‘Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple...’
Out of all the most iconic Universal monsters, the Mummy is the one I know the least about. I know what a mummy is of course in the context of ancient Egypt, and I could guess that a film called The Mummy features… a mummy. And sure enough, it does. From other depictions in pop culture, however, I was expecting a guy shambling along, wrapped in bandages and groaning a lot. That’s not, in fact, what goes off here. Perhaps it should have been…
The film begins in 1921 when an expedition led by Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) uncovers an ancient Egyptian tomb containing a fella called Imhotep (Boris Karloff) and a scroll that explains that the tomb is cursed. Despite that very clear warning, Whemple’s assistant, Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), reads the scroll and awakens Imhotep before promptly going mad. All this bit is wonderful. Norton’s tortured laughter has echoed throughout horror cinema for nearly a century and it’s still chilling even today. From there, however, the movie jumps forward ten years and now Imhotep is just living a normal life in modern society walking about and presumably eating cake and watching cricket and all that stuff. It’s not what I expected of a classic movie monster although Karloff’s hypnotic voice somehow manages to be both soothing and incredibly sinister which goes someway to re-establishing the character as something to be frightened of. The plot then becomes weighed down by a love/obsession story between Imhotep and Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), a young British-Egyptian woman and possible reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian princess.
Inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, The Mummy started life as a 9-page treatment and judging by this plot, it never really developed beyond that. What’s surprising is that to say how short this film is (73 minutes), it’s also quite dull. There is some lovely set design and make-up work, and director Karl Freund knows his way around a camera, but the plot is lacking in action and by the end, I’d lost interest in the whole endeavour.
The Mummy is obviously an influential film, spawning numerous sequels and reboots, but I have a nagging feeling that none of them are any good either. Maybe this concept just isn’t very interesting.
