Pros: The performances of the supporting cast, especially Michael Ripper as a harried, put-upon factotum, are a joy to watch; A couple of the mummy's kills are set up masterfully.
Cons: The recycled plot of a reanimated mummy wreaking vengeance on the expedition members that discovered its tomb is as musty and dusty as the mummy himself; The pre-titles sequence set in ancient Egypt lasts over seven grueling minutes.
Blogger extraordinaire Rebecca Deniston over at Taking Up Room has come up with a very simple and original blogathon idea: write about a film or TV show that underwhelmed you when you first saw it, but upon subsequent viewing(s) grew on you. If that concept appeals, by all means head over to her blogathon for more intriguing reassessments.
My choice for the blogathon is precisely no one's favorite of the many technicolor reboots of the classic monsters that Hammer Studios hammered out over a three decade period. Hammer is rightly famous (notorious?) for their Dracula and Frankenstein reboots featuring legendary actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. But they didn't stop with that Dastardly Duo.
From the late '50s through the '70s, Hammer added their own colorful spins to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, 1960 and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, 1971), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), werewolves (Curse of the Werewolf, 1961), and the Mummy saga with four (count 'em!) entries: The Mummy (1959), The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), The Mummy's Shroud (1967) and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971).
Somewhat like Universal's Mummy series, Hammer started out strong with their 1959 offering, starring Christopher Lee as the ancient cloth-wrapped instrument of vengeance, and Peter Cushing as a bookish yet formidable target of the curse. Although lacking in the mystical atmosphere of Universal's 1932 classic with Boris Karloff, 6'5" Lee brought several extra levels of physicality and impending doom to the title role.
1964's Curse of the Mummy's Tomb added some comic relief in the form of a brash, self-centered American entrepreneur (played by Fred Clark), but also leveraged the reincarnation angle to set up a surprise climax. By 1967 and The Mummy's Shroud, it seemed as if Hammer, like Universal's Mummy B pictures of the '40s, had run out of ideas and was in the lather, rinse and repeat mode. (However, they would infuse new blood, so to speak, into the series by adapting Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars and releasing it as Blood from the Mummy's Tomb.)
A synopsis of The Mummy's Shroud will seem very familiar to fans of Universal's Mummy franchise:
- An Egyptian royal runs afoul of court rivals and is entombed in a secret location along with his loyal manservant and guardian. Check.
- A 1920s expedition finds the tomb, which sets in motion the terrible consequences for the expedition members. Check.
- A modern-day Egyptian keeper of the tomb warns the expedition to stay away or be cursed. Check.
- The keeper reanimates the mummified guardian of the tomb by reading a sacred text from the royal shroud. Check.
- One by one, the defilers meet terrible fates at the hands of the avenging mummy. Check.
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| "Is anyone else feeling a sense of deja vu?" |
When I first saw The Mummy's Shroud sometime around my high school days (not quite 3000 years ago, but sometimes it feels that way), my reaction was "been there, done that." Mind you, that was a time of pimply-faced adolescence when I couldn't get enough of Hammer's bloody technicolored reboots of the Universal classics I'd been raised on. So of course I was going to see Shroud at the first opportunity, regardless.
But that first viewing was a slog, kind of like sifting through tons of Egyptian sand to find a shard of pottery or two. There was the seemingly interminable pre-titles sequence (lasting over 7 minutes!) depicting the Egyptian prince's flight into the desert to avoid being assassinated, and his lonely death attended only by his loyal manservant. Okay, it was poignant, I guess, and filmed in glorious color with striking costumes, but did it have to be that long?
And instead of being rewarded with a bit of action for making it through the sonorously narrated fictional history lesson, my juvenile self was treated to yet another interminable sequence, this time featuring a pompous, rich jackass bellowing at the help as he arrives at an Egyptian hotel.
Stanley Preston (John Phillips), is the jackass and wealthy financier of the expedition, which includes his son Paul (David Buck). It seems the expedition hasn't communicated with the outside world for some time and is feared lost, and Preston has arrived in Egypt to yell at underlings to do something.
Preston blusters and berates his way through more exposition and back story as his meek and harried press secretary Longbarrow (Michael Ripper) twists himself into a pretzel trying to keep up with his boss's demands. It seemed to take forever in my teen hormone-clouded mind for the film to just get to the expedition camp, where the search party headed up by Preston arrives just in time to learn that they've finally found the lost tomb of the benighted Egyptian prince Kah-to-Bey (played in the pre-titles sequence by Toolsie Persaud).
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| Longbarrow (Michael Ripper) tries to ingratiate himself with his irate boss. |
After being threatened by the sinister self-appointed keeper of the tomb Hasmid (Roger Delgado), the expedition leader, Sir Basil Walden (Andre Morell), wants to be cautious, but the arrogant money-man Preston forces the issue and gets the excavation going pronto, little knowing that he is sealing his, and the expedition's, doom.
Some 45 long minutes into the film, the mummy of the Prince's manservant Prem (played in the prologue by Dickie Owen; the mummy is played by Eddie Powell), finally gets around to his bloody avenging of the tomb's desecration, jump-started by Hasmid's malevolent ministrations.
Okay, so at this point the film goes on to do a credible job of building suspense and an impending sense of doom with the giant mummy lurking in every dark corner of the old city, but man, there's a ton of exposition and dialog to get through first!
Fast forward to 2019, when I was bit by the Hammer mummy bug after a rewatch of the original 1959 reboot. Being the red-haired stepchild of Hammer's mummy series, The Mummy's Shroud seemed to have successfully eluded any streaming services, so I took advantage of a classic horror convention I was attending to secure a DVD copy.
Far older and somewhat more mature, I was more receptive to the character development in the first part of the film that my younger self saw as an unforgivable delay in getting to the good stuff. But it wasn't John Phillips bloviating as Preston that got my attention, so much as master character actor Michael Ripper's wonderful performance as the put-upon factotum Longbarrow.
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| They never learn. That thing is going to start walking, and it's not going to be pretty. |
At this point in Hammer's filmography, Ripper was a very familiar face, popping up in seemingly everything bearing the Hammer name. Many of his appearances were brief, but they were always memorable. Complementing the exotic classiness of stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Ripper specialized in rough and tumble working class characters, from barkeepers to coachmen to day laborers. He was a relatable everyman who provided a bit of comic relief or a simple, common sense perspective in Hammer's world of monsters and swashbucklers (for more on Ripper and his extensive career, see my friend Barry's tribute to the versatile character actor over at Cinematic Catharsis).
His portrayal of Longbarrow in Shroud is something of a departure -- in the film he is dapper in a linen suit, complete with immaculate hair and pince-nez glasses (not to mention this is one of his heftier roles). At the beginning of the film Preston refers to Longbarrow as his press secretary, but like many underlings of the capricious rich, he has a boatload of "other duties as assigned," arranging hotel accommodations, getting together search parties, booking passage on ships, ad nauseum.
Ripper's poor, harried character doesn't even merit a first name, and the name he does answer to brings to mind "wheelbarrow" -- appropriate, as Preston seems to only see him as an expendable tool to haul around his baggage, real and metaphorical.
Ripper is a wonder to behold, at one and the same time meek, unctuous and efficient; one moment smiling in self satisfaction at a job well done and the next knitting his brow in worry that his master is displeased.
As the expedition members start to get picked off one by one, Preston's former brash self confidence collapses into gnawing fear, and he instructs his flunky to book passage for he and his wife on the next steamship out of Dodge -- against the explicit instructions of the Egyptian police inspector to stay put until the murders are cleared up. You can see the wheels turning under Longbarrow's brow as he wonders, "are you taking me with you?" and we're relieved for the worried assistant as Preston begrudgingly tells him he can book for himself as well.
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| "I can't take you with me Longbarrow, but here, get yourself something nice out of the hotel vending machine." |
Alas, the police get wind of Preston's plan to escape and shuts it down. When yet another expedition member, the photographer, is burned to death in his hotel room, the financier goes into full panic mode and commands poor Longbarrow to get up in the dead of night to make arrangements for the first ship out of port. When Longbarrow realizes that his boss won't be taking him along after all, the look of grief and disappointment on his face is heart rending. And, without spoiling too much, the pitiful assistant's fate is so very, very undeserved (but at least there's some justice in the Mummy universe -- Preston pays dearly for being Preston as the film draws to a close).
I would be remiss not to mention two other supporting actors who help elevate the film from a trite snoozefest to something that, for all its faults, bears a rewatch. Elizabeth Sellars plays Preston's elegantly cool and composed wife, Barbara, who for most of the film keeps to the background with a detached, slightly bemused smile as her husband grandstands and sucks the air out of every room he's in.
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| "Whoa Preston, you're way too tense! Here, let me give you a shoulder rub..." |
With nothing more than subtle facial expressions and some offhand comments, Sellars makes it clear that her character has calculated the trade off she has made -- affluence at the cost of living with a horse's ass -- and decided it was a bad bargain. When her panicked husband tells her to pack up, that they're leaving Egypt, she calmly tells him she's not going. "I'll be alright," she icily informs him. "After all, I didn't enter the tomb." Ouch!
Mirroring Barbara Preston's icy contempt, but hiding that contempt behind a twisted, toothless grin and a cackling, menacing laugh, is Catherine Lacey as Haiti, Hasmid's fortune-telling mother and prophetess of doom for the expedition members. Looking like a prototypical refugee from a central European gypsy camp and armed with a stage prop crystal ball, Lacey complements Sellars' cool detachment, her eyes glinting with mischievous glee at the terrible fates of the English interlopers.
Some viewers will chuckle as Haiti keeps tabs on the tomb defilers by watching their movements on the crystal ball as if it were a TV monitor. But there is one chillingly effective scene with the prop, when Sir Basil, exhausted and on the run from authorities who want to commit him to an asylum, encounters Haiti. Told that he has mere seconds to live by the malevolent soothsayer, Basil blinks wearily as he looks at the crystal ball and sees the cloudy reflection of the mummy creeping up behind him.
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| Haiti and Hasmid are hoping there's a DoorDash delivery in their near future. |
If you need someone to blame, or alternately, compliment for The Mummy's Shroud, John Gilling, who directed and wrote the screenplay from a story by producer Anthony Hinds, is your man. The previous year, Gilling had helmed two Hammer horrors, The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies, filming them back to back at Bray Studios for budget savings. Although not involving popular characters like Frankenstein or Dracula, over the years the two films have acquired a loyal cult following. An earlier Gilling-directed horror film, The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), starring Peter Cushing, is a very good adaptation of the infamous Burke and Hare murderous grave robbers story (see my review here).
While Shroud is nowhere near the top of Gilling's resume, it does represent the end of an era for Hammer, as it was their last film shot at Bray Studios, which had been home to the company for 16 creative and lucrative years.
Another notable feature is the mummy itself. According to Hammer historians Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, the creature was based on "a genuine relic resident in the British Museum's Egypt rooms of a later, Roman-era body. Its impressive demise, wherein the creature claws away at its own, disintegrating head, was filmed in Les Bowie's Slough studio. It was assistant Ian Scoones' gloved hands that crumbled a dummy wax head filled with fuller's earth, paint dust, and a prop skeleton." [Hearn and Barnes, The Hammer Story: The Authorized History of Hammer Films, Titan Books, 2007, p. 115]
If you haven't seen The Mummy's Shroud (and there's no reason you should have), it still presents challenges to the curious who want to check it out. It doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere, but there are DVD and Blu-ray copies available for those who have some spare change lying around. If you're a Mummy or Hammer completist, you definitely will want to take a look. Or maybe you're a Michael Ripper fan, and want to see him at the top of his game in one of his very best and most poignant Hammer roles. Whatever the reason, "beware the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet" (as the tagline goes) as you mount your own expedition to unearth The Mummy's Shroud.
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| In addition to the requisite avenging mummy, The Mummy's Shroud features a fictional ancient Egyptian history lesson. |
