The Mummy gives you Boris Karloff in bandages at the very beginning—his hands slowly emerging from gray rags in unnerving defiance against decay—but for most of the film he plays a spell-casting Egyptian priest in a fez. Once he’s inadvertently brought back to life by British archeologists, the priest Imhotep slips away and disguises himself as Ardeth Bey, an Egyptian historian. From there he pursues a plan to revive the ancient princess with whom, thousands of years ago, he was illicitly in love. The macabre plot involves killing one of her descendants (Zita Johann) so that the princess can be reincarnated in her body. As you can see, The Mummy involves a lot of “mumbo jumbo,” to use the film’s own term, much of it stiffly staged by director Karl Freund. There is some arresting imagery, however (Freund was also the cinematographer on the likes of Metropolis and Dracula), including eerie close-ups of Karloff’s face, whose eyes glow with otherworldly menace when he’s bidding victims to follow his wishes. The film’s highlight is an extended flashback to Imhotep’s life in ancient Egypt, which plays like a sequence in a silent epic (there’s no dialogue). It’s there that The Mummy offers its most horrible moment: the sight of Imhotep, condemned for trying to resurrect the princess by way of a dark spell, being mummified alive, strips of cloth wrapping around his bulging eyes and gaping mouth, music giving way to the awful silence of the tomb.
(1/28/2022)
