The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse)
by Christy Cabanne, Harold Young, Karl Freund, Leslie Goodwins, Reginald Le Borg
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Boris Karloff, David Manners, Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Zita JohannDirector: Christy Cabanne, Harold Young, Karl Freund, Leslie Goodwins, Reginald Le Borg
Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
Writer: Ben Pivar
Writer: Bernard Schubert
Writer: Brenda Weisberg
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 74 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Universal Studios
Movie Reviews of The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse)
Movie Review: "There's something happening that we're just powerless to stop."
Summary: 5 Stars
This warning from The Mummy's Hand (1940) doesn't just refer to the cycle of low-budget movies by Universal during World War II. There was something else 1940s American movie audiences might have wished they could slow down, if not stop, and that was America's new (self-appointed) responsibility for running the world.
All four of these movies were sequels to The Mummy (1932) starring Boris Karloff and the compelling Hungarian actress Zita Johann (the best actor in any of the Universal mummy movies). But the sequels tell a separate story from the Karloff movie. It's the story of three-thousand-year-old Kharis and his love for the Egyptian princess Ananka, which led Kharis from the ancient and mysterious Near East to the new center of world power, the United States.
Kharis is kept alive by the extinct "tana leaves" administered by an ancient priesthood. (The medallion-wearing priests are called priests of Amon-Ra until the last two movies, when John Carradine calls himself a "priest of Arkham." (This might make The Mummy's Ghost the first movie with a reference to H.P. Lovecraft - - a cliché homage now, like "Arkham Asylum" in the Batman movies. Arkham, Mass., is the fictional town where scholars from "Miskatonic University" study the Old Gods of the Cthulhu mythos. You sometimes see Miskatonic U sweatshirts in low-budget horror movies, too.)
In The Mummy's Hand a virile American hero and his giggly male sidekick named "Babe" (who likes to play with a "hootchie-kootchie" doll he bought from an poor Arab trader in Cairo) find the tombs of Kharis and Ananka, save the girl the hero has fallen in love with, and seal up the mummies until the next movie.
In The Mummy's Tomb the virile American hero from the last movie is an old man living in Middleton, U.S.A. The ingenue has given him a son (now a doctor) and conveniently died to free up the movie for that son's love interest. This movie came out in 1942 and the war is part of it. The doctor is waiting for his army commission to come through. A reporter who comes to Middleton to cover the "fiend murders" that follow the arrival of the mummy Kharis says, "I had a choice of covering the Russian front or this."
A priest of Amon-Ra brings Kharis's mummy to Middleton, where Ananka now rests in the local museum. This evil priest looks distinctly Japanese to me, though the actor apparently wasn't. But the character must have made 1942 audiences think of their present enemy. Sending Kharis on a mission of murder, the priest says, "While the moon is still high in the sky death goes with you." Is the moon a stand-in for the Rising Sun? Is Kharis a kamikaze?
One of the plot twists in all the mummy movies is the "temptation" of the priests. This temptation is usually lust for a white (or almost white) woman whose body has been infused with the spirit of Ananka.
The doctor is engaged to get married before he ships out, and his fiancee tries on her mother's wedding dress, but the foreign priest has other ideas. When the priest tells Kharis of his plan to possess the white woman even Kharis recoils at the horror of miscegenation (the only real acting anyone is able to do in the mummy wrappings).
As in most Universal horror pics, an army of villagers with torches appear and track down the priest. The sheriff shoots him without warning and then grins. One less . . . Egyptian. The twentieth-century posse chases Kharis and the girl to the doctor's family home. (It seems like Kharis is returning her to where she belongs, the doctor's bed.)
The doctor burns down his own home to incinerate Kharis. Death by flame was a common image of the war in the Pacific. Kamikaze pilots smashed into battleships. U.S. Marines used flame-throwers against enemy troops entrenched on islands. Tokyo and other cities were firebombed (though the British and Americans did that in Europe, too). All this was before the atomic bomb was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When The Mummy's Ghost came out (1944) the country and the movies were getting ready for the postwar period. By 1944 the Soviets had turned the Germans back at Stalingrad, Americans knew D-Day was coming soon, and the Big Three were meeting to divvy up the world. The war was as good as over, except for those who hadn't been killed in it yet.
Ghost opens in a college classroom in Middleton, filled with young men and women. By having the young men in class instead of in uniform, the movie was telling audiences it was okay to get ready for normal life again. But these young people don't know how corrupt the touch of the ancient world could be. The spirits of Kharis and Ananka were still a threat to American optimism and purity.
Here the new postwar American hero is in love with Amina, who doesn't even try to pass as white. "You're Egyptian. What's wrong with Egypt? It's as modern and up to date as any other country."
The "shadow" of Kharis that Amina feels pass over her in the night is the pull of the old world she can't resist. Describing her new acquaintance (the latest priest of Arkham to serve Kharis), Amina tells her boyfriend, "He kept talking about tana leaves and moonlight."
But late in the movie we find out something that may explain the hero's doomed love for the half-Egyptian Amina. Maybe he's not so pure himself. He wants to take Amina "to New York, to my people." "Your people?" Amina asks. "Maybe they won't want me."
"Your people" may just mean "your family," but it might be code for Jews, too. (And doesn't this young man look slightly "dark"? Could this New York boy bring home a girl less "suitable" than a part-Arab?) As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says in Annie Hall, the rest of the country thinks of New York as a liberal Jewish homosexual conspiracy. "Even I do sometimes." And Middleton is about as Gentile as the town Beaver Cleaver grew up in.
As usual, when Amina puts on her sheer nightgown, what priest of Arkham could resist temptation? But this mummy movie ends differently.
Kharis takes Amina (now Ananka incarnate, whose skin ages and crumbles at the mummy's touch) into a swamp. But the villagers won't let the hero chase his love into the swamp and save her from Kharis. "It's certain death." Amina/Ananka is where she belongs. ("We belong dead," as Frankenstein's monster said to his bride. You can't be part one thing and part another and live.)
This postwar hero is not like the archeologists and scientists who came before him. He's too accepting of the strange. He doesn't realize that his Amina can't be saved. She is too tainted by her foreignness. And her American hero himself may not be pure enough.
In The Mummy's Curse Kharis and Ananka rise from the swamp to find an America busy with government-sponsored technical projects, turning itself into a modern superpower.
A white manager sent to the swamps by the federal government argues with superstitious Cajuns who work for him. They don't want the swamp drained because they're afraid of stories of "the loup-garou." (A nice touch since this mummy is played by Lon Chaney, Jr., the best werewolf actor ever, but his sad face and voice go to waste in these movies. Even the mummy makeup is nothing special.)
"Can't you people get it through your head that the government is draining that swamp for your own good?" (Apparently Middleton is near the Louisiana bayou country.) The manager relies on his foreman "Cajun Joe," since he "knows how to handle these people."
A scientist comes to the swamp with an Egyptian colleague (who doesn't shake hands - - a tip-off ever since Boris Karloff first refused to shake hands in The Mummy) but the manager doesn't like "college professors getting in my way."
Pointy-headed professors aren't the only stereotypes. There's "Goobie," the only black in this part of the south (the rest of the locals speak what sound like metropolitan, not Cajun, French). Goobie's favorite line is, "The devil's on the loose and he dancin' with the mummy!" (The filmmakers liked it so much they had him repeat it.)
Ananka rises from the bayou and turns into a beautiful young woman with a Bettie Page hairdo (not the Amina who sank into the swamp at the end of the last movie). Ananka now possesses her completely.
You guessed it, the professor's Egyptian colleague is really a priest of Arkham, and he has a servitor who's passing as one of the locals. And in this movie, it isn't the priest who's tempted by the white or near-white woman, it's the acolyte. When the priest finds him with his hands on Kharis's princess Ananka, the priest puts the "curse of Amon-Ra" on him.
Michael is the self-appointed caretaker of the abandoned (presumably Christian) monastery where the Egyptian priests hide Kharis between murders. When he discovers the foreign blasphemy, Michael can save neither himself nor Ananka, who tragically can't really become American even though she's worked with the professor and his purebred American girlfriend and would like to be just like them.
The Egyptian priest can't save Kharis and his princess, and neither can the Christian monk. It's the modern scientist and government technocrat who finally bring order.
Unlike most of the other mummy films, this one doesn't end in fire, but in a more biblical way - - Kharis brings down the walls of the monastery on himself and the Egyptians like Samson.
Ananka returns to her state of decay, waiting for Hammer Films to revive her in twenty years or so.
More The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse) reviews:
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Summary of The Mummy - The Legacy Collection (The Mummy/Mummy's Hand/Mummy's Tomb/Mummy's Ghost/Mummy's Curse)
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