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THE MUMMY’S GHOST
Rating: 
USA. 1944.
Director – Reginald LeBorg, Screenplay – Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher & Brenda Weisberg, Story – Jay & Sucher, Photography (b&w) – William Sickner, Music Director – H.J. Salter, Special Photography – Clifford Stine, Makeup Effects – Jack Pierce, Art Direction – John B. Goodman & Abraham Grossman. Production Company – Universal-International.
Cast:
Lon Chaney [Jr] (Kharis), John Carradine (Yousef Bey), Ramsey Ames (Amina Mansori), Robert Lowery (Tom Harvey), Barton MacLane (Inspector Walgreen), Harry Shannon (Sheriff Elwood), Frank Reicher (Professor Matthew Norman), Lester Sharpe (Dr Ayad), Claire Whitney (Ella Norman), George Zucco (High Priest)
Plot: Yousef Bay, an acolyte of the cult of Akran, is sent to the USA to bring back the mummy of Kharis’s beloved Princess Ananka. In Mapleton, Egyptologist Professor Matthew Norman succeeds in reviving Kharis with the burning of tana leaves but is then killed by him. As the police begin a manhunt to stop Kharis, Yousef Bay and Kharis break into the museum and conduct a ceremony to raise Ananka. But instead this causes Ananka’s spirit to inhabit the body of Amina Mansori. They now set out to kidnap Amina and taken her back to Egypt.
The Mummy’s Ghost was the fourth and second to last of Universal’s Mummy films. (See below for other titles). Throughout the 1940s Universal put all the famous monsters they had created throughout the last decade – Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man and the Mummy – through sequels, team-ups and eventually meetings with Abbott and Costello. All of these are sequels routine and formulaic.
By the time of The Mummy’s Ghost, the Mummy series had been reduced to a series of limited plot devices – Egyptian cults, tana leaves, Kharis revived, Princess Ananka’s resurrection/reincarnation, Kharis killing all in his way. The Mummy’s Ghost does nothing except shuffle these around like a well-worn deck of cards. It is routinely handled on all levels. As the high priest John Carradine has a certain effectively sinister and swarthy presence. And the ending with Kharis and Ananka sinking into the bayou quicksands has a certain tragic sadness to it.
The other Universal Mummy films are:– The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Curse (1944) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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