Mummy Dearest: A Horror Tradition Unearthed

Interesting and highly informative documentary short about the making of the classic Universal horror film, The Mummy. This, and other excellent shorts like it, were featured on the original DVD releases of the Universal horror classics. I believe they have been included on subsequent re-releases as well. It goes into great detail about the history of the film's production from its original starting point as a story about Cagliostro through the behind-the-scenes of filming. It focuses a little more on actress Zita Johann than it does on Boris Karloff and practically nothing about the other actors, such as Edward Van Sloan and David Manners. But they had a short runtime to deal with and this is Johann's only Universal horror film so I will cut them slack on that. The other complaint I have is one that I see many others seem to have -- they don't spend much time on the later mummy films. They don't cover them until the last few minutes when narrator Rudy Behlmer quickly runs through them. Perhaps if they had added ten or fifteen minutes to the runtime they would have had a more in-depth film about the entire Mummy series, not just the first film. But anyway, as a documentary about the first film it's excellent and I'm sure Universal horror fans will eat it up. I've watched these DVD docs many times over the years. I'm a big fan of the Universal monsters so I never get tired of watching stuff like this.

I have so far only seen a couple of the making of featurettes that were made for inclusion in the Universal Classic Monster Collection and the Monster Legacy Collection and the first, about the film "Dracula" was perfection in every way. In contrast, while this featurette on "The Mummy" is enjoyable, it's also a bit lame due to the host as well as some lame jokes he tries (in vain) to make which make the film seem a bit lame at times. Fortunately, there is enough behind the scenes info about the film that it IS worth seeing...particularly if you adore the classic Universal monsters. In addition to Belmer (who was a disappointment), special effects master Rick Baker and several others appear in the documentary to explain the story of this 1932 classic.

Another video documentary of one of the classic Universal monster movies by David J. Skal (author of "Hollywood Gothic") that appear on home-video collections, this one about "The Mummy" (1932) covers ground already covered in Skal's treatments of the other films. This includes the resurrection of such information as that Boris Karloff was a good guy and that Jack P. Pierce's makeup work was arduous. Not seen in the other ones, however, is a brief biographical sketch of Zita Johann, since she's only the lead actress in "The Mummy" and doesn't appear, like Karloff, in the Frankenstein films and, thus, in Skal's docs for them. We're told that in real life she was also into the occult and that she wasn't fond of director Karl Freund. There's no such biographical sketch of Freund, though, nor recollections from his accounts of the production; instead, we're told that he was fat, hard to work with, but good at camera stuff. I think they could've dug a bit deeper in their "unearthing" on that account.

Rudy Belmer hosts again, but doesn't add anything interesting, except to contradict himself, beginning the show by stating that "The Mummy was something radically different," only to later say that it "borrows significantly" from the 1931 "Dracula," which indeed it does, as film historian Paul M. Jensen discusses here in some detail. The best part of this doc is the juxtaposition of scenes from the two films, which underscores their similarities better than one can in writing, including in my IMDb review of "The Mummy." Another interesting thing here, which I didn't know and wish they had more information on, is that the script originally included reincarnated love scenes throughout history. As indicated by surviving publicity stills, these scenes are assumed to have been shot, but were obviously cut. As usual, the doc ends with a summary of subsequent Universal pictures of whatever monster is covered--in this case the 1940s Kharis mummy movies and the later Abbott and Costello parody. No mention is made of the mummy series by Hammer, and this doc must've been made before the 1999 "The Mummy" with Brendan Fraser, since it was also distributed by Universal, and the other docs by Skal have no qualms with advertising Universal's later productions, including frequent clips of the semi-fictional biopic of James Whale, "Gods and Monsters" (1998).

This is an interesting documentary about Universal's classic Mummy series of movies. It concentrates the most on the first one, providing information on how it came to be, about its director Karl Freud, its main stars Boris Karloff and Zita Johann, and makeup man (or sadist?) Jack Pierce.

There are interviews with film historians, and relatives of some of the people involved with the film, such as Karloff's daughter. Relatively little attention is paid to the sequels, but they are covered.

I found it interesting how The Mummy started off as being about the Italian historical character Cagliostro! Also interesting to see was how The Mummy copies certain formulas and scenes from the Universal Dracula film, which they illustrated by showing some of these scenes one after another. A similar thing happened with The Invisible Man copying Frankenstein, as the documentary for The Invisible Man notes.

Exceedingly well-done documentary on the making of The Mummy with lots of great stories about some of the stars and makers of that film. Zita Johann is examined in great detail(greater than Karloff I believe), and we get lots of second-hand stories about her spiritualism, her fights with Karl Freund the director, and her wit. Film historian Gregory Man details a couple of the stories with great clarity, wit, and even does an impression of Freund! There are other stories about Karloff and the arduous make-up he endured for Jack Pierce. There is a whole exposition done on where the concept of the story came from and then the documentary moves to a point by point and scene by scene comparison of The Mummy and Dracula. Even more might have been examined by giving actors like David Manners and Edward Van Sloan(who seems never to get any love in these things but was crucial in those early Universal greats!)some talk. The documentary then moves to the sequels and gives them some time, but it really just goes over them in a somewhat cursory manner. Producer/director David Skaal once again has given the Mummy as well as all the other Universal monsters in the stable their due.