The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)

 "The public love to live dangeroiusly, as long as there's no real danger in it..."

Not every Hammer horror is a classic sadly. This isn't an awful film, and it looks gorgeous in places- the spectacle of the treasures from the toom, upon which we linger during the openimng titles, are so dsumptuous and impressibve we can very much forgive the obvious matte painted backgrounds in the obviously studio-bound desert scenes early on.

This is, I suppose, a fairly traditional mummy romp. The mummy looks good. The plot is decent, although one has to raise an eye at Adam's seduction technique of saying that an intelligent woman should not be a bluestocking but should instead use her intelligence to run a household and not worry her pretty little head over all that academic learning. Well then.

There's a very vulgar American stereotype, an ncultured P.T. Barnum wannabe. There's the inevitable George Pastell as a native Egyptian red herring, a man who proves to have noble intentions, even if his unexpected heroic sacrifice is shrouded in embarrassing stereotyping. 

Yet what stops this film quite catching fire, I think, is partluy that the cast, while generally competent, does not quite have the charisma that one would expect from such a film. There are no real stars and, while it's not necessarily a bad thing to cast character actors as leads, here it doesn't quite work. Everyone is competent onscreen but there is no magnetic screen presence.

Then there's the slow pacing in what is an awfully padded fim for one so short, and the fact we don't even see the mummy until far toolate. That said, though, the film is well made,and George Pastell is superb even if the stereotyped part he plays is not.