The Mummy’s Shroud

The Mummy’s Shroud (1967)

Dir. John Gilling

Written by John Gilling, Anthony Hinds

Starring Andre Morell, David Buck, John Phillips, Maggie Kimberly, Elizabeth Sellars, Michael Ripper

Well, who’d have thought it possible? 15 years after the events of CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB, and 20 years after the events of the original Hammer Production of THE MUMMY, well… this is really embarrassing, you’re not going to believe this, but the same thing happens again! Yet another team of racist British archaeologists uncover yet another mummy with yet another tragic backstory to flash back to, resulting in yet another painful Arab stereotype (plus a gypsy stereotype for good measure?) resurrecting the durn thing for some revenge. This time, at least, the girlfriend-archaeologist is a blonde so we don’t have to hear that she’s the exact double of an ancient Egyptian queen. Progress is being made.

You may rightly be dubious of the third-time’s-the-charm optimism of remaking the same basic plot for a third time (not even counting the original Universal Mummy movies it rips off) despite its current record of resulting in exactly zero acceptable mummy movies. But if we must try it yet again --and for the last time, I should add, since the fourth sequel BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB doesn’t even have a mummy in it-- I’m marginally happy to report that this is marginally better than the other two, arguably the “best” version of this dated and regressive languid convolution laboring feverishly to build a movie around the basic idea that a Mummy gets revenge on a handful of white people. It was not at all worth taking 256 minute and three movies to get there, but fuck it, this is the world we have, not the one we want. And if we’ve got to accept living in a world with three basically identical Hammer Mummy movies, we might as well try and enjoy what we got, and at least THE MUMMY’S SHROUD makes that about as painless as we could dare hope by this point.

It’s biggest success is that it wrenches the same story from the first two into a more workable form by introducing a clear villain. If they can’t give us someone to like (and why would they start now?) at least they need to give us someone to hate. And this one does exactly that. Oh, it has some supposed heroes --David Buck (voices in Bakshi’s LORD OF THE RINGS and THE DARK CRYSTAL), Tim Barrett (THE DEADLY BEES), Maggie Kimberly (small part in THE CONQUEROR WORM, nothing else) and --promisingly-- Hammer staple André Morell (HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES)-- as the archaeology crew scheduled for some Mummy-related fatalities. This cadre of players are, to their credit, rather more ingratiating than your typical generic pretty young Hammer kids. But the movie’s chief improvement on its predecessors is its villain, Shakespearean actor John Phillips (VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, TORTURE GARDEN, QUADROPHENIA) as the cold-blooded financier behind the operation. Phillips is not an overwhelmingly charismatic performer, but the movie finds setting him up as a irredeemable asshole to be an enormously helpful organizing influence. The previously versions had been irreparably crippled by their protagonists’ necessary passivity for the majority of the movie -- far too much time is spent trying to figure out what’s going on for any narrative conflict to gain momentum. Having someone we can root against gives our more heroic protagonists something to oppose, energizing them and also giving the inevitable mummy attacks a little more urgency, since we badly want to see this fucker get his canopic jarred, if you get my meaning.

Several more cosmetic details help too. Although Morell has a disappointingly small part (and looks like he’s seen some years of hard living between the previous years’ PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES and this role) the movie, unable to deliver as much Morell as you want, compensates with lots of Michael Ripper as a put-upon sidekick for the villain. Ripper is far and away the most enjoyable character in the movie as the the nebbish assistant, and his constant humiliations do a lot to solidify our hatred of his employer. And hey, he’s not in brownface, so that’s automatically an improvement from last time. The guys stuck in brownface this go-round are Richard Warner (also VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED) and Roger Delgado (“The Master” in the John Pertwee Dr. Who series). Delgado end ups with yet another distressing villainous stereotype (augmented by an equally broad Catherine Lacey [THE LADY VANISHES, SHADOW OF THE CAT] as his mother, who is, I guess, some kind of Egyptian Gypsy fortune teller with a crystal ball and everything?), but at least Warner gets to play a good guy; in fact, his inspector character is portrayed quite positively, certainly the only Arab character in the whole film series to be afforded any dignity. Again, that’s pretty faint praise, but an unambiguous improvement.  

I’m divided about the Mummy itself, which has a new look that features a somewhat goofy-looking painted-on face and some sort of weird mummy gauntlets. His attacks are a slight improvement, featuring more gimmicks (burning a guy with photographic acid!) but the biggest improvement is in the backstory. It’s just as unnecessary as in the previous iterations, but at least they stick it right at the beginning here, as a prologue and not a momentum-killing sidestory jammed haphazardly into the middle of the action. More importantly, the backstory is, for once, kind of interesting; it seems this mummy was a real nice dude once upon a time, a bodyguard for a child-king who fell victim to a murderous regime change. Unable to protect his young ward in life, the devoted manservant attempts to do so in death -- a surprisingly touching wrinkle which adds pathos and color to the title character, a rather dry and bloodless (ha!) instrument for destruction in the other films. The fact that we know the Mummy’s backstory matters not at all -- he’s used in the exact same manner as  the previous two films-- but our memory of the kindly, devoted bald man from the opening sequence* colors his reappearance as a desiccated corpse emblazoned with a daffy emoticon on his face, and adds a subtle layer of tragedy to the whole thing (particularly his gruesome final comeuppance, which seems like a much-earned release for the poor guy). Besides, Seeing the former child-king to whom he devoted his life --and to some extent seems to regard as a surrogate son-- unceremoniously displayed as a shriveled, naked raisin of a corpse (a rather startlingly realistic and grotesque prop, natch) for mildly interested British museum-goers actually does manage to feel like a cruel insult, so for once we can somewhat understand the outrage. He also has by far the best death of the series, a legitimately cool effects shot of a crumbling mummy ripping itself to pieces, which displays genuine hustle the series mostly lacks.

So there’s a lot of good here; the mummy looks a little silly, but he’s trying a bit harder and the overall story is much sleeker and better constructed. It sports generally stronger acting than the previous ones, and a more satisfying overall structure, even if it looks a little rinky-dink compared to Terence Fisher’s stately original.

But it’s still not all that great. In fact, if you must watch just one of these three nearly identical movies, I’d probably recommend the first one over this -- it’s a lot clunkier narratively (and more racist) but it probably boasts the definitive version of this iconography, which, it turns out, is really the only important thing anyway. I’ve been complaining for years that purported mummy movies like the 1932 Karloff version and the Chuck Heston THE AWAKENING don’t deliver any actual mummies, but after three middling attempts by Hammer to remedy that concern, I guess I’m finally forced to admit that this may be a concept that just plain doesn’t work. It’s a losing proposition from the get-go, riddled with fundamentally insurmountable problems which have nothing to do with execution.

To my mind, the problems with this basic premise are threefold:

1: Inherently passive protagonists. By its very nature, the structure of THE MUMMY, CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB and THE MUMMY’S SHROUD necessitates protagonists who don’t understand what’s happening to them and, until the very end, have no idea how to help themselves. Their story is built as a mystery, where they gradually realize there’s some ethnic type sending the mummy to bump them off one by one, and eventually figure out there’s some kind of sacred scroll they have to read at it or something. But of course we, the audience, already know all this stuff, it’s no surprise to us that there’s a mummy after them and we already know who’s behind it and why. This inevitably leads to the tiresome setup where our ostensible main characters gradually (and not especially cinematically) realize things the audience has known since frame one, a narrative miscalculation which is almost invariably a death knell for any movie which attempts it. It’s why poor Peter Cushing barely even registers until the final half-hour of the first movie, why the second movie has no recognizable leads at all, and this one finds any amount of urgency only in its villain.

2: A curiously dull monster. This one is harder to fathom, because, come on, mummy! It’s just conventional wisdom by this point that this is one of those iconic, immortal cinematic monsters, a cultural assumption which began when it became one of the flagship Universal Monsters and strengthened with Hammer’s insistence over the course of three movies that Universal must have known what they were doing. But has there ever actually been a good mummy film? Not that I can find. Not a single one. The origin of the mummy as a horror antagonist -- which we will explore ad nauseum in our next installment, I assure you-- does have deep enough roots that I think it’s fair to say there must be something there, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to have made it to the big screen. The Mummy, as he appears in his lengthy film career and especially in these three Hammer films, simply doesn’t have a lot going on. As I mentioned in the last review, he’s essentially just a solitary zombie that can’t bite you. The wrappings are a rather poor substitute for cadaverous gorey gristle, and even the best of them --Lee, obviously, with his towering menace-- are unable to impart much distinctness to the creature as a physical threat. All he can do is strangle or bludgeon you, and that’s only if you’re dumb enough to let him corner you somewhere you can’t maneuver away from. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares. But even if it did something cool --and it’s a moot point, since the single cool mummy beat in the entirety of the three movies is its own death in this one-- I think it would still be a losing battle because the movies are saddled with:

3: A plot which disempowers the mummy. Yes, the weird thing about all three of these mummy movies  --as well as every Universal Mummy movie I’ve seen (save the first)-- is that they effectively undermine the role of the mummy in his own movie! Like Tim Burton’s badly ill-conceived and overthought SLEEPY HOLLOW, the film is entirely precipitated upon our anticipation of its primary antagonist… who is then summarily reduced to a petty thug by an uninteresting and unimportant puppet master! Fucking why? ALL THREE of these Hammer films prattle on at length about the curse which falls upon those who violate the sanctity of the mummy’s tomb, but in all three cases the mummy itself is weirdly ambivalent about the whole thing, and it takes a more motivated modern character to command him. So even though the films each take long, painfully unnecessary sidetracks to explore the titular mummy’s backstory, it turns out to not matter in the slightest, or really even be related to what he’s doing in the present day. He might as well be a hired goon for all the actual investment he has in any of this. And since the real villain is merely a thoroughly contemporary religious fanatic,** the single most interesting aspect of the Mummy himself -- his connection to the indisputably amazing and mysterious ancient Egyptian culture, with all the enticing possibilities that conjures in the imagination-- is completely minimized and trivialized. The mummy could be a supernatural enforcer from any culture and any time period, for all the difference that it makes to the plot of these movies.

These three fairly immutable points are more than enough to thwart even a writer and director of John Gilling’s (THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, THE REPTILE, THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES) high caliber. Gilling was by no means Hammer’s strongest visualist, but for my money he was one of their most consistently strong writers, generally crafting more compelling characters (and particularly female characters, as he did with PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES and does again here, albeit somewhat less impactfully) and better-structured narratives than most of his peers. Alas, the structure here more or less defeats him -- this iteration of the story solves many of the glaring pacing and narrative issues from the previous two, but it still doesn’t add up to much. Most of the best parts, in fact, tend to come from his care for tertiary characters like Ripper’s put-upon yes-man and Warner’s thoughtful, maturely performed inspector, rather than any of the real genre goods. It’s not a disaster as a whole -- it certainly offers more pleasures than irritations, even if those pleasures are of a decidedly mild character-- but those three crippling facts are enough to rob it of the necessary juice it badly needed to justify its existence as essentially the third retread of the same plot. Any goodwill it was once granted is, by this time, utterly exhausted; the engine has run dry. But Hammer was not quite done with the Mummy yet -- and the fourth entry was to take a starkly different direction. Prepare yourself, dear reader, for BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB.

*Weirdly, stuntman and sometimes-actor Dickie Owens, who plays the mummy in CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB but not the character that turns into the mummy in the flashback, would reverse those roles here, portraying the eventual mummy during his life, but NOT in his mummified form.

**Partially code for “guy who thinks it’s a little fucked up that these crazy Brits have stormed into the country at gunpoint and spent the last hundred years stealing every treasure they can lay their hands on and carting them back to their homeland to be gawked at by repressed Victorian thrill-seekers under a thin veneer of cultural curiosity.”

COMPENDIUM OF HAMMER'S MUMMY CYCLE:
1959: THE MUMMY
1964: CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB
1967: THE MUMMY'S SHROUD

1971: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Nightmare Terror From The Tomb! promises one poster; Beware the Beat... of Cloth-wrapped Feet! the other advises. Obviously I love it when taglines wax poetic, and that second tagline is potent enough to hang a gimmicky mummy-themed disco song on.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Still loosely based on a few of the original Universal Mummy sequels.
• SEQUEL: Third in a series of four
• REMAKE: Only to the extent that it borrows elements from older movies
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: England
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Andre Morell, Michael Ripper, director John Gilling
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Mummy dismembers itself at the end, pretty cool.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Mummy!
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: Well, the modern day guys ordering the mummy around seem to have some religious justification.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: Yes!
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Ancient Egyptian into Mummy
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Medium, a mid-level production from Hammer’s heyday.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't paint a face on a mummy, come on guys, did we really have to have this one spelled out?
• TITLE ACCURACY: Definitely an actual Mummy here, and a shroud is a plot point.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

It's definitely a better structured and more enjoyable movie than the second one, but I still cannot in good conscience give it a 4-star rating. Think C+

Burke and Hare-athon Part IV: The Flesh And The Fiends

The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)

Dir. John Gilling

Written by John Gilling, Leon Griffiths

Starring Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, George Rose

TO SEE THE WHOLE SERIES, START HERE AND LEARN THE TERRIFYING TRUE STORY:

We’re making progress here. THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS is the first Burke and Hare movie to look and feel like an actual movie, not an indifferently staged and awkwardly truncated stage play. It begins with a succinct and perfect little bit of pure cinema: in the galling quiet of the night, two miscreants wordlessly stride into a graveyard. Their dread purpose is made clear by the instruments they bring with them: kart, chains and shovels. The camera furtively follows them as they choose a grave and begin digging, the second shovel of dirt flying directly into the camera (too bad this wasn’t 3-D!), SMASH CUT TO TITLE.

The ANATOMIST also began with an image of graverobbers, but there’s something distinctly cinematic about this version, a realization --for the first time in two decades of films on this subject-- that along with impassioned soliloquies on the subject of science, there’s probably an advantage to pursuing some visual possibilities as well. How the fuck it took them so long to realize that, I cannot say, but there you have it. It’s understandable that this is an improvement, though, since it’s co-writer/director John Gilling’s second pass on the subject. He also wrote (but did not direct) the 1948 THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART, and here he is again, adapting the same source material, but more than ten years later, in a very different era of filmmaking.

It had not been so very long since the 1956 U.K. premier of THE ANATOMIST, but in British horror cinema, everything had changed. Just a year after the British public had gotten Alastair Sim pontificating endlessly about science in peoples’ living rooms, Hammer Studios released THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which pushed the boundaries of what the strict British censors would allow and became a mammoth, runaway hit that established Hammer as the premier horror studio in the world and launched what would become a run of 20+ years and dozens of horror movies. Three years later, Gilling was working for early Hammer imitator Triad Productions (he would graduate to Hammer itself the next year and go on to a venerable career with the studio including THE REPTILE, PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, and SHADOW OF THE CAT), and setting himself the task of re-creating his earlier adaptation in an era more welcoming of atmospheric, grisly tales of murder. In a possible “fuck you” to the censors of the 40’s who had banned him from using the actual names of the killers, the first image of the film is a title card emphatically asserting: “[this] is a story of vice and murder. We make no apologies to the dead. It is all true.”

One of the biggest changes from THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART is immediately evident: After the wordless graverobbing introduction, the action shifts immediately to a lecture by Dr. Knox. Knox is barely present in the earlier film, appearing only in a single scene near the middle and coming off as a cold, amoral villain absolutely complicit in the coverup of murder. Here, though, he gets a rousing introduction where he inspires dozens of young pupils to a standing ovation with the power of his words (he quotes Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man: “know then, thyself, presume not God to scan / the proper study of mankind is man” and urges them to see death as not just an enemy, but also as one more means by which to learn. That seems a little morbid for what appears to be a graduation ceremony, but hey, I guess he knows his crowd because they eat it up). Next thing we know, he’s also kind-heartedly helping out well-meaning but ne’er-do-well pupil Jackson (John Cairney, Hylas in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS) by offering him a job. Quite a far cry from Arnold Bell’s icy schemer in WILLIAM HART and Alastair Sim’s grandstanding bully in THE ANATOMIST. But there are hints of problems on the horizon: he gently berates the young student for being “too emotional” over medicine, and assures him he’ll be ready to graduate only once he can think of a patient “in the abstract.” Man, if I ever say anything that obviously foreshadowing of my own downfall, go ahead and let me know, huh?

Knox is played by Peter Cushing, of course, in what is for my money is one of his best and most unfairly ignored performances. Having already portrayed the amoral, obsessed scientist Victor Frankenstein twice (in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and a year later its sequel, REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN) Cushing was obvious typecasting for the role of Knox, but as always the actor proves willing to go the extra mile, crafting a subtly different character here from many of the same parts. His Knox is arrogant, but not in the blustery, bullying way Sim’s Knox was. Oh, he can be just as witheringly caustic, as we see in a magnificent scene where he efficiently administers an eloquent but remorseless verbal thrashing to a gaggle of obsequious rich guys at a party. But he also has a softer side, as we see in his kindly relationship with his niece (June Laverick) and his tough-love coaching of Jackson. And unlike Sim, whose boundless contempt seemed to be a function of egomania as much as genuine conviction, Cushing’s Knox seems both sincere and fundamentally altruistic. His frustration with the backwards attitude of the establishment is perfectly reasonable; if he has no choice but to be complicit in bodysnatching in order to save lives, he’s willing to do it. This will be his downfall, obviously, but for the first time so far, his attitude seems somewhat more understandable. Cushing’s subtle but noticeable inclusion of the detail of Knox’s drooping left eye --ruined by smallpox during his youth-- is a nice visual illustration of his moral myopia; he sees the big picture more clearly than almost anyone, but at the expense of the personal, the immediate. These nuances make this Dr. Knox by far the most complex and interesting version of the character anywhere in the annals of the Burke and Hare-athon.

The movie begins with Knox, but unlike THE ANATOMIST, it’s not exclusively focused on him. Soon enough, we’re introduced to our Burke and Hare, in this case played by George Rose (PIRATES OF PENZANCE, but today best know for his own real-life murder mystery) and Donald Pleasance (RAW MEAT, every single movie released between 1956 and 1990) respectively. And just as with Dr. Knox, it’s immediately obvious that this is a very different Burke and Hare then we've encountered in previous incarnations. First off, they’re introduced as loutish drunks before they’ve ever entered the corpse procurement profession. It’s the first movie to depict their first sale to the medical establishment --a tenant of the Hare’s boarding house who had died of natural causes (the movie makes Burke the proprietor instead of Hare, for whatever reason)-- to a certain extent offering some explanation for their long slide into serial murder. We also spend significantly more time with them than any prior version, taking in their homelife, discovering what they’re doing with the money (squandering it on ostentatious clothes and gallons of whiskey) and even meeting a significant other; Mrs. Burke (Renee Houston, REPULSON) appears as an accomplish to our murderous duo here, though Mrs. Hare is curiously absent. The result of these new details are a pair of miscreants initially less one-dimensionally murderous than their previous incarnations; they’re vain, petty louts who turn to murder for money, but they’re also pathetic in a way which Slaughter/Moore and Ripper/Kelly were not. Murder isn’t exactly their natural inclination, but they’re heartless enough that when it turns out to be a lucrative profession, they eagerly embrace it.

Rose plays Burke as more or less an idiot, a violent brute with no qualms about murder if there’s a payday in it. That in itself isn’t especially different from the previous versions of the character (though historically Burke was thought to be the more intelligent of the two), but Pleasance makes Hare a little bit more interesting. He’s wittier, more calculating; what Burke does remorselessly without much thought, Hare guilds with self-serving rationalizations, egging his accomplice on. Burke begins the actual killing, but Pleasance’s reaction is the more intriguing: he covers his mouth with his hands in shock, but his wide eyes seem to suggest excitement more than than horror. It’s never explicitly stated, but his new career path seems to wake something in him even more disturbing than murder for money. Of all the incarnations of the two killers, Pleasance’s silver-tongued sadist is probably the most unsettling and memorable.

Besides Knox, Burke and Hare, we also follow the relationship between Knox’s niece and his dishwater-dull HGMS assistant Dr. Mitchell (Dermot Walsh, 1960’s THE CHALLENGE), and the burgeoning relationship between our ne’er-do-well HGMS assistant Jackson and a bawdy local prostitute named… Mary Paterson (Billie Whitelaw, FRENZY, THE OMEN, THE DARK CRYSTAL). This is the first film adaptation that gets some mileage out of the idea that Paterson is recognized by a student after her death, and likewise the first to imagine a romantic relationship between them. Obviously, the sex-and-violence angle is catnip for film writers, and so it’s little wonder that once Gilling had put it out in the world, it would find its way into virtually every subsequent version. It’s a good idea on paper, a way to link the victims of Burke and Hare’s crimes to the medical school where our heroes will eventually unravel the mystery of where these bodies are coming from (never mind that in real life, the murders were detected by a poor family staying at the Hares’ boarding house). 

On paper that sounds good. In practice, though, this structure would become the achilles heel of the entire enterprise of making Burke and Hare adaptations. Let’s count our characters now: Knox, Burke, Hare, Mrs. Burke, HGMS #1, Knox’s Niece, HGMS #2, Mary Paterson, and also I should mention we again get to spend some time with Daft Jamie (Melvyn Hayes, who had played young Victor Frankenstein in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN a few years prior). What is this, a prequel to NASHVILLE? The essential problem with this and almost every subsequent variation of this story is that there are just too god damn many characters, and most of them have absolutely nothing to do until near the very end. It seems like a good idea to involve our obligatory HGMS’s with the victims in order to give them a more personal stake in the mystery, but any benefit gained from this plot contrivance is more than offset by the tedium of having to deal with their pointless lives and relationships which do not in any meaningful way intersect with the actual story of Burke and Hare until the very end of the movie.

This leaves the whole enterprise feeling weirdly rudderless. Who, exactly, is the main character here? Nobody! Not a single person in this script would qualify as a character who encounters conflict and is ultimately changed by his or her experience. They’re all almost completely passive until the final reveal, and the only person who is active in the climax (the HGMS who ultimately discovers Burke and Hare’s secret) is the one with the least involvement in any other part of the plot. GREED OF WILLIAM HART and THE ANATOMIST are inferior films in almost every way, but they at least had their own clear sense of who the protagonist was, and how the basic story mechanics served that protagonist. THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS really struggles on this front. Burke and Hare themselves probably have the most screen time, but they don’t really have anything resembling an arc. One of the HGMS’s solves the mystery, but is basically a nonentity otherwise. And the person the film begins and ends with --Dr. Knox-- is only peripherally involved in any of the actual drama.

Oddly, this film, like THE ANATOMIST, ends with an inexplicably sympathetic scene of support for Dr. Knox. Cushing’s Knox is admittedly a little more likeable than Sim’s was, but even he admits, at the end, that he knew Burke and Hare were murderers. He does a little more soul-searching than his predecessors, but jeez, does it really count as character growth just that he feels a little bad about it and then everyone forgives him? I mean, I kind of appreciate that the film doesn’t go the usual horror movie route and condemn the scientists for meddling in God’s domain or whatever, but does this guy really deserve a happy ending (especially an ahistorical one)? Cushing’s performance is nuanced enough to make it kind of work; though his rhetoric remains robust, you can see the fight drain out of him, see his eyes grow suddenly tired. There’s a moment when a chance remark by a child makes him realize just how infamous he is, and he suddenly seems to really get it for the first time. The look of quiet devastation on his face is a truly gut-wrenching thing to behold, maybe one of Cushing’s very strongest scenes in his entire venerable career. But I don’t know. The whole point of telling this story is to remind us that it’s wrong to abet murder, even if it’s in the service of the greater good? No shit. At the very least, the majority of the story has nothing to do with that point, so it seems an odd note to end on.

The iffy narrative structure is a major flaw, but at least the movie has plenty of strengths to balance it. Pretty much every scene with Burke and Hare is gold, Cushing is terrific as Knox, and the script is peppered with darkly hilarious wit, most of it delivered by Cushing or Pleasance in the drollest possible manner.* Moreover, aside from being by far the most cinematic adaptation of this material so far, it is also the first unambiguous horror film; the murder scenes are sumptuously layered with eerie hard lighting that makes them feel exaggerated and nightmarish, and the gothic, expressionist sets heighten that sense. Even beyond that, though, this is a surprisingly gritty experience. For 1960, there’s quite a bit of sex, gore, and grotesquery on display. While there’s some broad hints that Paterson is a prostitute in THE ANATOMIST, here there’s no doubt. She lives in some kind of bawdy house where the downstairs living room has been retrofitted into some kind of weird orgy pad. As our heroes walk by we can see all manner of sexual chicanery happening within, including, humorously, a bare-ass naked lady just sort of ambling around in circles with no clear objective. The pub where Burke and Hare find their victims is equally raucous and lewd, topless women drunkenly pawing at their would-be paramours and sloppy fights breaking out at random. Producers Robert Baker and Monty Berman were known for inserting incongruous nudity into their productions, but here it works well to establish the debased world these characters inhabit. Likewise, the surprising (for 1960) gore adds some much-needed spice. We see a long-decayed body pulled from the ground, watch two brutal (though bloodless) murders, an ugly attempted rape (which thankfully the movie does not try to play as sexy), and even watch Hare get his eyes burned out (presumably a reference to the folk legend that he was blinded by a mob following his release). This ain’t your grandpappy’s Burke and Hare; these guys inhabit a world of drunken, desperate poverty and hopeless, disease-ridden mindless sex. I mean, it ain’t exactly CALIGULA or nothin’ but it’s a far cry from the chatty, sanitized visions of this story we got in 1948 and 1956.

THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS contains a whole slew of “firsts,” and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that it would dominate the way the story was told for the rest of the century. It’s the first movie to suggest a relationship between a HGMS and Peterson, the first to clutter up the story with way too many characters, the first to include a significant emphasis on sexuality, gore, and drunken debauchery, the first to actually show Burke and Hare’s fate, and the first to fall clearly into the horror genre. Every one of these factors would strongly influence both the structure and the feel of the next few versions, which is strange, because the movie itself was a box-office disappointment and seldom available for decades. I guess this movie is like the Velvet Underground; not too many people saw it, but everyone who did went off and made their own Burke and Hare movie. But anyway, they couldn’t have picked a better one to try and rip off, because between the fine cinematography, terrific performances and blackly funny script, this one’s a real winner. Only the shapeless structure holds it back from being a real genre classic, but that’s forgivable in light of the things it gets right. I don’t want to say it was worth 16 people getting murdered to get a horror movie this good… but you know, not a bad silver lining, anyway.

*On the subject of Parliament’s reticence to help medical schools gain easier access to cadavers, Knox quips, “with five hundred walking corpses there, you would think they could spare one.”

OUR STORY SO FAR:

1948: The Greed of William Hart

1956: The Anatomist

1960: The Flesh and the Fiends

1972: Burke and Hare

1985: The Doctor and the Devils

2010: Burke and Hare

Burke and Hare-athon Checklist!

• Title: The Flesh And The Fiends
• Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
• Story regulars: Burke, Hare, Knox, Paterson, Daft Jamie, Mrs. Burke, HGMS. No Mrs. Docherty in this case, and our usual HGMS is actually TWO HGMS’s this time around.
• Attitude towards Dr. Knox: Ambiguous, but ultimately positive.
• Wonky eye or no? Hell yeah, the best ever.
• Scottish accents? Only Billie Whitelaw as Mary Paterson attempts a Scottish Brogue, but she's pretty crazy. I didn't mention that to save space in the review, but boy, does she make dating an alcoholic prostitute not look very appealing despite the cleavage.
• Irish accents? Both Rose and Pleasance oblige with an Irish accent, though neither goes over the top with it.
• Heaving cleavage? Yes sir.
• Rockin’ theme music? No, although a nice scary score.