The Mummy

The Mummy is a 1911 American short silent film produced by the Thanhouser Company. The film details the story of Jack Thornton, a businessman, who is in love with Professor Dix's daughter. Jack purchases a mummy and plans to win his respect as an Egyptologist, but the mummy is reanimated in Jack's room by a live electrical wire. The mummy takes immediate interest in Jack, but is rejected and mummifies him. Before Professor Dix can cut up the now-mummified Jack, she returns and saves him. Jack explains everything and the film concludes with Professor Dix marrying the mummy. The production was one of several films of the same name produced in 1911 and was met with favorable reviews. The film is presumed to be lost. Plot The original synopsis of the film was published in the Moving Picture World as follows: "Professor Dix has won fame as a scientist and has collected many objects of Egyptian ware, centuries old, that arouse the enthusiasm of his associates. Even Jack Thornton, an active, go-ahead young businessman, is interested in the professor's home, but although he tries to pretend it is Egyptology which interests him, the professor's fair young daughter is really the lodestone. Jack decides to win the old man's respect by posing as an Egyptologist himself. To start his collection, he purchases a mummy at an auction sale, and takes it home expecting that later he can make a great hit with his sweetheart's father, by presenting it to him as a gift. While the mummy is in Jack's room, a live electric wire is by accident brought in contact with it. The body has been so perfectly mummified, that the electric current is all that is necessary to ignite the vital spark, and Jack is amazed to see dancing forth from the case which he thought contained only unattractive rags and bones, a beautiful Egyptian princess. As soon as she is released, the mummy makes violent love to Jack, and causes his sweetheart to quarrel with him (for how can a plain businessman explain the presence in his room of a beautiful barbarian?). When her love is spurned, the visitor from the distant past avenges herself by having Jack made into a mummy and placed in the case in her stead. Her heart relents, however, in time to save him from being 'cut up' by the professor, who with the sharp knife, starts to investigate the contents of the mummy case. But all ends happily when Jack's plain statements of the seemingly impossible facts are proved true by the professor.