The Mummy's Shroud

The Mummy’s Shroud (1967)

Last week, as part of our ongoing BBC Horror Double Bill recreation, we watched Hammer’s The Mummy. While there’s no denying that Lee, Cushing and George Pastel are all great in their respective roles, the film is really quite unsatisfying, rather repetitve and somehow amounting to far less than the sum of its parts.

Hammer’s second stab at the character, Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb (1964) recycles the reincarnated love story (albeit in a slightly different way) and gives too much time to the boring King Expedition guff. There’s one atmospheric shot of the mummy shrouded in fog in a Victorian London alleyway but the rest is mostly forgettable.

As for Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (1971)….well, I tried to watch it as part of this week’s doubler, but I gave up after twenty minutes. It’s a dreary affair indeed.

Contrary to ‘popular consensus’, I’ve always considered The Mummy’s Shroud to be Hammer’s most entertaining entry in the subgenre, and for that reason one of the best mummy pictures made by any studio.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. The entire Ancient Egypt prologue is embarrassingly poor, the sandpit ‘desert’ is pathetic beyond belief, the costumes, props, lighting, ‘choreography’ of the fight scenes and ‘performances’ of the bit players is sub-amdram standard. And this bit is way too long.

Once we get to the lost expedition the good stuff begins. After all, here’s André Morell, things can only get better! The addition of an expert linguist with a certain degree of clairvoyance is the first welcome innovation and it makes a change to find the female lead in a Hammer film not reduced to a screaming pair of tits.

The two other females in the cast are polar opposites. Barbara Preston, wife of the millionaire sponsor of the expedition (played by Elizabeth Sellars who was in the first Hammer film shot at Bray studios and this, the last) is an elegant, refined, cultured and serene lady whose pointed indifference towards her vain and overbearing husband is counterpointed by her affectionate complicity with her son, Paul (competently played by David Buck). Sellars’ understated performance recalls those quiet matriarch characters so often seen in BBC Sunday evening melodramas in the 1960s and 70s.

On the other side of the shekel we have the repulsive and uncouth Haiti (a good old Egyptian name), a cackling septuagenarian mystic with a crystal ball and half a set of dentures. Catherine Lacey hams it up good and proper, as demanded by the script, and provides a memorable grotesque.

Equally hamming it up and equally memorable is Roger Delgado as Haiti’s son Hasmid, Keeper Of The Tomb. The relationship between these two denizens of Nº 8 Alley Of The House Of Mukhtar is rather less placid than that of Mrs Preston and Paul.

Director John Gilling really makes the most out of the material, his camera lingers over expressive close ups of characters’ faces - feverish, menacing, mocking, sinister, terrified, arrogant, impassive, agonised – and a variety of camera angles plus atmospheric lighting milk the sense of melodramatic dread out of every scene. The effective ‘horror’ score also contributes no end to the effectiveness of the creepy scenes.

Something I found lacking in Hammer’s original The Mummy was much feeling of empathy with Kharis’ victims and the offhand way he carried out the killings, automaton style. The most effective slaying was that of the already terrified old boy in the asylum, but the uncle was a rather grey character and didn’t have much time to panic before being choked to death. Cushing’s John Banning looked pretty worried about the possibility of falling victim to the mummy, but not scared shitless as might be expected. He retained an air of quiet dignity even when being throttled to death.

Conversely, the murderous attacks in The Mummy’s Shroud are highly effective for two reasons; the victims are either seriously ill and delirious (Sir Basil) or seriously bricking it (Harry, Longbarrow, Stanley Preston) and the mummified Prem is both sadistic and creative – deliberately smashing a bottle of acid over the prostrate Harry, heaving the half blind Longbarrow out of an upper story window, smashing Preston’s head against a wall, taking an axe to the cornered hero. In horror entertainment, variety is the spice of death, and most mummy movies (including Hammer’s first) rely too exclusively on the old shuffle’n’strangle routine.

Gilling also gets full value from the opulent-Eastern 1920s décor of Don Mingaye’s sets, and helps create a sense of size by judicious use of travellings, trucks and tilts. There are some fine frame compostions with multiple actors in the frame and much going on in the background. Abundant shots through grilles, gates and reflections add style and visual interest. The famous Bray backlot is effectively pressed into service as the backstreets of ‘Mezzera’- cluttered, crowded and claustrophobic and suitably ‘Oriental’ looking while never approaching anything like authenticity (I’d reckon that for many fans the theatrical fantasy world look is one of Hammer’s most endearing qualities in all their period films), even looking eerie when deserted by (day for) night.

Of course, no review of this film would be complete without mention of Michael Ripper’s finest hour as Longbarrow, the officious, ingratiating but penniless and lonely ex-pat Englishman who suffers Preston’s hectoring demands with resignation. His death at the monster’s hands is quite poignant. Desolated after his employer cruelly dashed his hopes of a return to ‘the shady lanes of the Old Country’, frightened and visually impaired after having shattered his glasses, his brutal and undignified demise, thrown out of his window into a horse trough, is quite harrowing. Ripper’s performance economically walks the line between pathetic, irritating, comical and sympathetic, resulting in a sufficiently rounded character whose ghastly end, although not a surprise, comes as an unpalatable shock.

By the same token, John Phillips as Preston is so unctuous, conceited and unpleasant that it’s almost a pleasure to witness his comeuppance.

The Mummy itself is certainly an improvement on the limping, one armed, snail-paced Kharis of the Chaney movies and seems credibly unstoppable on the final rampage. Its crumbling destruction is both novel and gruesome, with its hands clutching at its disintegrating skull, courtesy of SFX that are clearly of their time but effective enough.

And that could well be a summary of the film itself. Well made, stylishly directed, atmospherically photographed, competently acted and impressively scored, not groundbreaking but with some refreshingly different touches, visually and narratively busy – clearly of its time but effective enough. And, in contrast to The Mummy, much more than the sum of its parts.