Day Twenty-Five: The Mummy (1932)
Bowen’s Cinematic’s 31 Days of Horror has largely been a catch as catch can affair. No master plan, no attempt at writing a horror canon. I always knew there would be a Karloff film though, and I always knew it wouldn’t be Frankenstein. Nothing wrong with Frankenstein at all, actually there’s quite a bit right with it. But we all know Frankenstein. We all know The Mummy too, but how many of you have actually sat down and watched The Mummy?
The Mummy was directed by noted German cinematographer Karl Freund (he shot Metropolis, Dracula, Key Largo, among others) and he lends this film, as expected, an assured visual tone that resembles the crumbly, dusty, old as the ages look of the mummy himself. Freund’s framing is cramped, stuffy, entombed, impressive. Watch how Freund handles the marvelous opening scene, a mummy resurrection scene as suggestive as any of the feline shenanigans in Cat People, we see the young moron laughing madly, and we pan to a strip of the mummy’s wrapping disappearing out the door. The most terrifying part has already happened though, and that’s the opening of the great Karloff’s eyes.
It’s fitting that Freund shot Dracula, because The Mummy is essentially a remake of that film with a different creature. Unfortunately, The Mummy inherits Dracula’s flaws too. Both films devote quite a bit of running time to the spouting of various romantic banalities by the boring heroes, and both films keep the monster off screen for far too long. Dracula was stilted and obviously lifted from the stage, the superb atmosphere by Freund and the legendary Tod Browning its only real asset. Dracula himself, as embodied by Bela Lugosi, has always been a bit of bust for me. I think he’s one of the more overrated approaches to the monster. He’s overdone, clownish, and not nearly as frightening as some of the other vampires of the time.
The Mummy may have the boring heroes, the laughable dialogue, the creaky pace, but it has a wonderful monster. Karloff’s work here isn’t as showy as his (also brilliant) work as the Frankenstein’s monster, but he’s no less interesting. We nearly sympathize with his aim here, his single minded urge to find his love, but Karloff’s portrayal is couragously unsentimenal. Karloff’s Imhotep may have began his quest with a romantic desire, but the ages of unrewarded pursuit have whittled him down to pure, malignant rage. He truly is a corpse, a forgotten relic who refuses to surrender to the inevitability of time.
Beyond this performance, the film is hit or miss. The other performances are largely awful, and the story is, as I said earlier, Dracula all over again. The Mummy setting up shop in the museum is rather nifty, as is Imhoteps’s scheme in the beginning of telling the archaelogists where the ruins are so they can dig them up for him. It’s also worth noting that the only real mummy shot is near the beginning, the rest is Karloff. I was reading a bit and playing with the extras on the DVD, and it was said that Karloff was so huge after Frankenstein the year before, that all the marketing had to say was “Karloff….Mummy”. Karloff more than justifies the fervor here.
