The Mummy
                               
Director: Terence Fisher
Year: 1959
Rating: 7.0
Hammer had great success with Frankenstein and Dracula and wanted more from the long ago Universal Monsters. But this time around Universal wanted something for it. They were not pleased that Hammer took Frankenstein and Dracula without their permission. Hammer though was able to say with a straight face that the source for their films were the original novels.  But for The Mummy this was not so easy. There was really no specific book from which The Mummy came. Before the 1932 Universal film there had been folk tales and a few written tales about Mummy's - even from Doyle, Stoker and Poe - there was even a tale of a High Priest named Khamwas who looked for the Scroll of Thoth that could bring the dead back to life. The Scroll of Thoth was used in the 1932 version. But Hammer was able to strike a deal that allowed them rights to all of Universals monsters - later The Phantom of the Opera, The Wolfman and they had an Invisible Man planned but it was never made.



After the 1932 The Mummy, Universal waited eight years before they returned to their Monster with a four-film series called The Kharis Quartet and it is from these films that writer Jimmy Sangster took pieces for this film. In particular the first one, The Mummy's Hand (1940). With Hammer, the Mummy was brought back to the screen with practically nothing of note on the subject being made since the Kharis Quartet. There was The Pharaoh's Curse produced in 1957 that sort of had to do with archeologists, tombs and a blood-sucking Mummy but nothing remotely like this film.



Director Terence Fisher brings in the film at a slim 88-minutes and that probably could have been cut down with less time in two flashbacks, but for the most part the film moves along smoothly. The Mummy never became as popular as did the other two iconic figures - Frankenstein and Dracula - but I have always had a soft spot for him. He returns from the living dead to avenge the woman he loved 4,000 years ago. My kind of guy. He may be slow, but he usually gets his man. Hammer was to make three more Mummy films over the next 12-years - but the Mummy has taken on a life of its own away from Hammer. But of course, they had to make him into a CGI action spectacle. Watching this again for probably the first time in 40-years, I had to make a mental adjustment. It almost feels quaint. The horror isn't so horrible, the action is a long wait, but the designs of the Mummy swathed in muddy bandages is powerful.



Both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are again teamed up after Frankenstein and Dracula and they are just so good. Most people give the high praise to Cushing, but it was the scenes of Lee with only small cuts for his eyes that won me over. When he sees Yvonne Furneaux who looks just like the woman he loved, Princess Ananka, the look in his eyes of astonishment to love is remarkable. When she later commands him to put her down, the sadness in his eyes makes it a tragedy, not a horror film.  



Like most of these Mummy films, it begins in Egypt with the discovery and opening of Princess Ananka's tomb, but not before they are warned away by the modern dressed Mehemet Bey, a worshipper of Kamak. Later on, he gives a fine monologue to Cushing on how they desecrate these tombs and the people within by putting them on display. I sort of feel the same way. Cushing's response is, well this is why we know the history of Egypt. Knowledge, science always wins out. A few years later Bey (George Pastell) has Kharis shipped over with one mission - to kill the three men who entered the tomb of Ananka. The scene of him rising from the swamp where his box accidentally landed is pure cinema. A number of great scenes shot so well - Cushing waiting for the Mummy to show up but is unprepared for his speed and has to tell his girlfriend, let down your hair as he is being choked to death. Let down your hair.  There is also a nice bit for Hammer regular Michael Ripper as a drunk who first sees The Mummy.