Sun 30 Aug 2009
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: Three 1940s Lon Chaney MUMMY films.
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[9] Comments
THE MUMMY’S TOMB. Universal, 1942. Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco. Director: Harold Young.
THE MUMMY’S GHOST.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Robert Lowery, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco. Director: Reginald Le Borg.
THE MUMMY’S CURSE.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Virginia Christine, Kay Harding, Dennis Moore. Director: Leslie Goodwins.
The Mummy (1932; reviewed by Steve way back here) is one of the great romantic films, and The Mummy’s Hand (1940) is a snappy little programmer, but the three Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr. are the plodding, proletarian work-horses of the Monster Movie.
Slow-moving, badly-cast and sloppily-written, they have always struck me as examples of what a day-to-day Grind a Monster’s life must be. Kharis stumbles along playing out his curse with no joy, no sign of satisfaction, preying on the Old and Slow-Moving like he was stamping out Widgets on an assembly line, which is a very apt description of the way these films were produced.
Ben Pivar, the producer responsible for the series, was by some accounts a man of legendary Bad Taste, a filmmaker whose idea of Art was a story that could incorporate as much stock footage and as few sets as possible.
Indeed, his Mummy movies seem to be made up mostly of clips from earlier films, like youngsters devouring their parents.
Yet the Kharis films taken as a whole, convey a theme of surprising perversity: alone among Movie Monsters, Kharis fulfills his destiny. He destroys the defilers of Ananka’s tomb and twice reclaims his reincarnated Princess.
Yet, like the hero of a David Goodis novel, he never succeeds on his own terms. Each film ends with him joylessly sinking back into the grimy milieu from whence he came at the start, no wiser, no happier, and no longer loved.
Which is a pretty odd message to come from a low-brow producer like Pivar. Just a pity the films themselves are so damn boring.
August 30th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Well, I’m a sucker for all these Universal horror films. As a teenager in the 1950’s I must have seen these Mummy movies a dozen times over. I can still imitate the great walk and limp to scare people that annoy me. Always makes them scurry away. About time I watched them again.
August 30th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
As a friend of mine said of Night of the Living Dead it is hard to work up much of a sweat about monsters your grandmother can escape from on her walker.
These three Mummy films do have a curious claustraphobic feeling. They have an almost dream like quality — though not a good dream. Chaney fared much better in the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula films fro Universal and some of the better Inner Sanctum entries like Weird Woman based on Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife.
Re the Tom Tyler Mummy film, he spent so much time in that cold swamp at the end of the film he became ill, and the rest of his career was bothered by arthritis that severely limited him and contributed to his early death. Guess Kharis had a real curse after all.
August 31st, 2009 at 2:33 pm
In spite of my general admiration for Dan’s reviews, I’m with Walker on his enjoyment of the Mummy films. Maybe you had, in a sense, to be there to enjoy them. I didn’t have the advantage of comparing them, to their obvious detriment, to the Karloff film. I appreciated the interpolated material, and the tana leaves became almost as iconic to my adolescent spirit as Proust’s madeleine would become a couple of decades later when I was presumably more intellectually developed.
And, oh, yes, that glorious Mummy shuffle! Gorblimey but I loved it!
August 31st, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I also developed a huge admiration for George Zucco, who is one of my favorite character actors, especially when he plays the villain. Though come to think of it he always was the villain! He was great in these Mummy films.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:45 pm
THE MUMMY’S CURSE has a beautiful little scene where Princess Ananka rises out of the swamp, monstrous looking under all of the mud. She wades into the river and emerges beautiful and young. Okay, it’s only one scene, but it does work.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:07 pm
George Zucco, aside from being the best of the Moriarity’s (in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Rathbone and Bruce), had one of his best roles as a wry and dry witted Scotland Yard man assigned to keep undercover operative Lucille Ball alive as she helps his boss Charles Coburn find a serial killer in Douglas Sirk’s noirish suspense comedy Lured.
The film also features George Sanders, Boris Karloff, and Cedric Hardwicke, so it is no easy thing for Zucco to steal the movie, which he does. He was also good as a red herring in Charlie Chan in Honolulu. Always an interesting villain, but too often his comedic talents were ignored.
January 9th, 2014 at 1:36 pm
I always found the original Mummy with Boris Karloff boring. It’s not Karloff’s fault – his acting is fine – it’s the script. But it’s been years since I last saw it. Maybe I should watch it again. I got a chuckle from Dan’s line “preying on the Old and Slow-Moving like he was stamping out Widgets on an assembly line.”
October 23rd, 2014 at 8:07 am
always liked the older monster movies newer ones too graphic thank you david reeser
March 1st, 2019 at 3:12 am
The real intrigue of this cheesy series is the repetitive sense of ritual. George Zucco’s Andoheb is the glue holding it all together, however precariously. Transferring the medallion, doing the Tana leaf mumbo-jumbo.Somehow, improbably, he survives into three pictures.If only we’d gotten to see Kharis out of control from too much Tana leaf tea, as often tgreatened!