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The Mummy 1932. Directed by Karl Freund. Boris Karloff,
Zita Johann
When I was sorting through names for my web site, one of the names I considered was "The Mummy's Pool," referring to Karl Freund's languid 1932 classic with Boris Karloff. It has always seemed to me that there has never been a better metaphor in film for the attraction of horror movies. The Mummy's pool shows us the dark events of the past, warns of the events of the present, and, we suspect, can scrye the future. Its fascination is the fascination with our own mortality. It holds us in its spell... It's a lyrical touch in a movie filled with lyrical touches. I came to The Mummy late in life, after a childhood spent watching Universal's second generation of Mummy movies (with poor, doomed Prince Kharis condemned to walk the earth searching for his re-incarnated princess). The second generation left The Mummy in his bandages and robbed him of speech and made him into an automaton at the beck and call of whoever had a supply of Tana leaves. Being used to this, Karloff's original came as something of a shock. His Imhotep was an undead sorceror with a frightening stare and with strange powers over the living. The movie he inhabited was different from the blood and thunder horror movies that Universal specialized in. It was slow, stately, and carefully constructed, tinged with a subtle eroticism and a hint of necrophilia. There isn't another movie like it, really. The story here follows Imhotep, resurrected by The Scroll of Thoth, in his quest to reawaken his princess and forbidden lover, Queen Anksunamen, who has been reincarnated in the present. The usual heroes--the girl's fiance and the aging professor who knows about such things--race to stop him. Universal was in the habit, those days, of splitting the responsibilities of their heroes between multiple characters. Let's face it, none of those heroes holds a candle to the monsters, so I guess they had good reason to team up. The heroine here was more than up to the task: Zita Johann had a touch of the exotic about her and she gave a terrific performance (in spite of her dislike of director Karl Freund, who she called "incompetent"). The Mummy was Karloff's first movie after Frankenstein and it is the first movie to feature that wonderfully sinister, half-lisping voice. His narration of Imhotep's dark past makes full use of that voice and transforms it from banal back story to terrifying legend. Depicting it in The Mummy's pool transforms it even further into myth. The real star of The Mummy, though, is Karl Freund, the director. Freund directed only two horror movies (the other was Mad Love with Peter Lorre), but he was a world class cinematographer whose stamp was all over both German Expressionism and the Universal horror movies. His cinematic eye stamps The Mummy with an "otherness" that separates it from the other Universal horror movies. It is a fascinating experience, infused with a dreaminess that seems connected directly to the subconscious mind. |