, literally shaking as he speaks and convincing us he’s
really a palsied old man — commissions his assistant, Yousef Bey (John
Carradine in “Egyptian” makeup that looks like he just got back from a six-week
course at a tanning salon — why, when Universal had an authentic Egyptian,
Turhan Bey, under contract, they didn’t use him is a mystery, but Carradine is at least
effective in a sort of role he’d already played quite often and would eventually
run into the ground), to go to the U.S., bring back the mummy of Ananka and
also get Kharis back out of the land of the infidels and home where he belongs.
Yousef asks how he can lure Kharis out of wherever he is, and Andoheb tells him
that the mummy will scent out the tana leaves as soon as Yousef — or, it turns out, anybody else —
brews them and come a-running.
The scene then shifts to Mapleton College in New
England, where professor Matthew Norman (Frank Reicher) is holding forth to a
rather bored-looking undergraduate class about Kharis and how he menaced their
town some years before, until he burned up in the house — only, of course, he
didn’t really burn up. That night, Norman looks at the box in which Kharis’
stash of tana leaves
were found way back when and finally deciphers a hieroglyphic that had
previously eluded him, annoying his wife (Claire Whitney) who naturally wants
him to call it quits for the evening and come to bed with her, realizing it
represents the number nine (number nine … number nine … number nine) and that’s
the correct number of tana
leaves to brew the tea that will revivify the mummy. He brews the leaves in a
similar crucible to the one Zucco was using back in Egypt (though the details
are different enough it was not
the same prop!) and sure enough the mummy scents it — exactly how the mummy survived the fire and kept
alive during the intervening years are details the writing committee doesn’t
bother even trying to
explain — comes into Norton’s room (through a conveniently open outside
window), kills him and drinks the tana-leaf tea. The police immediately catch on that the mummy is
loose again from the mold around Norton’s neck where the mummy strangled him —
as the third entry in the series this isn’t one of those movies that was going
to waste a lot of time having the characters initially doubt the monster’s
existence — and from then it’s a series of chase scenes with the police and the
townspeople (an intriguing adaptation of the “angry villagers” scene to an
American setting) are trying to catch the mummy and the mummy, which is
impervious to bullets, keeps eluding them.
The writers also borrow the
reincarnation schtick
from the 1932 film; when the mummy breaks into the museum of Egyptology in
which Ananka’s mummy is being displayed and reaches for it, it crumbles to dust
at his touch and all that’s left is a bunch of dirty bandages. It turns out
Ananka’s soul is now housed in the body of Egyptian exchange student Amina
Mansouri (Ramsay Ames), whose boyfriend Tom Hervey (future Batman Robert
Lowery) is naturally put out at her discomfort whenever anyone around her
mentions Egypt or mummies. Every time Kharis comes near her, a little more of
Amina’s hair becomes grey and it looks like she’s been having highlights done
at the Bride of Frankenstein salon — though, astonishingly, none of the
other characters in the movie seem to notice! Supposedly the influence of Kharis is prematurely aging
her and fitting her to join him in living-mummydom, though in the middle of all
this Yousef Bey decides that he
has the hots for Amina and instead of injecting her with tana fluid to make her a mummy again, he’s
going to give her the drinkable form of the tana tea and keep her for himself. (He
decides this in a rather odd structure that consists of a shack on top of a
long series of sloped tracks that seem like a low-tech grain elevator — I’ve
seen this movie many times and I’m still unclear what was the original function of this
bizarre-looking building.) It ends with Kharis realizing that Yousef has
double-crossed him, killing him, kidnapping Amina — who’s turning into an old
hag, with fully white hair and a wrinkled old face that’s much more
frightening, actually, than the mummy himself — and carrying her into a bog,
where Tom wants to go in after her but is warned by the cops that to enter the
bog means certain death. (I joked that at this point Tom should have said, “If
I were Batman I could
rescue her!”) As often as I’ve seen this movie before, I’d quite forgotten that
Amina dies at the end — I was expecting a resolution in which Tom rescues her,
Kharis dies and as he expires his influence over Amina ends and she turns back
into a normal young person again — instead the mummy at least temporarily
drowns in the cranberry bog, only with the next film in the cycle, The
Mummy’s Curse, the bog
has turned into a bayou and the mummy has somehow floated under about 1,500
miles worth of the U.S. to end up in Louisiana.
Stiffly directed by Reginald
LeBorg — whom Universal kept giving horror assignments to even though his
“straight,” non-supernatural thrillers are consistently better and more
convincing movies — The Mummy’s Ghost isn’t much of a movie, and Kharis isn’t much of a monster
either: he has a paralyzed arm (except when he picks up Amina, when it suddenly
re-acquires normal strength), a slow, staggering walk (one would think his
human victims could just out-run him) and one permanently closed eye, and Jack
P. Pierce’s makeup is so thick there’s no way Chaney or anyone else behind the
mummy’s mask could do the subtle, nuanced acting Karloff did inside Pierce’s
makeup for the Frankenstein monster. Seeing this on the big screen, after so
many years of knowing this movie only from TV and video, made it look
surprisingly “fake” — the join line around Kharis’ one working eye where
Pierce’s makeup left off and Lon Chaney, Jr.’s real skin began was all too
obvious, and so were the lines on the breakaway fence rails when the mummy
bursts through a fence in an early scene: I knew where the rails were going to break and,
sure enough, they did exactly where I thought they would. The Mummy’s Ghost is a product of Universal’s horror cycle
in its later, most decadent form (in terms of quality, not content), at a time
when aesthetic leadership in U.S. horror had decisively shifted to Val Lewton’s
unit at RKO — in the next film, The Mummy’s Curse, one could see the Universal-ites making
some half-hearted attempts to incorporate Lewtonian touches, including a
visually rich Louisiana setting and a street singer used as a sort of Greek
chorus, but these didn’t gel with a big old ugly monster roaming around the
film — and part of the problem with these movies is that their makers seemed to
equate “ugly” with “frightening” and also they’d forgotten the art Universal
had once mastered in the early 1930’s of keeping the monsters powerfully off-screen at first and then introducing
them with careful, suspenseful buildups instead of just having them walk around
with no buildup at all — though the box-office returns of these films indicated
that they were at least giving their audiences what they wanted to see, just as
what today’s horror
audience wants to see is rivers of blood gushing across the screen, never mind
suspense, thrills, terror or any degree of imagination and subtlety! — 10/28/10
•••••
I broke open the
Blu-Ray boxed set of Universal’s classic monster movies from the 1930’s, 1940’s
and 1950’s (the last decade included Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequelae but not any of the “bugs!” movies Martin Landau
as Bela Lugosi contemptuously dismissed in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood like Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis), which somewhat to my surprise included
at least one one-off disc, the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains. (They did not include the 1925 silent version with Lon
Chaney, Sr., but I have that elsewhere.) I had wanted the new collection
because my previous DVD edition of the set had a lot of glitchy discs
(especially since then Universal’s manufacturers were doing two-sided discs,
which means an extra layer and therefore greater chance for the layers to
separate and cause disc rot), and after screening movies two and three in
Universal’s Mummy cycle on Hallowe’en, last night I ran movies four and five, The
Mummy’s Ghost and The
Mummy’s Curse.
Universal’s first Mummy
movie was made in 1932, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff as
the revivified mummy Imhotep and Zita Johann as the modern-day reincarnation of
his lost love from way back when. The script for the 1932 film was by John L.
Balderston and is practically an object lesson in how to introduce romance and
pathos into the horror genre;
Karloff’s delivery of Balderston’s lines about how no one has suffered as much
for love as he has is heartbreaking, and Johann matches him and beautifully
portrays her confusion as the soul of the Princess Ankhensamon battles within
her for dominance over the modern woman she has become and wants to remain.
Alas, the Mummy movies went downhill from there: in 1940 the “New Universal”
put into production The Mummy’s Hand, which was refreshingly campy in the first half and
suitably scary in the second. The mummy in that one was called “Kharis,” his
long-lost squeeze from the ancient days was “Princess Ananka,” and instead of
being revivified by a reading of the Scroll of Thoth, Kharis was kept alive
over the centuries by a fluid brewed from tana leaves, the remnants of a now-extinct
tree. According to the script for The Mummy’s Hand, a tea made from four tana leaves would keep the mummy alive in
suspended animation, while one from nine leaves would render him animate and
capable of movement. (In the final film in the cycle, The Mummy’s Curse, the number of leaves needed to keep him
in suspended animation was reduced from four to three, but that was hardly the
most blatant violation of continuity between these films!)
In The Mummy’s
Hand the mummy was
played by Western actor Tom Tyler, who apparently was cast mainly because he
was the same height as Boris Karloff and therefore they could use clips from the
earlier film as stock footage. For The Mummy’s Tomb the time of the story was moved up 20
years and Dick Foran and Wallace Ford, as the anthropologists who found the
mummies of Kharis and Ananka in the first place, were not too convincingly aged
20 years (though the cars, clothes and settings in both films were those of the
early 1940’s) before the mummy, now played by Lon Chaney, Jr., knocked them off
before perishing in a house fire. But of course he didn’t really die: in 1943 (that’s the on-screen copyright
date, though imdb.com lists it as a 1944 film) they dredged Chaney out of the
ruins of that burned building as George Zucco, the head of the priesthood of
Arkham that had kept Kharis alive all those years, sent his apprentice Yousef
Bey (John Carradine, delivering a good enough performance if you can accept his
almost total impassivity — Amina Mthis was just before he made Bluebeard at PRC and delivered a rich, powerful,
multi-dimensional performance as the kindly young artist psychologically driven
to kill) to recover Kharis and get back the Princess Ananka, whose recovered
mummy was on display at the Scripps Museum in the New England town of Mapleton.
(The writers, Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher and Brenda Weisberg, never specified
just which New England
state Mapleton was in.) I’ve probably seen The Mummy’s Ghost more times than any other film in the
cycle besides the initial one with Karloff (which is really an outlier because
of its articulate mummy and its overall air of doomed romanticism, which the
later films didn’t even try
for), including a showing at the San Diego Public Library where, after years of
having seen it only on low-resolution black-and-white TV’s, I noticed for the
first time the breaks in the fence rail where they were set to come apart when
the mummy crashed through them, and the obvious gap between where the mummy’s
facial mask ended and Lon Chaney, Jr.’s real face began. (According to an
imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the mask still exists — it’s in the Experience Music
Project Museum in Seattle, though what it’s doing in a museum nominally devoted
to Jimi Hendrix is a mystery — and it’s the only fragment of a makeup created by Jack P.
Pierce that still exists.)
The one thing Jay, Sucher, Weisberg and director
Reginald LeBorg (with a name that cool he should have made better films! I read
him referred to in Stuart Timmons’ biography of Harry Hay as one of Hay’s
lovers during the 1940’s, which only made me say that as Gay Universal horror
directors went, Reginald LeBorg was no James Whale!) did right was return to John Balderston’s gimmick
in the first film of having Princess Ananka’s soul reincarnated in the body of
a modern woman, Egyptian émigré Amina Mansouri (Ramsay Ames, who delivers the
film’s strongest performance even though she’s hardly in Zita Johann’s league
in depicting the conflict between her ancient and modern selves!). I also liked
Frank Skinner’s musical score, which I’ve described as “overbearing” in
previous comments on the film but now seemed especially eerie when Skinner
added electronic organ tones to give an otherworldly ambience to certain
scenes. I’m still
mystified about the original purpose of that bizarre wooden structure in which
Carradine’s character hides the mummy and in front of which the final
confrontation scene takes place. I’d always thought it was some sort of grain
elevator; Charles said he thought it might have been a small smelting plant,
but I hardly think anyone would have handled molten metal in a building made of
wood. It was also interesting that as Ramsay Ames’ character was taken over by
the mummy, her hair turned grey (first just streaks of it — which of course
made me joke that she’d been to the Bride of Frankenstein Salon — and
eventually all of it) and her skin gets older-looking and more wrinkled as
Kharis the Mummy carried her into the cranberry bog outside Mapleton and the
two (presumably) drowned together. I was hoping that her rather tacky college
boyfriend Robert Lowery (four years before he became the second screen actor to
play Batman, who surely would have been able to effect the rescue!) had been
able to grab Ananka from Kharis and she would have returned to normal as the
mummy drowned, but in some ways the tragic ending they did supply is more moving — even though none of the later Universal mummy films even
came close to the
beautiful romance and pathos of the one Karl Freund, John Balderston, Boris
Karloff and Zita Johann had created in 1932! — 12/14/19
