I went to my friend Bob R.’s and ran him Mystery of the Wax Museum — a movie he found at once too confusing and too predictable. The limitations of two-strip Technicolor were less annoying in this one than in The King of Jazz, partly because the print that survived was in much better shape from the standpoint of color registration, and partly because the movie was so carefully designed to work around the limitations of the process — notably by containing no daytime exteriors, thereby obviating the need to show sky. The visual quotes from the 1925 Phantom of the Opera and the 1931 Frankenstein were pretty obvious, and Anton Grot’s expressionistic sets would actually have looked better in a dark, shadowy, chiaroscuro black-and-white than they did in color, but the spectacular scenes — the fire in the original London wax museum at the beginning and the “monster” climax in which Lionel Atwill tries to murder Fay Wray by spraying her with wax — did benefit from the use of the two-strip process. (When I taped this movie, I left in the host’s introduction, in which he explained that the movie was not colorized, but was actually shot in an early color process — at the time this was aired, colorization was so poor that colorized films tended to have many of the same limitations as the early two-strip films, notably a palette biased heavily towards browns and a “smeary” effect caused by problems in matching registrations between the various “strips,” whether physical or electronic, containing the various spectral ranges. I also hadn’t remembered the host being such a queen!) — 5/4/93
=====
I made dinner for myself and then walked over to Charles’
home and ran him Mystery of the Wax Museum
and The Brasher Doubloon, two
movies I’d copied from Beta to VHS recently. Charles liked them both, and was
amazed at how well the two-strip Technicolor of Mystery of the Wax
Museum had held up (though at least part of
that may have had to do with the fact that we were watching a copy of the
recording I’d originally made; the copying process, for some strange reason,
tends — if it affects the color at all — to make it brighter). He’s seen the remake, House of Wax, of course, but he liked this version as well. I like it better, actually, since it’s shorter, it’s set contemporaneously, Lionel
Atwill is a more subtle and less stylized actor than Vincent Price and Glenda
Farrell — significantly more important than her counterpart in the remake — is
a treat as the fast-talking, hard-bitten girl reporter who unravels the case;
as Tino Balio put it in his introduction to the published script, “A typical
Warner Brothers production dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a
Universal picture.” — 9/16/96
=====
Since I got the double-sided Warner Home Video DVD of Mystery
of the Wax Museum and House of
Wax I’d been anxious to run these films,
especially Mystery since — aside
from the fact that I think it’s the better of the two versions — I’ve been
curious about how a relatively well-preserved two-strip Technicolor movie
(according to the American Film Institute Catalog, the last
film made in the two-strip process) would hold up in a DVD transfer. It looked
about the same as it had on my previous tape (a Beta tape I copied over to VHS)
and about like most two-strip films: dominated by salmon-red and
turquoise-green as the main colors but also harmonious and painterly in its
overall color scheme. (I often find good-condition two-strip actually
pleasanter to look at than some early films in the three-strip process that
succeeded it, which were frequently garish and overbright, especially in the
primaries.) The film was remade 20 years later in 3-D as House of Wax (unfortunately this DVD does not contain either the 3-D version or the glasses needed
to view it that way!) and according to the AFI catalog was also the basis for a
1966 TV-series pilot that wasn’t picked up but was released theatrically under
the title Chamber of Horrors (and
the AFI also mentions Roger Corman’s 1959 film A Bucket of Blood, a variation on the basic concept in which the
protagonist is a beatnik with artistic ambitions but no talent, who kills
people, plasters clay all over their bodies and exhibits these as sculptures).
The transfer is adequate and Warner Home Video deserves kudos for duplicating
the color “as is” and not trying
to “improve” it through color-correction or colorization, though as Charles
noted as we watched the film doesn’t really gain that much from being in color: aside from the
marvelous opening sequence in which the original wax sculptures of Igor (Lionel
Atwill) are burned in a fire by his crooked partner, Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell)
— including a beautiful series of close-ups in which some of the wax women
actually seem to be crying as the
fire starts to melt their faces away — most of this film would have been as
effective, possibly even more so, in black-and-white. I’ve also long treasured
Tino Balio’s description of Mystery of the Wax Museum — “A typical Warner Brothers production dons a
fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture” — especially
since Glenda Farrell, as the wisecracking reporter who solves the mystery,
romances rich playboy George Winton (Gavin Gordon) but ends up marrying her
editor (Frank McHugh, less oppressive than in most of his appearances at the
time — the director, Michael Curtiz, must have restrained him), suggesting this
as a prequel to His Girl Friday,
is by far the most significant character in the story and the one with the most
screen time even though she’s billed third behind Atwill and Fay Wray (as the
ingenue whom Atwill marks for waxification because she’s the spitting image of
his lost sculpture of Marie Antoinette), and her high-energy portrayal gives
this film most of its entertainment value. (Inexplicably the writer of House
of Wax, Crane Wilbur, eliminated this
character completely from his
story, thus significantly draining the remake of the original’s power.)
All in all, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a quite good film that holds up well. Like Boris
Karloff, Lionel Atwill had the sophistication as an actor to portray one of
these obsessed characters with sufficient depth to make his obsession credible
and genuinely pathetic instead of just evil. Fay Wray had little to do but look decorative and scream (you’re
likely to remember her waxen appearance as Marie Antoinette much more than her
ambulatory scenes as Charlotte Duncan, who meets Igor because her fiancé,
apprentice sculptor Ralph Burton [Edwin Maxwell], works for him) but there’s a
quite good supporting cast, including actors like McHugh and Gordon whom Curtiz
got far better performances from than was their norm. The AFI Catalog has some rather odd mistakes in their description of
the film — they don’t mention that Worth, the character who torches the wax museum
in 1921 London in the film’s prologue, reappears in the main part (set in 1933
New York) as a bootlegger who’s exposed by Farrell’s character and ultimately
murdered by Igor in his giant wax bath just before he tries to give Fay Wray
the same treatment; and they refer to Arthur Edmund Carewe’s character as
“Sparrow” when he’s actually called “Professor Darcy” in the film (Carewe, who
played the secret agent in the Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom
of the Opera, here is cast as a sculptor
who’s become a heroin addict and, arrested for his role in Worth’s bootlegging
racket, “cracks” in the police station and implicates Igor in the murders —
this being a pre-Code film he’s openly referred to as a “junkie” in the
dialogue; in House of Wax he was
played by Charles Bronson under his real last name, Bushinsky,[1]
and due to the Code his addiction had to be downgraded from heroin to alcohol);
they also credit Ralph as Charlotte’s sole rescuer in the final scene when in
fact a squad of police officers raid the wax museum, though it is Ralph who pushes the gurney on which Charlotte is
about to be sprayed with wax away from the wax spout just in the nick of time. Mystery
of the Wax Museum was thought lost until
1970, when the sole extant print turned up in Jack Warner’s home (and I first
saw it that year when the San Francisco Film Festival ran that original print
along with an even more delicious rediscovery, James Whale’s The Old
Dark House), and since then it’s trickled
out on occasional showings on various Turner channels — though one person I’m
almost sure saw it early in its revival career was Mel Brooks, because he
cribbed two elements from it in Young Frankenstein (the pronunciation of Atwill’s character name as
“EYE-gor” instead of the more usual “EE-gor” and the scene in which a live
character appears as part of a lineup of otherwise lifeless heads) — prior to
this quite welcome and beautifully transferred DVD release. — 10/17/03
•••••
I ran the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I have on the Warner Home Video two-sided DVD
also containing its more famous 1953 remake, House of Wax. By coincidence I happened to see both films for the
first time theatrically within less than a year of each other — Mystery
of the Wax Museum at the San Francisco Film
Festival in 1970 when the sole extant print (found in Jack L. Warner’s personal
collection after he had forgotten about it for decades) had just been
rediscovered and reissued; and House of Wax in 1971 in a spectacular transfer of the original
3-D version (and I pity anyone who hasn’t seen it in the 3-D format; it’s
really spectacular and adds a lot to the film). Mystery of the Wax
Museum was the last feature film made in
the two-strip Technicolor process; all the major studios experimented with it —
sometimes merely for color sequences
in otherwise all-black-and-white movies — but Warners, having just hit the
jackpot by being the first big studio to shoot a movie with synchronized
dialogue and music and thereby sparking the talkie revolution, thought color
would be, shall we say, the next sound. So they signed a big contract with
Technicolor to make 60 features in the two-strip process, which involved using
a camera that shot two separate negatives, red and green; the two strips of
negative film were then “married” to produce positive prints through so-called
“dye transfer imbibition,” a process similar to lithography. There were a lot of things that could go wrong with this in practice,
and with Technicolor having stepped up (and speeded up) production to fulfill
Warners’ contract, critics claimed that the quality of Technicolor’s films
declined due to the sheer rush. Two-strip had a major limitation inherent in
the process: it could not photograph blue, because blue has the shortest
wavelength of any color in the spectrum and therefore was the hardest to
photograph, period.
Anyone who did newspaper or magazine production in the era
before desktop publishing will remember “non-photo blue” pencils and marking
pens with which you could proofread copy without leaving an image that the
camera that photographed the galleys to make offset plates would pick up (such
people will also remember that red photographed black), and James Wong Howe
first “made his bones” as a cinematographer by figuring out how to photograph
the blue-eyed Mary Miles Minter: he hid himself and his camera behind a velvet
curtain, bounced the light off the curtain and back into Minter’s eyes, and
thereby created a shadow that allowed Minter’s irises to look like normal ones
on screen. Indeed, when the three-strip Technicolor process replaced two-strip
(three-strip was introduced in 1932 by Walt Disney in the cartoon Flowers
and Trees; the first live-action
three-strip films, the final reel of the Jeanette MacDonald musical The
Cat and the Fiddle and the short La
Cucaracha, came out in 1934, and the first
feature shot entirely in three-strip, Becky Sharp, came out in 1935), directors, cinematographers and
art designers seemed to go out of their way to include blue objects just
because they could. What makes it
odd is that the Warner Home Video edition of Mystery of the Wax
Museum does feature some objects — mostly
walls in nighttime exteriors — that look deep blue, and I was trying to determine whether that was an artefact
of the old TV we were watching it on (not likely because other people on the
imdb.com message board on the film were also saying they’d seen blue), some “tweaking” of the color in the DVD
transfer process (also not likely because if they’d played around with the
color balance they’d have gone farther and not left many scenes in the overall
brown-and-green scheme of two-strip, and in one scene a frog appears, and
though you would expect it to be green it is blue), or — my guess — differential fading of the dyes used to make
the color image so what looked dark green to the original 1933 audience looks
blue now because the yellow components of the lithography have faded more than
the blue ones.
As far as Mystery of the Wax Museum goes as a film, it’s an excellent little chiller, far superior to its slower-paced, more lumbering remake,
offering not only the cheekiness of the so-called “pre-Code” era (the
Production Code was actually put into place in 1930, but pressure from the
Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency in 1934 forced the studios to be a lot more serious about enforcing it, vetting films both
when they were in script form and after they were shot) — including a character
who’s quite openly drawn as a heroin addict and a lot of sexual innuendi from
Glenda Farrell, playing a reporter (what else?) who cracks the case — but also
superior acting, direction and writing. The story in both versions is the same
(a recently made House of Wax
junked the original tale by writer Charles Belden and substituted a typical
modern-day slasher story with blood and gore replacing the Gothic terror of
both this version and House of Wax):
a talented sculptor leaves the fine-art world and starts making figures for a
wax museum in London he co-owns with a crooked entrepreneur. Alas, just as
respected art critics are drifting in and offering him the acclaim he wants,
the crooked entrepreneur burns the place down for the insurance money,
destroying the sculptor’s cherished figures and leaving him badly scarred and
with stumps for fingers. Twelve years later, his museum reopens in New York
City with figures duplicating the originals, only the sculptor can no longer
make the figures himself and has to depend on assistants to do the actual work.
The artist is particularly obsessed with restoring his lost wax sculpture of
Marie Antoinette, and he goes off the deep end when he meets the girlfriend of
one of his assistants and finds she looks exactly like his Marie Antoinette.
Eventually it turns out that all, or nearly all, of the “wax” figures in the
museum are actually dead humans, murdered because they resembled the original
statues — in a humorous topical bit obviously evoking the real-life
disappearance of Judge Crater, a missing judge named Ramsey turns out to have
been killed because he looked like the museum’s statue of Voltaire, while
another person, a socialite named Joan Gale who supposedly committed suicide,
was actually killed and embalmed with wax because she resembled the mad
sculptor’s Joan of Arc.
The plots track similarly, but Mystery of the
Wax Museum is a better movie because it’s
shorter (by about half an hour, avoiding the longueurs of House of Wax), it’s better constructed, it has the advantage of two-strip
Technicolor (superbly used by director Michael Curtiz and cinematographer Ray
Rennahan — who was actually employed by Technicolor, not Warners — to evoke a
flawless Gothic atmosphere; unable to show blue sky in two-strip, the
filmmakers turned the limitation into an asset by not including any scenes that take place outdoors during daytime) and
it also has a far superior cast. In Mystery of the Wax Museum the mad sculptor is called “Ivan Igor” — the last
name is pronounced “EYE-gor” instead of the more common “EE-gor,” and Mel
Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein
not only copied the “EYE-gor” pronunciation but also included a visual quote
from Mystery of the Wax Museum (a
row of wax heads in which a live human hides, concealing the rest of his body
behind the table the wax heads are sitting on — in Young Frankenstein it was a row of severed human heads but the gag was
the same) — and he’s played, superbly, by Lionel Atwill. In the remake, House
of Wax, he was called “Henry Jarrod”
(apparently the filmmakers didn’t want to insult Russians!) and played by
Vincent Price, who camped his way through the role in a performance that
eventually “typed” him as a horror actor after a 15-year film career in which
he’d played mostly lounge-lizard second leads. (Eventually Price’s camping
through horror part after horror part would itself become the major appeal of
his films — though given a good “straight” role in a genuinely sinister movie
like Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm,
he proved as late as the 1970’s that his acting chops were still A-O.K.)
By
contrast, Atwill brings to the role the same twisted pathos Boris Karloff did
in the 1932 version of The Mummy
(another horror classic that as a work of art towers far, far above its
remake!); like Karloff, he’s able to convince us that he’s so bonkers that he
genuinely believes that killing the heroine and reincarnating her (as a living
mummy in Karloff’s film, as a dead wax sculpture in Mystery) he’s really doing her a favor! Mystery also benefits from the rambunctious reporter
character played by Glenda Farrell — unwisely eliminated by Charles Belden when
he wrote the screenplay for House of Wax: the filmmakers, including screenwriters Don Mullaly and Carl
Erickson, give her a showcase for her torrential energy and rapid-fire delivery
of dialogue (Warners at one point even advertised her as having the fastest
mouth in films!) — and by the radiance of Fay Wray in her part as the hapless
heroine who finds herself at the center of the villain’s schemes due to her
unfortunate resemblance to (his vision of) Marie Antoinette. It’s a wonderful
movie, well directed by Michael Curtiz and with stark, stylized, almost Caligari-esque sets by Anton Grot, and it even has Frank
McHugh (as Glenda Farrell’s editor) getting her at the end, as she dumps the
rich guy she’s been chasing all movie (an innocent suspect in one of the
murders because Jane Gale was his previous girlfriend) and ends up in his arms
for the final clinch, while we just assume Fay Wray and her “stick” boyfriend (Allan Vincent) get together as
well. Mystery of the Wax Museum
is a gem, and while Tino Balio’s assessment of it — “a typical Warner Bros.
production dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal
picture” — is somewhat accurate, in fact the film is a clever mix of Warners’
clichés and an overall Gothic atmosphere just helped by the use of two-strip
Technicolor. — 2/15/13
[1] Actually, in
House of Wax “Igor,” now pronounced
“EE-gor” instead of the first version’s “EYE-gor,” is no longer the name of the
mad sculptor but his mute assistant — and that, not the addict sidekick, is the role Charles Bronson
played under his birth last name, Buchinsky.
