In short: The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

Backlot Egypt. For reasons one can’t help but suspect to be gullibility and incompetence, roving archaeologist (who just happen to sound like grave robbers more often than not) Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his odious comic relief buddy Babe Jenson (Wallace) just can’t find a job with any serious archaeological institution anymore. When they are nearly destitute, Steve stumbles upon on a vase that hints at the location of the long-lost tomb of the Princess Ananka.

They wander off to the Cairo Museum to acquire funding for digging up the dead woman’s bones, but its boss, one Mr Andoheb (George Zucco), poo-poos Steve’s theories. That’s not because Steve is actually wrong, mind you, but because Andoheb is the leader of a heroic group of Egyptian citizens protecting their ancestors’ graves against Westerners out to rob them. Ahem, I mean “an evil Egyptian cult”, of course.

Eventually, the idiot protagonists do get their funding from a stage magician, who, together with his mandatory love interest daughter (Peggy Moran) will haunt the rest of the movie with his less than exciting presence. Because Babe alone just wasn’t bad enough.

Eventually, and I mean eventually, Andoheb is going to get around to bringing the mummy Kharis back to life to fight off our so-called heroes.

Universal’s new-found interest in its monster properties in the 40s resulted in some good things early, namely the basically perfect Son of Frankenstein and the wonderful The Wolfman, before it descended into usually pretty dire monster mashes. The first new mummy film is neither a Son nor a Wolfman, alas, but rather a tepid and slow attempt at making a runtime of 66 minutes feel like hours.

As is pretty typical for Universal’s modus operandi when they weren’t making great films, The Mummy’s Hand, as directed by Christy Cabanne, suffers from a script that seems to have little idea of why anyone might want to watch a movie of said title, and so decides to introduce us to its monster only about twenty minutes before it is already over, instead wasting much of its running time on its personality-less main characters doing little of interest, lots of comic relief that is neither funny nor a relief, and a romance that’ll leave every eye in the house tearless. Which isn’t just a shame because spending time with these characters will make anyone in the audience automatically side with the supposed villain of the piece – George Zucco also granting us with the only fun performance on screen – but because it turns nearly two thirds of the film into a painful slog.


This also does a heavy disservice to some perfectly adequate mummy stalking sequences late in the film, but that’s only par for the course here.