Pharoah Got Your Tongue?

The Mummy (1959) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Jimmy Sangster

I don’t even remember the first time I saw The Mummy. It must have been in color, because I distinctly remember the second time I saw it, which was on a tiny black and white television set in a van during a road trip. I was probably no more than 9 years old and I can remember thinking at that moment about how the scene looked in color.
I must have seen this movie dozens of times because it seemed to be on every other weekend or so for years. And I know exactly why this movie made such an impact on me—it was because of the scene where Christopher Lee gets his tongue cut off. (I would flash “Spoiler Alert” here but, folks, the film has been around for 50 years.)
It wasn’t even the most gruesome thing I’d seen by then. (That would be watching Christopher Walken blow his brains out playing Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter when I was around 7years old.)
But something so viscerally struck me about the whole tongue bit that it was remained with me in the back of my mind. Perhaps because it was, in the story, a punishment for forbidden love, so that it became in my mind associated with the lengths some people will go to keep people apart, though a mute man might be just the right thing for some women. (But a tongueless man? Only a woman with a peculiar fetish could want that.)

I think the key to it all was the setting, though. Even in ancient times other cultures thought Egypt was exotic and sexy. Maybe it was because everyone shaved off all their hair and wore candles on their head. Maybe it was the eyeliner. Maybe the hot climate and diaphanous clothing.
The thing is, what I now love even more about The Mummy is how the entire flashback scene (which seems very lengthy) violates several rules of modern storytelling by interrupting the action of the here and now and by revealing backstory through pure narration. But, it is so effective that the Stephen Sommers Mummy films use the same trick at some point.
Why? In part, because what’s the point of telling a story that has ancient Egypt in it if you can’t use it as en excuse to dress people up like King Tut? Bubba Ho-Tep has a flashback sequence. Even lesser entries in the mummy genre get this. (Bram Stoker’s The Mummy has a flashback sequence). The brilliance of The Mummy is that it’s in color and, it’s combined with something that can make anyone squirm. I think it’s the look on Christopher Lee’s face that does it. It’s not like we see what happens. But Lee’s expression makes the fear palpable.

Now, allow me to backtrack a little to set the film itself in better perspective. Long before we see Christopher Lee, we begin with an 1895 British archaeological expedition in Egypt which includes…wait for it…Peter Cushing as John Banning, driven seeker of antiquity, Grand Moff Tarkin as Indiana Jones. His father Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) and uncle Joseph (Raymond Huntley) have spent 20 years looking for the Tomb of Ananka, Lady of the Two Kingdoms and Easy Upon The Eyes of Horus. They find it, and they are warned by a sketchy Egyptian fellow named Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) that evil will befall them for robbing the graves of Egypt, and he should know because he’s going to follow them home and do evil to them.
But the archaeologists didn't come all this way to play tiddly-winks and then go home. They go in to see what is to be seen and they find The Scroll of Life, which, as we know, is always a paradoxically dangerous magical item. They should just call it the Scroll That Will Make You Wish You Hadn't Learned Hieroglyphics. John can't make it to the tomb because of an injured leg so Uncle Joe goes to tell him about the news.
The elder Banning reads the scroll of life and then sees something that horrifies him into catatonia.
Fast forward to 6 months later when the remaining team dynamite the entrance to the tomb to seal it. John and Joseph can't find the Scroll of Life (it's always the last place you look for it) but they don't dwell on it. (It's not like it was the Scroll of Endless Porridge.)
Next thing you know, it’s 1898 and Mehemet Bey has rented a manor house right next to the Banning estate. There’s a great scene with some low comic characters in a pub who are transporting things for the Egyptian. (The characters are named Pat and Mike so it's really old-school low humor.)
Meanwhile the Mummy heads over to the Engerfield Nursing Home for the Mentally Disordered (a great name for an institution, like The Sunnydale Academy for the Psychologically Disarrayed.) and kills the elder Banning and from here on out the whole thing plays out (both narratively and visually) as a drawing room mystery with the twist of supernatural provided by the Mummy of Kharis.
This is where the flashback comes in. It is 2000 BC and Kharis the priest (Christopher Lee without bandages and with blue eyeliner) is in love with the princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). When she dies the priests do their business and we get an interesting reconstruction of Egyptian funeral rites and mummy wrapping. (The nude body of the princess is tastefully shown with a pair of columns covering the R-rated parts). The priests even kill a bunch of servants as a human sacrifice. Later Kharis sneaks into Ananka’s tomb to resurrect her (because she is quite attractive, even dead), but he is caught and for defiling the tomb of the princess he is punished by having his tongue cut off in the aforementioned scene of awesomeness and then he is mummified alive. (Actually, neither alive, nor dead, just eternally vigilant—though, it doesn’t make sense as a punishment for his forbidden love to leave him forever guarding the dead woman he was in love with, but the Egyptians weren’t exactly the most consistent of people anyhow.)

But now there’s a case of murder and this brings out Police Inspector Mulrooney (Eddie Byrne) (because even in England, they trot out an Irish cop) who believes in “cold, hard facts” which will soon enough include the cold hard fact of a living dead mummy. When the mummy shows up at the Banning house and kills Uncle Joseph, John manages to shoot Kharis twice to no effect.

Banning intuits that the Egyptian (who has transformed his rental into a veritable Egyptian temple) is behind the killings and may be controlling the mummy so he heads over and when his suspicions seem confirmed he goads the Egyptian (by referring to his chosen deity as a third-rate god) into making a move.
This leads to a discussion about archaeology and colonial exploitation.
Mehemet Bey: It has often puzzled me about archaeologists. Has it never occurred to them that by opening the tombs of beings that are sacred they commit an act of desecration?
Banning: If we didn’t, the history of your country, indeed of a great part of civilization would still be unknown.
The Egyptian adopts the language of post-colonial resistance which is instantly discredited for our audience by virtue of the fact that we already know that he is a vicious murderer and a fanatic cultist. Is it coincidental that a proto-nationalist Egyptian would be presented as an occultist murderer a mere 3 years after the debacle at Suez? I think not.

In the end, Banning is saved by the remarkable resemblance of his wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux again) with Ananka, so that Kharis will do anything for her, including burying himself down into the murk of a bogside and taking the Egyptian with him. (In the end, Kharis acted completely out of love. Mehemet Bey could only control him as long as he could convince Kharis that his actions were for Ananka, but when he overreaches and tries to make Kharis kill the person he believes is Ananka, then Kharis turns on him with all his supernatural might.)
It is this angle which gives The Mummy its humanity, because Kharis is allowed an inherent goodness that Frankenstein’s monster in Curse of Frankenstein is completely denuded of. Kharis is never the villain, just the unwitting tool of one. The “monster” is just a lover, cursed by fate. It’s an actual human-scale tragedy. Kharis isn’t a world-devouring apocalyptic super-villain. He’s just the remnants of a human.

I know it’s really easy to compare this film with modern filmmaking and laugh at how cheap it is and how much more awesome the effects are today. But I have a question: what the hell is wrong with us that we can’t tell simple stories on a human scale anymore? Why do all the supernatural stories now have to be about the end of the world? Why can’t we scale things down a notch to a more human level? How inflated do our heroes have to be? How heroic do they have to be? Why do we even need heroes?
Think about this, is there even a hero in this film? John Banning is a protagonist, but he’s no hero. There’s a villain. There are victims. But the closest thing to a hero is Kharis, who suffers for love, and even makes the ultimate sacrifice not even for his love but for an approximation of love (unless you believe Isobel is the reincarnation of Ananka). It’s a far cry from that level of complication to the shoot-‘em-up good-guy heroes we’re used to.

I like the fact that the climax of this film plays out like an Agatha Christie mystery with a Mummy. It's approachable. Don't get me completely wrong, watching a sandstorm nearly devour Brendan Fraser is awesome too, but there should be a place for something less apocalyptic too.

So, The Mummy is, for all its simplicity more complicated underneath than you would expect and while Christopher Lee is buried under gauze for most of the film, the flashback sequence alone makes this another Hammer classic.


Extras
as per the other releases
Cast & Crew
Theatrical Trailer