There being no such thing as an objective review, this is a personal, slanted and systematic survey of the fantastic on film from around the world, working backward and forward from 1942, the year of Val Lewton's Cat People. Horror, science fiction and fantasy movies: I've seen a lot, now I'm looking to find out what I've missed. And remember, if a movie isn't pretentious, it probably isn't trying hard enough.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Mummy's Hand (1940)
The companion piece to my beloved Horror Island (1941), Universal's The Mummy's Hand stars that film's Dick Foran and Peggy Moran. Excuse me: affable Dick Foran and pretty Peggy Moran, as they are invariably described, because there's really no better way of describing them. Both films are so entertaining, and the chemistry between the two leads so comfortable, I wish they had been teamed together fifty more times. The Mummy's Hand is essentially a 'B' sequel to Universal's previous 'A' The Mummy (1932) starring Boris Karloff, but it's a different kind of beast altogether. Where Karloff's film was a moody romance with a body count, its sequel is a fun and funny pulp adventure with a monster, and almost certainly the direct inspiration for Stephen Sommers' big budget The Mummy (1999), which is itself notable for being an infinitely better Indiana Jones rip-off than the miserable and insulting Indiana Jones And The Temple Of The Crystal Skull (2008).
(Sommers would go on to diminish the slight achievement of his Mummy movie with a couple of sequels that completely blew the modest charm of the original, and then drove the final nails into a promising genre film making career's coffin with the truly dire Van Helsing (2004), which after Ford Coppola's Dracula viewer's had a right to expect would star Anthony Hopkins and not be almost entirely computer generated.)
Dick Foran plays an avid but perpetually broke Egyptologist who happens upon an ancient pot decorated with the map to a lost Pharaoh's tomb. When he and comic sidekick Wallace Ford take it to George Zucco, director of the Cairo Museum, he tells them it's a fake and contrives to drop it on the floor, shattering it. Fortunately, Foran remembers what was on it, doesn't believe it to have been a phony, and convinces traveling magician Cecil Kellaway to finance his expedition. Peggy Moran, as Kellaway's daughter, thinks Foran and Ford are a couple of hustlers, and insists on accompanying the group into the desert, where against her will a mutual liking develops between her and Foran. Little do they know that Zucco, actually a priest of the cult of the soon to be revived Mummy, is not far behind, and has a yen for Peggy himself...
The whole enterprise is just great, unpretentious, sweet natured fun, light as a souffle and good for your soul.
P.S.: As an added bonus, here's the trailer for Horror Island, which I forgot to post with its review:
Fantastique: a French term for a literary and cinematic genre that overlaps with science fiction, horror and fantasy. We'll be spelling it with a 'c' instead of 'que' so as not to look any goofier than we already do, but the Fantastic is generally what we will be looking for here, and the hoity-toitier it is the better we like it. Expect to see Jean Ray mentioned wherever we can figure out how to shoehorn him in.
Auteur: 1950s-era auteur theory, associated with the French New Wave and the critics who wrote for Cahiers Du Cinema, holds that the films of a good director (or, at any rate, an interesting one) reflect their personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of the films in question being made as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinctive enough to shine through all kinds of studio interference. Another good place for this to occur is in the making of low budget films and films made outside the studio system. We're particularly fond of films that subvert genre to the nefarious purpose of a writer or director with a bone to pick.
Semiotics: Biased Observer keeps looking this word up, but finds that the definition slides out of his memory like his brain was made of Teflon, and it will therefore not be used except in this sidebar. That was it just now.
Mise en Scene: has been called film criticism's 'grand undefined term'. That means that everyone who uses it presumably has some idea of what they mean by it, but anyone who reads it has to guess, which makes it a pretty sloppy word for anyone to employ who actually wants to be understood. But it makes you sound like an intellectual, so I'll try to fit it in every three sentences or so.
Good Kill: term used by splatter and slasher film fans to describe a particularly wet or inventive murder or, on occasion, other mode of buying it. While we don't have a problem with gore effects in general, we don't particularly care for films that are distinguished entirely by their catalogue of good kills, and that's not what we're after here, though a good exploding sheep a la Bad Taste is a joy forever, make no mistake.
Lewtonensque: This term is going to crop up over and over here. Val Lewton was a producer, not a director, though the term auteur suits his output perfectly, as his personality is ground into every film his name was attached to, particularly the B horror films he left a lucrative career by David O. Selznick's side to make for a pittance at RKO. His early films in particular are firmly grounded in the urban present (of the 1940's) and are models of restraint as they depict the fantastic intruding into modern life, and not a pitchfork wielding villager anywhere to be seen.
Cronenbergesque: A positive descriptor. Clinical, chilly, and intellectual are all terms characteristically used to describe David Cronenberg, but 'humane', 'humanist' and 'a fantastic interview' apply equally well. Canada's answer to J.G. Ballard, on whose behalf the term 'body horror' was coined, though I dunno by whom.
(Sommers would go on to diminish the slight achievement of his Mummy movie with a couple of sequels that completely blew the modest charm of the original, and then drove the final nails into a promising genre film making career's coffin with the truly dire Van Helsing (2004), which after Ford Coppola's Dracula viewer's had a right to expect would star Anthony Hopkins and not be almost entirely computer generated.)
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