creature features: revisiting the mummy (karl freund, 1932)

Sometime in the past, I wrote of The Mummy:

This is appropriately moody, and Boris Karloff is typically excellent. The problem is that the Mummy isn’t the most fascinating monster Universal came up with in their glory years. He’s not a vampire, he’s not a man-made creature, he’s not a werewolf, he’s just a guy in a tattered outfit with a jones for his lady love of 3700 years ago. It’s probably true that this is the best Mummy movie ever made. That’s just not as big a compliment as it sounds.

Watching it again, I'd say I understated the interest the Mummy evokes in us. Truthfully, he's at least as fascinating as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. But he's not very scary.

Director Karl Freund is a legendary figure in film history, although not for his directing. Freund was a cinematographer, one of the most innovative of his time. Later in his career, he was the cinematographer for I Love Lucy, also innovative in its day. Apparently, being nice to Zita Johann was not one of his finer points ... Johann, who played the reincarnation of the Mummy's love (or something like that), did not get along with Freund (or vice versa). There are numerous stories that Freund mistreated her during the filming of the movie. It doesn't show up on the screen, for what it's worth.