Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled

The print of this film is in no worse shape han that many many films of this period and the comedy is quite as well done as the majority of them too. It is certainly worth anybody's while to watch it- I would say it was virtually compulsory - to see that a black director, a black cinematographer and black actors - never mind whether the holding company was run by whites; it also had a black manager - were able to produce just as good a film as most of their white counterparts. The timing is not "actually very good"; it is just very good and it is very good because there were plenty of black actors who were excellent comedians with considerable experience of working in vaudeville.

Then ask yourself why there were not many more films made by black directors or with black cinematographers and black actors and black performers.

Those who have the copy of the film should also make sure it is as widely available as possible for everyone to view. The copy at present on youtube lacks both the beginning and the end of the story. Not only should this film be in the public domain but it is very important that it should be watched.

The other Ebony films available are Spying the Spy and The Reckless Rover and also the earlier Two Knight of Vaudeville made by the original Historical Feature Film Company. Make a date to watch them all.

Other IMDb reviewers have done a good job of describing this film's attributes. I will only add that the original score written and performed by Alloy Orchestra is fantastic, with its emphasis on bass, percussion, and a resonant piano. (I watched this film on the Criterion Channel, FYI.)

Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled (1918)

*** (out of 4)

Fun comedy has Bill wanting to marry the woman his loves but her father refuses until he can prove to be a money maker and capable of taking care of her. Bill then reads a note in the newspaper with a many offering a grand for an actual mummy so Bill goes out to find a mummy.

I must admit that I had never heard of this film until it popped up on Kino's Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection. This film should certainly be better known and especially to horror fans since there's a mummy on display here. The comic timing is actually very good throughout the picture and I thought there were some hilarious sequences including one where the mummy (a man dressed up) falls off the back of a carriage and is being dragged around. Another funny sequences happens when a friend of Bill's sees a fake mummy.

The only problem with this short is the fact that the start and end of the print are in really horrid shape. It's hard to make out what's going on and it's really too bad because this is still a gem.

Ancient Egyptian mummies were a popular source early on in film history. The same year as this film, "Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled," saw the release of Ernst Lubitsch's "Eyes of the Mummy Ma." Moreover, this Ebony Film Company release is largely derivative of an earlier comedy short, "The Egyptian Mummy" (1914), but with a black cast instead of a white one. The slapstick here is broad, involving a man setting out to buy and, then, resell a sarcophagus--after hiring someone to pretend for a day to be the mummy inside--to the father of the woman he wishes to be engaged to so as to have enough money to win his approval to marry her. Seeing an early iteration of a mad scientist--and who, therefore, is in need of an ancient, preserved corpse--is amusing in its absurdity. Being distributed by Ebony, which shortly hereafter closed due to protests over the depiction of negative racial stereotypes, makes this also historically interesting to see for its racial representation--not only for African Americans in this case, but also for them depicting two ridiculous Western notions of Egyptian characters. The most fascinating aspect of viewing the surviving footage of this film today, however, has nothing to do with any of that.

The decomposition of the nitrate film here is severe--particularly at the beginning and end. While unfortunate in respect to film preservation, although it's a blessing for such old films to exist in any shape considering that most from the era are now lost, the decomposition seems unintentionally apt here. This is a film, after all, that deals in mummies--the preserved remains of decaying bodies. It's the nitrate film that's the true relic, though. It's the mummified remains that today are most captivating.

Daddy may be mad, but he's not stupid and he wants his daughter to marry a man with some money. Daddy has also put an ad in the newspaper, to buy an Egyptian mummy for experiments, so his would-be son-in-law buys a sarcophagus and hires a guy to play the mummy.

It's a pretty good comedy from 1918, with a a pleasantly complicated story and an appeal to the public interest in Egypt that would peak the following decade with the opening of King Tut's tomb. This film from the Ebony Film company, like the others, starred Black actors and was primarily tended for the all-Black movie houses of the era. The surviving print isn't in very good shape, but it's more than worth your time to look at.