Monster March: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

To borrow a formulation from actor/podcaster Griffin Newman, The Mummy’s Tomb makes The Mummy’s Hand look like The Mummy. Last week, I had barely complimented The Mummy’s Hand for being boring but watchable, but now I find myself in the position of looking back on Hand with rose-colored glasses. Having just been through The Mummy’s Tomb(in which the titular tomb barely appears), I didn’t know how good I had it – The Mummy’s Tomb is a real slog.

Thirty years after The Mummy’s Hand, Steve Banning (Dick Foran) is happily retired, regaling his son John (John Hubbard) and fiancée Isobel (Elyse Knox) with tales of ancient Egypt. Little do the Bannings know, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) was not destroyed; instead, he has been reanimated by Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) to seek revenge against all who desecrated the tomb of Princess Ananka.

 

Of its sixty-minute runtime, The Mummy’s Tomb includes twelve minutes of stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand, designed to catch the audience up on the legend of Kharis (two years was a long time without the benefit of DVD or streaming services). It may be that this extended “previously on” segment made me overly nostalgic for The Mummy’s Hand, since all the boring bits are excluded while only the morbid mummy action gets replayed. This recap/best-of reel is supposed to set the table for The Mummy’s Tomb, but it indirectly shines a light on everything that Tomb does wrong.

 

For one, there is something inherently incongruous about a mummy picture set in Massachusetts. For all its faults, The Mummy’s Hand was at its most watchable during the dig sequences that unearthed the mummy. (See also, naturally, 1999’s The Mummy, which is set entirely in Egypt.) To relocate the action to America gives the whole proceeding a patent absurdity – as, for example, in the moments when we see Kharis shambling his way across a quaint New England wooden bridge. One might argue that the American protagonists are suitably averse to superstition, allowing the mummy to wreak plenty of havoc before being discovered, but The Mummy’s Tomb treats the “discovery of the supernatural” as a routine procedural element of the plot, as many of the Universal Monster movies did.

 

If I were hosting Monster March in chronological order, this would certainly be Lon Chaney Jr. week; alongside The Mummy’s Tomb, Chaney headlined The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and Son of Dracula, all in the span of two years. In many ways, The Wolf Man was the part Chaney was born to play – because he’s nowhere near as engaging in the other roles. As Kharis, Chaney seems to be sleepwalking, though I’ll grant you that the role of The Mummy is almost never the most interesting performance in any of these Universal Monster movies. (Excepting, of course, Boris Karloff.) As before, Kharis is speechless and barely mobile, though even his brief moments of physical activity seem not to have the potency of Tom Tyler’s prior interpretation of the part. 

 

The rest of the cast, too, is given nothing much to enact. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford reprise their roles from The Mummy’s Hand, though they have no scenes together, which seems a terrible waste. Moreover, both are charged with playing the characters thirty years hence, which seems an odd creative decision – though, in fairness, both actors do a decently convincing job playing much older than they are. Elyse Knox is the quintessential damsel in distress here, especially in a retread of the “priest’s bride” third act turn from The Mummy’s Hand. Only Turhan Bey, as the mummy’s high priest, is given any substantive material to perform; he does an admirable job being captivated by the mysticism of the mummy, though the film largely relegates him to the “strange foreigner” stereotype, right down to the fact that the residents of Mapleton, Massachusetts, immediately (and, I grant you, rightly) suspect that the mummy must be connected to their new Egyptian neighbor.

 

Despite running about as long as an episode of your average streaming service television show (once you get that longer-than-average recap out of the way), The Mummy’s Tomb manages not to do anything new with that runtime. Even three scant films into the franchise, we’ve seen all this before and better. The mummy may be more violent than last time, but he’s also slower and sleepier – just as the plot is. There’s less suspense to be had in The Mummy’s Tomb, and I can’t help but feel a bit cheated that we never really get to see much of the eponymous tomb. That dissonance – a tomb-less Tomb – might say all we need to know for this Mummy Monday.

 

The Mummy’s Tomb is not rated. Directed by Harold Young. Written by Neil P. Varnick, Griffin Jay, and Henry Sucher. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, Wallace Ford, and Turhan Bey. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden.

Next week for Mummy Monday, prepare to be haunted by The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.

Monster March: The Mummy's Hand (1940)

I had the distinct feeling after watching The Mummy’s Hand that I was about to forget everything I had seen. Never mind that the film is only 67 minutes long, half of which is astoundingly boring; the half that is interesting is wholly generic and entirely unmemorable. It’s a far cry from the Boris Karloff original and an even further cry from 1999’s The Mummy (which I contend is not just the best mummy movie ever made but one of the best adventure movies, period). 

Archaeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his assistant Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford) think they’ve stumbled upon the last clue to the location of Princess Ananka’s tomb. Initially discouraged by Professor Andoheb (George Zucco), Steve and Babe set off in search of their own funding, which they find in magician-cum-investor Tim “Solvani” Sullivan (Cecil Kellaway) and his daughter/assistant Marta (Peggy Moran). What they don’t know is that Andoheb is secretly the high priest of an order devoted to protecting Ananka, and this priest has a mummy (Tom Tyler) at his beck and call.

 

As I’m watching the Universal Classic Monster movies, it’s been fun to notice places where tropes were born, moments when story beats become ossified into canonical necessity. In the case of the Mummy films, I’ve been noticing echoes with the Stephen Sommers Mummy, and The Mummy’s Hand has those in spades – a down-on-his-luck adventurer, affluent investors, superstitious local diggers, a museum curator in league with a secret society. For being only the second Mummy movie, there’s a surprising amount of formula already at play in The Mummy’s Hand, even as it differentiates itself from the 1932 original by locating a solid half of the film to the archaeological dig site.

 

When the film gets to the dig site, the real mummy action kicks in, and The Mummy’s Hand is at a minimum watchable. That action is horribly cliché, and there’s a surprising lack of urgency despite the fact that the mummy Kharis is methodically killing off protagonists tent by tent over the course of what seems to be a single night. Having said that, though, there’s a certain engagement to be gained simply by having a supernatural creature skulk through your film and do his master’s dark bidding, and I have to say that there’s something charming about seeing the archetypal mummy action play out. Unlike Karloff’s Imhotep, Kharis is a silent and lumbering brute, lurching his way toward his victims, and makeup artist Jack Pierce adds another visual stunner into his repertoire. If nothing else, this mummy looks good.

 

“Watchable at best” is certainly damning with faint praise, and it’s a real wonder if audiences even make it that far. The first half-hour of the film is interminable in dragging out its exposition; The Mummy’s Hand opens with two old men droning on about mythic backstory before one expires, perhaps from boredom. Then the film sets up a long and uninteresting plot in which Steve Banning fundraises for his expedition before falling in with a magician who never does much magic beyond his introduction. (You’d hope, if Solvani is Chekhov’s Magician, he’d do a bit of prestidigitation to save the day. No such luck here.) These B-movie shenanigans truly diminish the film’s potential for horror to the point where you almost expect the gumball machine from Mystery Science Theater to pop up and start riffing on how dull the film is.

 

Often the best thing we can say about a bad Universal Monster film is that they rarely overstay their welcome. The Mummy’s Hand is brief, but it’s a slog, exacerbated by subpar acting that’s both monotonous and overly campy. Wallace Ford gets a few chuckles in as a Lou Costello type, though for comic relief he’s wildly out of place in the brand of monster movies Universal had perfected by 1940. The rest of the cast are the very definition of serviceable though largely indistinguishable from other versions of the same archetypes. Even Tom Tyler as Kharis is a bit of a snooze, and perhaps I was so desperate for something engaging that my first glimpse of a mummy got me to sit up and say, “I’ll take it.” But Kharis himself lacks any agency in the film; he’s at the mercy of Andoheb and his mystical tana leaves, which reanimate the mummy and set him off into the night. There’s a half-baked suspense plot about what might happen if Kharis gets his hands on an infinite supply of tana leaves, but none of the protagonists knows about this, so the net effect of anticipation is a wash. 

 

Ultimately, The Mummy’s Hand is an exercise in unmet expectations and settling for the first gruesome creature to shamble your way. It’s dull and (pardon the pun) lifeless, a reanimated clone of The Mummy drained of its excitement and fueled by the sort of scripting that might fit better on an episode of Svengoolie. Even with a runtime of little more than a hour, as Universal Monster sequels go, The Mummy’s Hand is a bust.

 

The Mummy’s Hand is not rated. Directed by Christy Cabanne. Written by Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane. Starring Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Wallace Ford, Eduardo Ciannelli, George Zucco, Cecil Kellaway, and Tom Tyler.

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Drácula (1931) starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.

Next week for Mummy Monday, enter The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.