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Mummy movie music
Relâche in Residence at the Penn Museum
The sublime accompanied the ridiculous in the latest pairing of new music and silent film by contemporary music ensemble Relâche at the Penn Museum. The feature, The Eyes of the Mummy (1918) by Ernst Lubitsch, was effectively supported by a Relâche-commissioned score, composed by Michael Stambaugh, that was by turns tense, jaunty, and compelling, even when the film sagged.
Though Lubitsch would go on to a great career — he directed Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), and Heaven Can Wait (1943); worked for Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox; and is credited with a succinct, witty style known as “the Lubitsch touch” — Eyes of the Mummy does not foreshadow those accomplishments.
Despite a title promising mystery and menace, Mummy is a melodrama. The acting is strenuous, even by silent film standards, and the movie is punctuated with dangling plot points. For instance, how did Radu (Emil Jannings), the Arab with the entrancing gaze, control the beautiful dancer Ma (Pola Negri) with just a look, even across huge distances? And after plunging his dagger into a painting of Ma and fleeing the drawing room, how did the dagger reappear in Radu’s hand? And why, since Ma knew she was powerless to resist Radu’s spell, did she repeatedly peer into his eyes? And then there is Prince Hohenfels, the fashionable dandy who rescued Radu and made him his servant. Why didn’t the well-dressed Prince provide his servant a new outfit, instead of leaving him in the same filthy garment through the whole movie? And shouldn’t there have been a mummy somewhere in this confusion?
I don’t know what effect Lubitsch’s film had on audiences in 1918, but in 2015 there was a fair amount of giggling. Though short on fright and mummies, the film and its thoroughly enjoyable score left no one disappointed. The hour-long film was bookended with additional pieces performed by Relâche, and the mummy deficit was addressed by an optional pre-film tour of Penn Museum’s Egyptian galleries, led by Paul Verhelst, an Egyptology graduate student.
The event was part of a Relâche series, "Music for the Mystery of Silents," which enables audiences to experience silent films with newly created, live music. The next installment, Roches de Kador (1912), a French mystery with music by Regis Huby, will be presented on May 3.
For Pam's review of a previous silent film with music by Relâche, Hitchcock's Lodger, click here.
What, When, Where
The Eyes of the Mummy. Ernst Lubitsch directed. January 25, 2015. Part of the series Relâche in Residence: Music for the Mystery of Silents (www.relache.org) at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia. www.penn.museum
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