THE EGYPTIAN MUMMY (1914)
Article 4847 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-13-2015
Directed by Lee Beggs
Featuring Lee Beggs, Constance Talmadge, Billy Quirk
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy

A young lover is distraught because he doesn’t have enough money to marry the woman he loves. However, when the woman’s father offers a large sum of money to someone who can provide him with an Egyptian mummy so he can test an elixir of life, the lover hires a bum to portray the mummy.

This silent comedy short has two shots at fantastic content; the mummy and the elixir. As you can tell from the description, the mummy turns out to be a fake, and as it turns out, we never find out if the elixir really works or not. Well, at least the movie flirts with fantastic content, and skinny Joel Day looks pretty cadaverous as the fake mummy, so it’s close enough to get by. Overall, this one is pretty amusing, though I do find it pretty hard to swallow that our hero is able to sell the mummy, invest the gains into the stock market and get ten times his return in about ten minutes (maybe this is the real fantastic content). This one is not bad.