Films: 1940s
(1944) The Mummy's Ghost
Monday, February 26, 2007
The Mummy's Ghost
Director: Reginald Le Borg
Release: 1944
The members of the expedition that unearthed Egyptian Prince Kharis are dead. The mummy, however, is still in the United States and its original quarry, Princess Ananka, is now entombed at the American museum that funded her abduction. The cult of Arkan wants them both back and High Priest Andoheb (George Zucco) sends adherent Yousef Bay (John Carradine) across the Atlantic to reclaim the (un)dead.
Director Reginald Le Borg delivers a muscular and mostly effective chapter of Universal's 1940s walking dead franchise. "The Mummy's Ghost" resolves its predecessors' problems with diffuse direction and focuses on the monster.
Lon Chaney, Jr. plays Kharis, locking the swaddled mummy's face into a grimace of sorrow but otherwise capturing the physical traits of Tom Tyler's 1940 first try.
There's plenty of Chaney on the screen during "The Mummy's Ghost," but there is also a fairly arresting performance by Carradine. He manages to actually illustrate an arc from selfless and supplicant service to personal avarice and desire. Yousef Bay covets Amina Mansouri (Ramsay Ames), Egyptian clerk at the museum.
Mansouri is romantically attached to grad student Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery), who is duly fascinated with his professor's (Frank Reicher) descriptions of Kharis previous rampage against the expedition members. Tom is duly perplexed by his girlfriend's longing for something Egyptian. He hopes to get her away from the campus and solidify a conventional American life with her.
The primary complication arises when Yousef and Kharis find Ananka in the museum. Although they think they've performed their ritual correctly, Ananka's soul departs and relocates to Amina's strangely lonely body. Kharis then pursues Amina. Yousef cannot survive the contest and Amina's fate is sealed upon contact. The soul of Ananka permeates her flesh and transforms her into a rough approximation of her eternal lover. Despite her human partner's efforts, Amina is carried into the depths by Kharis.
Besides economy of storytelling ("The Mummy's Ghost" clocks in at one hour and one minute), Le Borg teases some interesting expansions and reversals of previous themes by "Mummy" writers and directors. Screenwriters Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher pick up on a single line of "The Mummy's Hand," spoken by George Zucco as a younger Andoheb in that film. Andoheb speaks of the pillaging of Egyptian art and its dead.
In that film, Andoheb seeks to stop the exit of the Americans with Egyptian property. In this film, aged and bitter at his failure, Andoheb sends his youthful minion to retrieve what he has lost. The very question of ownership (and belonging) becomes amplified by "The Mummy's Ghost" setting. In the United States, the relatively antiseptic setting of the Scripps Museum - contrasted with the more gruesome tombs of preceding films - suggests a neutralization of ownership. Ananka is kept in a roped-off sarcophagus. She is preserved and on display. No one may touch her. While accessible, she is dispossessed and removed from cultural signifiers.
Similarly, Amina is culturally sanded by her museum environment. Her heart, it seems, aches from some other place. She speaks of premonitions, that her duned homeland is somehow just around the corner.
"The Mummy's Ghost" predicts the inevitable return of the soul to its source. The identity is intimately tied to its people. There is no real happy ending to the story - the good American girl not only does not exist in "The Mummy's Ghost," the girl is also not returned to the future husband. She is instead is consumed by the forces of heredity. Kharis is the driving force of ancestry, manifest and undeniable. Even his power is not enough, however. Both prisoners cannot make the journey away from the new land, but only into its depths - submerged in the old waters of its swampland.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
