The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)

Karl Freund was one of the greatest cinematographers in the first half-century of film. His directorial career was smaller and less satisfying to him, but those directing credits include two classic horror movies, The Mummy and Mad Love. Freund, born in Austria-Hungary in 1890, started working in film at age 15 as a projectionist. He was the camera operator for newsreels by age 17 and worked his way up to cinematography jobs at German studio UFA by his twenties, working on some of the greatest classics of early German cinema. He had the good sense to get the hell out of Germany in 1929, emigrating to the United States and working as both a cinematographer and director in Hollywood in the '30s. He quit directing after 1935's Mad Love to focus exclusively on cinematography, his profession until his retirement in the early '60s. He died in 1969. Freund's cinematography credits include The Golem, Dreyer's Michael, Murnau's The Last Laugh and Tartuffe, Lang's Metropolis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Browning's Dracula, A Guy Named Joe, The Thin Man Goes Home, Huston's Key Largo, and the I Love Lucy TV show.

Freund directed two obscure silent films in Germany and several shorts, but The Mummy was his first film as director to reach a large audience. It's a dreamy, slow burn of a horror film, relying more on atmosphere, tension, and implied violence than shock, and Freund's experience as cinematographer makes it look beautiful (credit also to the actual cinematographer, Charles Stumar). Zita Johann, one of the stars of the film, did not get along with Freund and repeatedly said he was incompetent, but that supposed incompetence is nowhere to be seen onscreen. Instead, we get subtle, controlled performances, striking images, elegant camera movement, and a lean, fat-free running time and structure, and we get to see controlling, selfish males and white colonizers (mostly) get their comeuppance.

The Mummy begins in the early '20s in Egypt, with an expedition from the British Museum finding (i.e. stealing) a mummy, some pottery and other artifacts, and a mysterious gold box with an even more mysterious scroll inside. Despite a warning to leave the items alone from a friend who is a British doctor living in Egypt, the head of the expedition, Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron), and his impatient younger colleague, Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), press on with their research. Whemple is a level-headed fellow, but when he leaves the tent, Ralph reads the scroll. The mummy (Boris Karloff) comes alive, takes the scroll, and busts a move out of there, mummy-style, leaving Ralph a cackling madman.

The action picks up 10 years later with a fresh expedition, led by Whemple's milquetoast dweeb colonizer of a son, Frank (David Manners). He's bummed about not finding anything good, since his fellow Brits have plundered almost everything for the museum, when a strange Egyptian man named Ardath Bey (Karloff again) who looks suspiciously like everyone's favorite mummy from a decade ago shows up unexpectedly and tells them to dig in a certain spot. They find the tomb of the Princess Ankh-es-en-amon, but Bey has made a deal with the Cairo Museum, which gets to put the treasures on display locally, to the consternation of dumbass Frank, who thinks the British Museum should get it because of their inherent supremacy over the world's artifacts. Fuck this guy. He doesn't get enough comeuppance in this film.

Into the mix comes Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), a half-Egyptian woman living in Cairo. She's a descendant of Ankh-es-en-amon on her mother's side. Ardath Bey/Im-ho-tep has put a spell on her and wants to resurrect his old love, the Princess, through Helen. Meanwhile, for reasons no one will ever understand, the stylish, witty, sharp, and beautiful Helen and milquetoast dweeb Frank have fallen in love (keeping with the classic Hollywood tradition of great women characters falling in love with boring nerds). Also, Papa Whemple and his doctor pal have figured out Ardath Bey/our resurrected mummy's evil plans, and Bey has figured out that they have figured out his evil plans. This causes many complications.

I'll leave the rest for you to discover. It involves an evil white cat (who rules), magic rings, magic pools, creepy staring, psychosexual centuries-long love triangles, male entitlement, western entitlement, fireplace document switcheroos, death, pithy one-liners, incredible Karloff closeups, fuckin' Frank (that whiny dork), inappropriate handling of archival material, and freaky museum behavior. This is another one of those classic '30s horror films that influenced so much of what was to come, and though it's light on the jump scares and creepy thrills, it has tons of atmosphere and memorable images. I liked it a lot.