THE MUMMY @ 90

Archaeologists open a case found in the tomb of a mummy which brings the executed undead to life. A half Egyptian half British society gal turns out to be the dead spit of the object of the Mummy's affections all those years ago. Will she fall for his thrall?

That's the basic plot of 1932's The Mummy which should be enough to make a tight and snappy horror flick. The opening scenes of the resurrection of Imhotep and the subsequent traumatising of the young archaeologist are pure mastery, worthy of anything in the early Universal horror canon. But from that point everything stodges down to the kind of drawing room horror that Todd Browning only just kept compelling in Dracula. 

There are exceptions to this including the famous shot of Boris Karloff staring out in his weird, ancient glory and the admittedly gripping finale. However, we are meant to maintain interest in the dusty dialogue of the professorial oldies as they try to nut out what is happening. Karloff's Ardeth Bey might have some compelling scenes of menace but is given almost no support for this until the crucial moments at the climax. Mostly, this film wastes its talent while apparently trying to fulfil the substance of the ... 

I was about to write stage play but recalled that this was an original screenplay meant for the cinema. It just plays like theatre in a way that live performance compels but screen presentation allows to sag. This is despite some impressive set design, good casting (including the pleasingly unusual beauty of Zita Johann and the dependable Karloff as the baddie). Enduring the grind of the pace of the talk heavy scenes we long for the romance between Helen and Frank to get infectious but there's too much haze from the speed blocks to allow it. The film runs for under eighty minutes but feels like two hours.

Director Karl Freund was no slouch. He'd lensed Dracula with Todd Browing and his cinematographer rap sheet is as long as your arm. The Mummy was his second directorial performance and his first with sound. His career as a director continued for decades and included episodes of the tv classic comedy I love Lucy. But those things happened long after this which continues to feel like a film maker who does not grasp what he has been given. In general I dislike comparisions and what ifs but I kept wondering how much more stable mate James Whale might have made of this material. His drawing room horror comedy The Old Dark House shares a vintage with this and is a film I could watch weekly.

When younger folk ask me for recommendations for cinema of earlier eras I prefer to customise my advice to their concerns over throwing them a rigid top ten. People interested in older action thrillers are going to be bored lifeless by Citizen Kane. Everyone who sees it is dazzled by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari but many would find the silent classic tough going when they want dialogue. I would recommend The Mummy as a secondary venture in cases where Frankenstein or Dracula have worked for them. But even that would come with the caution that there was neither Browning's silent movie experience and carny spirit nor Whale's mix of deep visuals and what never failed on stage, but instead a walk through of a creative problem that ended with what worked and what didn't; the film that had to be made to show how it could have been improved.