by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Karl Freund
CAST: Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Arthur Byron
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 89% Certified Fresh
PLOT: A resurrected Egyptian mummy searches Cairo for the girl he believes to be his long-lost princess from ancient Egypt.
The story of The Mummy is good enough to warrant a mostly positive review from me, even though the storytelling itself lacks zing. Clocking in it a brisk 73 minutes, my girlfriend called it “the longest 73 minutes ever.” She has a point. There are long stretches with no dialogue, and while some of those passages are thick with atmosphere, they tend to bring the film’s momentum to a screeching halt.
However, the underlying plot was still interesting enough to keep my attention during those doldrums. We learn in the opening scenes that a British archaeologist, Sir Joseph Whemple, dug up the sarcophagus of an Egyptian priest named Imhotep, in Cairo in 1921, along with a sealed box bearing a warning and a curse on whomever opens it. Naturally, the warning is dismissed, the box is opened, and in a genuinely creepy, chilling scene, the cloth-wrapped mummy in the background comes to life. In a neat bit of trickery, we never, ever see the mummy itself after it spontaneously revives. We only see its hand as it reaches into the frame and the reaction from Whemple’s poor assistant who goes insane on the spot. That is admirable restraint.
Ten years later, Whemple’s son, Frank, returns to Cairo in his father’s footsteps. He is introduced in typical early-Hollywood fashion with a shot highlighting his strong profile as he looks eagerly into the distance. I mention this detail because, as it happened, both Penni and I thought the exactly same thing in our heads: “And who is THIS handsome fellow?” It’s corny, but it’s how things were done back then, what are you gonna do.
Frank meets a tall, gaunt stranger calling himself Ardath Bey, which as everyone knows is an anagram of “Death by Ra”, so talk about a spoiler alert. Ardath is, of course, the resurrected corpse of Imhotep from ten years ago, played by the legendary Boris Karloff. We eventually learn that Imhotep is attempting to resurrect his princess who succumbed to illness thousands of years ago, and whose reincarnated spirit, coincidentally, may reside in the body of the young socialite Helen Grosvenor, vacationing in Cairo this very night, wouldn’t ya know.
That’s the plot in a nutshell. Imhotep casts various spells and chants various chants and Helen is inexplicably drawn to the mysterious Ardath Bey, and Frank and his father try to unravel everything before poor Helen is killed in a ritual sacrifice. The story feels admittedly trite, but I tried to imagine what contemporary audiences must have felt when seeing this movie for the very first time, nearly a hundred years ago now. We don’t get the anticipated scenes of a shuffling, moaning mummy “chasing” its victims in a deserted pyramid. Instead, Imhotep does most of his damage remotely, via a magical pool of water that works like a CCTV camera. Maybe that was more disturbing to people, that this malevolent force doesn’t even have to be near his victims to hurt or even kill them. Come to think of it, that IS a little more disturbing.
I won’t say The Mummy is chock-a-block full of thrills and chills. It’s not King Kong (1933). But there is plenty of atmosphere to satisfy the average movie fan; there’s even a “surprise” ending that I did NOT see coming. But that’s all you’ll get from me. Mum(my)’s the word.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 