Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Return to The Mummy

The Mummy (1959)
Directed by Terence Fisher
Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster

Revisiting the first Hammer foray into mummyland and I'm still a fan of this one.  Having delved even further into the depths of the Hammer catalogue I can now say with more confidence that the 1959 mummy stands out as a gem of the classic Hammer horror set.

Let's get the fan review out of the way.  If you want to explore Hammer films this is an essential.  Fan of mummy movies?  Essential.  Christopher Lee, with and without a massive amount of makeup.  Peter Cushing back when he was the young lead.   (He seems so much older as Van Helsing in the 1958 Hammer Dracula.)  The English country setting gives us some nice low comic stylings that reoccur in other Hammer films from this period and thus if you aren't a fan of Michael Ripper going in you will become one.  

The film itself is one part archaeological adventure, one part ancient Egyptian epic sampler and one part  drawing room murder mystery.

And of course there's the post-colonial discourse of the film.  Nowadays we might forget just how fresh the Anglo-French Suez crisis was in the minds of the British audience for this film.  It must have made for a very different attitude towards the Egyptian villain of the piece.   Mehemet Bey is indeed a curious character.  He is a closet worshipper of Karnak.  (Though the definition of closet is stretched by the large room he uses as a shrine in his rented house in England.)  The closet worshipper of an ancient religion is a familiar trope in adventure stories because it opens the door to exotic (inventive and invented) practices and rituals that make for more exciting stories than what you might get if Mehemet Bey was merely a moderately devout Muslim looking to recover antiquities with which he has no spiritual connection.   Instead he is a fanatic follower of Karnak and he has with him the living dead mummy of Kharis.  Putting off the backstory of Kharis for a second, Mehemet Bey uses Kharis like a golem.  It is ultimately his misuse of this instrument that causes his destruction.  Well, maybe not so much misuse as a misunderstanding of Kharis.  Sure, Kharis was the high priest of Karnak, but Mehemet Bey should have been more suspicious of Kharis's reliability as an instrument of service to Karnak.  After all, Kharis was entombed alive as a punishment for trying to resurrect the high priestess Ananka in order to engage in forbidden love with her.  So the whole reason that Kharis is there is because of his unreliability when it comes to obedience to the rules of Karnak.  Mehemet Bey should have known better.  Sure, what were the odds that he'd run into someone who is a dead ringer for the Princess Ananka?  But on the other hand, the only thing we know about Kharis is that he violated Karnak's sacred rules.  There's a logical fallacy at the heart of the punishment meted out to Kharis in the first place.  Kharis is obsessed with Ananka.  Ananka dies and he tries to bring her back to life in order to consummate his love for her.  (We are never informed about how Ananka felt about Kharis, mind you.)  Kharis is caught before he can resurrect Ananka.  His tongue is cut out and he is entombed alive, in the tomb of the woman he was obsessed with and so that he could be the guardian of her tomb.  Cutting out the tongue?  Yeah, that's a punishment.  But what part of putting him eternally close to the object of his obsession is supposed to be a punishment for Kharis?

At any rate, Mehemet Bey is determined to punish those who violated the tomb of Ananka and he does have the perfect instrument to enact vengeance since nobody cares more about Ananka than Kharis.  But Mehemet Bey's key flaw is that he believes Ananka is sacred because of her status as a priestess of Karnak, whereas Kharis was and is in love with Ananka.  Mehemet Bey underestimates the unpredictability of love.  Of course, what were the odds that one of the people he's hunting down would be married to someone who looks just like Ananka?  And how much of a facial match would someone have to be for Kharis's Ananka-radar to kick in?  Isobel Banning is an exact match.  What if someone was a 75% match?  Well, we do know that Kharis doesn't recognize Isobel as a match for Ananka if her hair is up, so even with a dead ringer Kharis isn't completely fooled.  And so, while Kharis is "fooled" by Isobel into believing she is Ananka and thus he unravels Mehemet Bey's revenge plan, on the other hand it is not pure Enlightenment rationality that wins the day because the mummy could only be fooled because of the miraculous coincidence (or should we call it fate?) of the resemblance of Isobel and Ananka.

One of the strange things that comes from this story is that while Stephen Banning, the man of science (archaeology, Egyptology), comes through against the closet cult fanatic (and possibly some form of apostate or closeted nonbeliever) it is not the values of science and enlightenment that prevail, per se.  The Bannings prevail because they recognize the existence of the irrational and mysterious and engage it to their benefit.  It's not exactly a victory of modern science, it's a victory of ancient irrationality.  At the end of the film the rational world has to deal with the genuine existence of the living dead and magical scrolls that can bring people back to life.  That's hardly a victory for the rational world.
But of course, the most irrational thing in this movie is love and yet for all its irrationality and the inability to scientifically prove its existence (show me a molecule of love) it does seem to be quite real.
And so Kharis's ancient love for Ananka wins out in the end.  Sort of.  He's now dead in an English bog and she's probably going to be on display in a museum.   Not exactly a love story for the ages.

While most of the main story of the film takes place in England and plays out in and around the Banning drawing room the discovery of the tomb in Egypt and even more so the ancient flashback that are the most vivid parts of the film.  The mass human sacrifice at the burial of Ananka is so tastefully played out that you might be forgiven if you don't notice that a lot of people are killed to join Ananka in her tomb.

So, were the archaeologists wrong to explore the tomb?  Was their search for knowledge (in this case knowledge about the past through archaeological study) akin to Victor Frankenstein's pursuit of forbidden experimentation?  I suppose one of the problems with cinematic archaeology is that the complete backstory of the archaeological discovery seems to always be available.  The archaeologists in this case know everything about the story of Ananka and Kharis.  All they need to do now is find the tomb.  This is one of the most unrealistic tropes that you can imagine.  I know this is a mummy story and not an archaeology story, but it would be nice to see some cinematic archaeology that doesn't involve already knowing the complete story of an archaeological discovery before you find an artifact.

Notwithstanding that last bit of crankiness I have always enjoyed this film and having seen some of Hammer's later forays into Egypt I have to say this is one that stands the test of time both compared to later mummy films (and yes, that includes all those Brendan Fraser vehicles) and to the earlier Universal mummy franchise.  Note also the joy to be found in a simple story with lowered stakes (still life or death, mind you) as opposed to the world-killing dust storms of the contemporary CGI era.  It doesn't always have to be the end of the world.

Cast
Stephen Banning -- Felix Aylmer
Joseph Whemple -- Raymond Huntley
John Banning -- Peter Cushing
Isobel Banning/Princess Ananka -- Yvonne Furneaux
Kharis -- Christopher Lee
Inspector Mulrooney -- Eddie Byrne
P.C. Blake -- George Woodbridge
Dr. Reilly --Willoughby Gray
Pat -- Harold Goodwin
Mike -- Denis Shaw
Poacher -- Michael Ripper
Mehemet Bey -- George Pastell

Cinematography -- Jack Asher
Music by Franz Reizenstein

Special Features
1. Theatrical Trailer

No comments: