The Hammer Mummy

Hammer Film Productions’ 1959 The Mummy (not so much a remake of the 1932 film as a composite of all five Universal mummy movies) is everything all those über-famous Universal Studios flicks from the 30’s and 40’s should have been, but mostly weren’t. This is perhaps an unfair comparison, as Hammer had an extra 15-30 years to overcome the staginess that plagued so many very old movies, but considering how far The Mummy towers over even its contemporaries, I really think there must be something more at work than time alone. If I had to guess, I’d say that something is a combination of pacing, an unusually astute script, and top-notch performances from Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who in this film acts the pants off just about everybody in Hollywood today, using his eyes alone.

     After more than 40 years, the story of this film probably offers no surprises, but here goes: The year is 1895, and the famous archaeologist Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) is in Egypt with his brother Joseph (Raymond Huntley, from The Ghost Train and So Evil My Love) and his son John (Cushing), excavating what he hopes is the long-lost tomb of the 20th-dynasty princess Anankha. John is currently unable to take full part in the dig, because he broke his leg some five days earlier, but he is determined to stay in the field-- he has no intention of missing the excitement in the event that his father really has found Anankha’s tomb. Just after the Bannings’ laborers finally break through the layers of rubble blocking the entrance, a well-dressed Egyptian man (George Pastell, Hammer’s favorite ethnic actor-- we’ll later learn that the character’s name is Mehmed Akhim) arrives to warn the Bannings of a curse laid upon the tomb in ancient times. Stephen thinks this curse to be nothing but ridiculous superstition, and enters the tomb anyway, his brother at his side.

     The tomb proves to be all that he had hoped. Not only is it really the tomb of Anankha, it has miraculously been spared the depredations of the 4000 years’ worth of grave robbers who ravaged so many of the ancient tombs. Anankha’s mummy is there, along with her vast fortune in grave-goods, including a hitherto-considered-legendary text called the Scroll of Life, the latter preserved in a cartouche-shaped box inlaid with lapis lazuli. Stephen sends Joseph to tell John of the discovery, and the younger Banning brother hurries away. Moments after Joseph has left the tomb, however, he hears his brother screaming within. When he reaches Stephen’s side, the latter man has collapsed across the princess’s sarcophagus, and looks to be in deep shock, muttering incoherently to himself and seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. Three years later, John has come to see his father at the nursing home to which he has been confined since that day in Egypt. For the first time in all those years, the elder Banning has emerged from his catatonia, and asked to see his son. The reason for Stephen’s concern stems from what he saw back in the tomb. The way he tells it, he did not have a stroke (the doctors’ best guess as to his affliction). Rather, as he read aloud the text of the Scroll of Life, the ancient incantations brought to life a mummy (Anankha’s? Someone else’s?), which attacked him, bringing on his present debility. Stephen is unshakably convinced that this living mummy is now coming to England to kill him, along with Joseph and John, who were accomplices in his violation of the tomb. John takes the old man’s ramblings as well as could be asked (though, watching him, one gets a clear sense of “I came all the way out here for this?!”), and tries to persuade him that he is mistaken, and is simply suffering from an attack of nerves. Disgusted at his son’s disbelief, Stephen sends him away. Not much time has passed, however, before we begin seeing evidence that Stephen knew what he was talking about. A pair of cartmen are sitting in a tavern, discussing over drinks their current assignment. Apparently a “foreigner” has commissioned them to transport a crateful of ancient Egyptian relics to his newly-acquired home in the countryside about half a mile away from the tavern. The trip to the house takes them past Stephen’s nursing home, which doubles as an insane asylum, just as the asylum’s alarm begins to sound. Afraid that the alarm heralds the escape of some dangerous lunatic, the cartmen whip their horses to a higher speed, despite the worsening condition of the road ahead. Predictably, the cart hits a massive bump in the road, causing their employer’s crate to fall overboard into a deep bog. The cartmen don’t much care; at this point, they just want to get away from the asylum.

     The next day, the police are questioning one of the cartmen as they attempt to dredge up the crate. Just then, the “foreigner” who hired them shows up to see what all the fuss is about. You probably don’t need me to tell you that this man is none other than Mehmed Akhim. Mehmed is suspiciously unconcerned about the fate of his relics. I don’t know about you, but if I’d just lost thousands of pounds’ worth of irreplaceable Egyptian artifacts because of the clumsiness of the movers, I’d be pretty fucking pissed. But not Mehmed; he just nods his head and goes back home when the police inform him that his crate is in all probability irrecoverable. He comes back that night, though, with a familiar-looking papyrus in his hands, and begins to read it over the bog. The incantation is full of worrisome phrases like, “Make supple these limbs, and strong these sinews, and give them not to corruption,” and it is rather less than surprising that the recitation results in Christopher Lee, wrapped in bandages and clotted with mud, rising from the bog. Mehmed Akhim instructs the mummy to seek out and destroy those who have desecrated Princess Anankha’s grave, and the next thing we know, the moldy old hulk is smashing his way into Stephen Banning’s hospital cell to strangle him.

Back in 20th dynasty days, Anankha made a pilgrimage to the Temple of Karnack to perform some important religious observance or other. She never reached the temple alive. Her actual fate remains unknown, but her body was recovered by Kharis, priest of the Temple of Karnack (Lee), and was buried with all the grandeur due a princess and a priestess-- with one exception. Instead of following the customary practice of sending the body back to the royal capital for interment, Kharis had Anankha buried locally, in a location known only to him and to the builders of the tomb-- all of whom he immediately had killed. The reason for Kharis’s departure from orthodoxy was that the priest was in love with the princess, but was kept from her by her religious vows. The trick is that Anankha’s vows were only binding during her lifetime. With her death, she was released from them, and was free to do what she wished. The ever-resourceful Kharis was not troubled by the obstacle that the princess’s death would seem to present to a fulfilling relationship, because he possessed the Scroll of Life, whose incantations held the power to raise the dead. So he naturally wanted to keep the body of his love close by. Unfortunately for Kharis, he was discovered before he could complete the spell, and sentenced to be buried alive in Anankha’s tomb. Before he died, a spell was placed over him pressing him into service to stand guard over Anankha forever.

The collision course with Kharis on which that spell places the Bannings should be obvious, and the main outlines of the film’s principal conflict should be equally so. The complication that will get us to the all-important scene in which the mummy staggers off into the night carrying a beautiful, unconscious girl is similarly predictable. John Banning’s wife, Isabel (Yvonne Furneaux) bears a striking resemblance to Anankha. I’m sure you see where this is going.

The thing is, though, that The Mummy suffers not a bit from all this predictability. Sure, all but the most dim-witted viewers will be two or three steps ahead of the film the entire time, but in this case, that somehow adds to the film’s effectiveness. Watching The Mummy is like watching a complex but graceful and elegant machine at work. You already know what the end result will be, but the pleasure is in seeing the process itself. The Mummy’s predictability is the predictability of rightness rather than of intellectual laziness, and the only misstep in the entire film is the conspicuous lack of an explanation for Isabel’s unconsciousness when the mummy absconds with her-- one moment, we see her menaced by the mummy, the next, we see it carry her through the door. Sure, several obvious explanations present themselves, but something in the structure of the scene makes it seem like we were supposed to see her faint or be knocked out or whatever. But it’s a minor flaw, and is vastly outweighed by the film’s many strengths. Especially satisfying is the way screenwriter Jimmy Sangster weaves together all the best elements from The Mummy, The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Mummy’s Curse into a narrative far more coherent and compelling than those upon which it was based. Though much longer than any of the Universal films, and more deliberately paced than any but the original The Mummy, this version holds the viewer’s attention in a way that none of its models do-- not even the ones that are only an hour long! Finally, even if this version of The Mummy had nothing else to recommend it, it could still succeed on the strength of the awesome screen presence of Christopher Lee. Even with scarcely any dialogue (and none at all as the mummy), Lee dominates the film, even upstaging Peter Cushing for once. His Kharis is the only living mummy ever filmed that doesn’t make you say, “why the fuck doesn’t anybody just go around him and toss a match at him from behind?”-- in a way that Boris Karloff, Tom Tyler, and Lon Chaney Jr. never could, Lee makes the mummy seem genuinely threatening. It’s going to take a lot more than zillion-dollar CGI visual effects to make a mummy film that can stand up to this one. (1000 Misspent Hours)

Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb: There are few horror films that seem automatically destined to B-programmer status simply by their themes – the werewolf film fairly much so, the mummy film however without any doubt.  Michael Carreras’s direction is crude and colourless, failing to enervate the scenario with any horror – although an opening containing the severing of a man’s hand has some crude impact. The mummy, routinely made up and played by a stocky stuntman, is unconvincing. Even though a twist ending shows the mummy is not the real villain of the piece, the film seems stuck with and unable to unhitch itself from the need to conduct a routine mummy’s revenge story. The pedestrian plot is buoyed somewhat by the usual plush Hammer production values (even though we see nothing of the supposed expedition to Egypt), but this only shows that a Hammer period film without the florid stylism of a Terence Fisher can be deadly static. The cast are a singularly dull bunch – heroine Jeanne Roland hardly displays any emotion at all. Fred Clark’s brassy performance as the crass, money-hungry American showman is rather awful, even so is the liveliest thing in the film. He does get some of the more amusing lines – suggesting to an Egyptian belly dancer that he could find a place for her if she could learn to dance ragtime; and a scene where he is introduced to some Turkish candy and decide he wants to exploit, then taking Ronald Howard’s eulogy ‘delightful’ – “That’s it, we’ll call it – Turkish Delight.” 

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb was one of the handful of films directed by Hammer producer Michael Carreras, grandson of the company’s founder. Carreras’s other genre films as director include Maniac (1963), Slave Girls (1967) and The Lost Continent (1968). (Moria)

The Mummy's Shroud: In the 1920s, eminent Egyptologist Sir Basil Walden (André Morell) leads an expedition into the Egyptian desert to find the lost tomb of Kah-to-Bey, a young Egyptian prince who fled into the desert to escape a rebellion, with his loyal servant Prem. The archeologists become lost in the desert sand and their financier Stanley Preston, whose son is in the group, arrives in Egypt and heads out into the desert to find them. He finds the group near the tomb and they go in together where Preston insists on taking the remains back to Cairo to be displayed. Back there however, the mummified Prem continues to protect his master from those who disturbed his tomb, while the one man who could save them, Sir Basil, is locked in an insane asylum...

Hammer's third mummy film is probably their most generic - a typical "restored monster" storyline follows the basic formula to the letter; from an opening scene showing the back story, the introduction of the team who will uncover the creature and finally the stalk and kill scenes. Fortunately the screenplay, written by director John Gilling, at least makes the material watchable and with the characterisation he adds some variation - Sir Basil could easily have been a Van Helsing clone, while Paul Preston is never just a typical "dashing hero", the Stanley Preston character is clearly supposed to be an unlikable and irritating man and has the potential to become very annoying to the viewers as well, but his interations with his assistant and his wife are cleverly written and add some subtle humour. Rather less subtle though is a comic relief scene after the first killing, which comes in crashing contrast to the rest of the film but is mercifully brief. Fairly paced throughout, the film never otherwise falters and builds to a nice, if not unexpected climax.

John Gilling's direction is good, but this seems to be one of the lesser funded of the Severn-Arts co-productions - the desert scenes in particular never escape the "British Quarry" look. As usual for Hammer the sets are well made - the tomb and the occultist's house are real highlights, but the urban exteriors are never particularly convincing. Gilling does liven things up with some creative camera angles, a few handheld shots and some quite elaborate deaths. Unfortunately the mummy is a bit of a let-down, although apparently based on a real mummy from the British museum its face looks like a cheap papier-mâché mask. Don Banks provides a solid orchestral score with the usual themes that are associated with Ancient Egypt.

The cast on first inspection seems to be a Hammer B-team grouping, with nether Lee nor Cushing, nor any imported American lead, but they actually provide some strong performances. The ever reliable André Morell had headed up Gilling's effective Plague of the Zombies (1966) the year before and is on top form again here, in the tomb scene alone we can tell his lust for discovery, his distain of Preston and his growing sickness from the snake bite, all without a word being said. Character actor John Phillips (Torture Garden (1967)) provides a memorable performance as Stanley Preston, managing to make his character dislikable while never actually annoying to watch. Hammer's favourite bit-part player, Michael Ripper, gets one of his very best roles as Preston's tormented assistant while Roger Delgado (Dr. Who's The Master) is almost unrecognisable as the temple keeper, speaking a convincing native tongue.

Unlikely to win any awards for originality and often overlooked as a B-picture, The Mummy's Shroud does what it sets out to do and manages to stay enjoyable throughout. There are enough mummy scenes to please genre fans, while a special mention should be made for any Michael Ripper fans who will find one of his best performances here. Partly recommended. (Mondo Esoterica)

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is one of the more contentious efforts from the latter days of Hammer Films. It has a number of champions, as many detractors and almost all agree that it is a flawed work. Part of the problem with the film is that it had a deeply troubled production history. It was begun by Seth Holt, who had directed several of Hammer’s other films, in particular the psycho-thrillers Scream of Fear/A Taste of Fear (1961) and The Nanny (1965). Seth Holt began shooting with Peter Cushing in the role of Professor Fuchs. However, Cushing’s muchly beloved wife died and a bereaved Cushing dropped out of the project, whereupon he was replaced by Andrew Keir. Holt continued shooting, only to die unexpectedly three weeks later. The production was then hurriedly taken over and completed by Hammer producer Michael Carreras. Unfortunately for Carreras, Seth Holt had departed from the text of Christopher Wicking’s screenplay considerably and what completed footage there was proved to be confusing. The result was finally released and probably emerged as a better film than it had any right to be in the circumstances.
Hammer had made various mummy films before – most notably Terence Fisher’s excellent The Mummy (1959) and the more routine likes of The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) and The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). Blood from the Mummy's Tomb was envisioned as a different kind of mummy movie, one that eschewed the shuffling bandage-enwrapped title creature, which had become a dreary figure through the Universal Mummy sequels of the 1940s. Here Hammer sought to go back more to the eerie supernatural horror of Universal’s original The Mummy (1932). To this end, they turned to The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1917), a novel by Dracula (1897) author Bram Stoker, a largely pedestrian work that has nevertheless proven surprisingly popular as a film subject (see below for other versions). It was an intriguing attempt to make a different kind of mummy film, even if it is not entirely a successful one.

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is an uneven film. There is a fine atmospheric opening – a near-naked woman (Valerie Leon) is entombed by priests amid arcane Ancient Egyptian rites; her hand is chopped off and thrown to the hyenas but crawls away; a mystery wind pops up and the priests fall to the ground with their throats gored, all of which proves to be a dream being had by Fuchs’s daughter Margaret (also played by Leon) in the present-day. It is certainly the best scene in the film. Elsewhere Seth Holt (and Michael Carreras) conjure an adequate, if not standout, atmosphere. The film feels cramped in terms of budget – it only takes place around two houses and there are no Egyptian exteriors, apart from a single scene set along the side of a pyramid. That said, the sets and dressings are lavish and colourful. However, Seth Holt is not the most vibrant of Hammer directors and never mounts the film with the floridness of a Terence Fisher or even a Freddie Francis – the scene where Tod’s car crashes looks particularly unconvincing. On the whole though, the behind-the-scenes production problems never show through – certainly, one would not guess that the film had anything other than a normal production history without having read about the problems.

For a role that was originally to have been played by one of Hammer’s top stars, Peter Cushing, the character of Fuchs’s father/professor is surprisingly sidelined for almost the greater part of the film. That leaves the bulk of the rest of the show to be carried by a suitably supercilious James Villiers and Valerie Leon. Unfortunately, Valerie Leon is not the right person for the part. She has clearly been chosen for an impressively front-heavy figure rather than anything else. In the part, she radiates a blankness and little in the way of Tera’s supposed sinister mysteriousness.

Subsequent versions of The Jewel of the Seven Stars are the underrated, big-budget The Awakening (1980) and the cheap Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (1997).  (Moria)