The Eyes of the Mummy (1922)

Very well executed

Lack of good storyline.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

As others who've seen this film have mentioned, "The Eyes of the Mummy" is not a horror film involving any mummies; rather, it's an insipid melodramatic tragedy. It was the first of director Ernst Lubitsch's dramatic films, after having started as a comedic filmmaker. The movie involves exotic places (this time, Egypt), which are poorly exploited here compared to other such pictures. Pola Negri, in her first appearance as Lubitsch's star, performs some exotic dancing, too."The Eyes of the Mummy" is a generally uninteresting relic. The acting, especially by stars Negri and Emil Jannings, is overdone. Lubitsch employs slight dolly movements to nice effect in the finale, but otherwise the direction is prosaic and theatrical. From the sampling of Lubitsch's German films that I've seen, his dramatic pictures are generally less remarkable than his comedies. With these dramas, however, he received attention in the US--leading to his emigration to Hollywood.

I agree the film was not restored well at all. The music did not go along with the visual images. It seemed as though whoever wrote the score was just not paying attention to the movie. The music sounded rather chipper for scenes that seemed dark and a plot that is haunting. A new version is coming out March 28,2006 with a new music score. Hopefully that one will be much better. I heard that the new score is all piano and that the composer also did the score for The Mechanical Man. Which is a very rare old silent film that was found. Looking forward to seeing it. Hopefully the next version of Eyes of The Mummy will be much more better.

If, as promised, this movie was restored then the results are simply horrible.A company called National Film Museum gave this film to another company called Hypercube IIc, in New York to digitally restore the film.But, instead of a intelligent restoration what this people did was to tint every scene to red, probably with Photoshop, with disastrous results.Douglas M. Protsik music is as unremarkable as the bad restoration. His accompaniment does not enhance the images at all.In all, the available print shown on TCM is unwatchable and I had to turn off the TV set.

... but a tragedy... of sorts. The "Eyes Of The Mummy" refer to the eye-holes in a doorway with a face on it that Pola Negri looks out of to scare people out of the temple of Queen Ma. There is no mummy, there is no monster, there really is no horror. This is not a complaint, but this movie is often grouped in with monster movies merely because of it's title. It's easy to laugh at a film almost 85 years old, your grand kids and great grand kids will laugh at what you currently enjoy as well. The dance that Pola does may look strange to our eyes, but the desired effect was to be exotic. The acting is typically broad and melodramatic, appropriate to it's time. With the deterioration of many silent movies, we can sometimes be thankful that the actors seemed to be overacting, we can still see their expressions even when their films are fading away. Not Pola Negri's best work, or her worst. There must be a few different cuts of this film circulating. The one I saw was about an hour and ten minutes long, not the half-hour reported here or the forty-five minutes reported on the main page for this movie. I rather enjoyed the version I saw, maybe the shorter cuts leave too much out to fill the story out. Recommended if you enjoy the genre and it's stars. If you are looking for Halloween fare, stick with Universal's later horror classics, including..yes, the "real" mummy movies.