The Mummy (1932)

Day 140 of Sobriety.

It has bothered me for a while that I have never really seen any of the iconic Universal Classic Monsters films, even though they are a key component in the heritage of the horror films that I love. I’m pretty sure I saw Dracula (1931) at some point, but for the most part, the Universal films are so old and omnipresent that I never felt the urge or need to actually sit down and purposefully watch them.

Deciding to rectify this, I recently bought the “Complete 30-film collection” blu-ray box, and have embarked, at least initially, on watching the films in their order of release. The Mummy is the third film that I have watched from the set, following on from Dracula and Frankenstein (1931).

The set itself is pretty nice, but it does have a few issues. For one thing, it is not really “complete,” as promised by its title. It doesn’t include several of the classic Universal horror films, with The Black Cat (1934) being a notable omission, and several films are also repeated two or three times across the volumes in the set as they include multiple monsters. This is apparently because each volume is also sold separately. It’s still a good set, but these issues show a bit of a slap-dash attitude on the part of Universal, considering the important place these films hold in cinema history. Even the colors of the plastic cases are inconsistent, with some volumes having clear cases and some being blue.

The Mummy has never really been a monster that has held all that much fascination for me personally (actually, now that I think about it, perhaps only Dracula has that distinction), but I was still curious to see the origin of such an enduring horror icon. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that I enjoyed the film quite a lot. In some respects, it seemed to be a more polished film than either Dracula or Frankenstein. I think the addition of incidental music—absent from those two preceding films—helped quite a bit.

The actual Mummy, as we know it, only has a very small part in the film, which plays out for a large part as a kind of dark, wistful, romance. My own points of comparison might be Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), or even She (1965). One thing I particularly liked about The Mummy was the lead actress Zita Johann, who has a very distinctive and somewhat strange look that I thought was perfect for her role.

It might sound derogatory to say it, but one thing that these old films have in their favor is that they are very short—about 75 minutes. This means that they clip along at a good pace, and tell their stories in a lean, economical way. To me, it seems to lend them a kind of comic-book quality that is appropriate to their monster subject matter.

Having enjoyed The Mummy, I’m now looking forward to checking out some of the other films that I have felt a bit disinterested in, such as the Invisible Man films and, of course, the numerous Mummy sequels. Still feeling a bit unenthusiastic about the Abbot and Costello tie-ins, though…