Round Up 1940

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,097 films made in 1940, 32 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

A Macabre Legacy 
Before I Hang 
Beyond Christmas 
Black Friday 
Chamber of Horrors 
Crimes at the Dark House 
Dr. Cyclops 
Drums of Fu Manchu 
Earthbound 
El monje loco 
El secreto de la monja 
Enoken no songokû: songokû zenko-hen 
Fantasia 
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe 
Men with Steel Faces 
Mysterious Doctor Satan 
One Million B.C.   
Pinocchio   
Sky Bandits 
The Ape 
The Blue Bird 
The Devil Bat 
The Fatal Hour 
The Ghost Breakers   
The Human Monster 
The Invisible Man Returns 
The Invisible Woman 
The Man with Nine Lives 
The Midnight Ghost 
The Mummy's Hand 
The Thief of Bagdad 
You'll Find Out

It's time this blog started living up to the 'biased' part of its name. Luckily, here we are in 1940, where one of my bigger prejudices finally emerges, full blown and unreasonable. 1940 is the year Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia were released, but I'm not going to discuss them because I'm not interested in Disney, except in their capacity as a destructive influence on fantasy cinema in general and children's films in particular.

I don't like their cryogenically frozen founder or his tattling to HUAC.

Or the way they dumped toxic waste in the Florida Everglades on the outskirts of their Magic Kingdom.

Or their inauguration of a new James Woodsian tradition of unrestrained and unamusing voice overacting, since made even more shouty and overbearing by such luminaries as Eddie Murphy (this generation's Arthur Askey).

Or their Mouseketeer child stars who grow up dysfunctional in public, get breast implants before they hit puberty, and end by shrinking the ever-closing gap between the music video and pornography even further on their way to complete breakdowns and/or rehab. (Above left: that isn't a still from Blue Sunshine, it's a pre-teen success story!) (Now, that, below, is a still from Blue Sunshine.)

 

Or the way they tried to destroy underground comix artist Dan O'Neil and his Air Pirates in the courts despite the crucially-important-to-freedom-of-speech laws protecting satire and parody.

Or the way they've dealt with genius animator and competitor Hayao Miyazaki by buying the rights to release his infinitely-superior-to-Disney films in North America and then under-promoting and overcharging for them. (Toss all those Disney discs and show your kids Miyazaki instead, so they'll grow up to be interesting people who like good movies).

Or the fact that they now own Marvel Comics (unless they break Diamond Distributor's destructive monopoly on comics, which I suppose they just might).

And I don't like Disney animated features.

Well, except for Sleeping Beauty. I like the dragon and the bramble forest and the evil queen.

Oh, and Atlantis -- Atlantis was okay.

And Winnie The Pooh was quite nice.

But, boy, they sure ruined Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wind In The Willows, three peculiarly British classics that American animators should never have been allowed to touch.

Of course, now that I think of it, the Headless Horseman half of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was better.

And their live action Child Of Glass is one of my favourite children's films, and still holds up for me even today. Wish that was on disc...

Also wish there was some information available for these Mexican horror films I keep seeing mentioned when I generate my Internet Movie Database lists for each year, but apart from their titles and personnel I can't find anything anywhere on the net (not in English, anyway).

And, finally, I wish there was something else to say about 1940, but when The Mummy's Hand is as good as it gets, it's a pretty miserable year for fantastic film. The Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard The Ghost Breakers is entertaining in a non-life-changing kind of way, but the title and the presence of Hope probably tell you all you need to know about it. Otherwise, apart from Republic's not-as-good-as-it-should-have-been Drums Of Fu Manchu serial, the year was one long round of mad scientists and lizards dressed up to look like dinosaurs (One Million B.C.), which is not my idea of a good time. I didn't read about a single film I feel compelled to add to my Want To See list. So we close the book on 1940, and it's onward to 1944 and backward to 1939.

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: