| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM
Rating: 
USA. 1933.
Director – Michael Curtiz, Screenplay – Carl Erickson & Don Mullaly, Based on the Play by Charles Belden, Photography – Ray Rennahan, Art Direction – Anton Grot. Production Company – Warners.
Cast:
Lionel Atwill (Igor), Glenda Farrell (Florence Dempsey), Fay Wray (Charlotte Duncan), Frank McHugh (Jim), Allen Vincent (Ralph), Matthew Betz (Otto), Gavin Gordon (George Winton)
Plot: London, 1912. The waxwork sculptor Igor has lovingly created an exhibition of beautifully realistic waxwork mannequins. But these are not making money and Igor is shattered when his unscrupulous business partner burns the wax museum down for the insurance money. New York, 1933 and Igor opens a new wax museum. Searching for a story, reporter Florence Dempsey discovers by accident that the deranged Igor is stealing bodies from the morgue and using them as the basis of his new waxwork creations.
Mystery of the Wax Museum is one of the genuine genre classics to emerge out of the 1930s Golden Age of Horror. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, the director of later celebrated classics such as Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942). Furthermore it served to make the name of Lionel Atwill, who’d earlier appeared as a good mad scientist in Curtiz’s Doctor X (1932) and who would go onto other great parts as a memorably hissable villain in Murders in the Zoo (1933) and as the one-armed inspector in Son of Frankenstein (1939), before becoming a supporting player in various Universal monster team-ups and mad scientist films of the 1940s. And, as though to confirm its classic status, the film also featured Fay Wray, who two months later the same year appeared in the all-time classic King Kong (1933).
Mystery of the Wax Museum is a classic but one that also has to be understood within a certain context. Prints were unavailable for many years and it did not emerge back into circulation until the late 1960s. There its reappearance disappointed many fans in respect to the reputation that had built up around it. The much more widely seen remake House of Wax (1953) has tended to form perceptions of the film and when seen against this Wax Museum tends to disappoint slightly. Most notedly the horror element is something that only really emerges at the end. To those who don’t understand this, the major two-thirds of the film which center around girl reporter Glenda Farrell (who is the real star of the show rather than Fay Wray) prove rather dull. As much as it belongs in The Golden Age of Horror, the film just as equally falls into the era’s genre of newspaper romantic comedies that emerged after The Front Page (1931). In themselves these newspaper scenes are not at all unenjoyable with Farrell giving a wonderfully boisterous performance and the dialogue in these scenes being wonderfully snappily tuned.
And when the film finally emerges as horror at the end it does with suitably entertaining regard, building to a classic Grand Guignol climax. There’s the memorable much-talked-about scene where Lionel Atwill has Fay Wray cowering before him and finally rises from his wheelchair to come for her and she batters at his face, only to break his mask and reveal his hideously disfigured real face beneath. It’s a classic scene, on the order of the unmasking of Lon Chaney’s Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
Like many of other horror films of the era, Wax Museum employs the stylized Expressionism of the silent German classics, in particular The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Atwill’s lair is built as a real mad scientist’s lab with distorted staircases, giant struts running across the lab at 45 degree angles, angular doorways, and the multi-tiered central lab itself with giant bubbling vats. The film was also shot in an early Technicolor process. Restoration prints restore the original colour process.
The wax museum theme has proven a popular one in horror throughout the years. House of Wax (1953) was a lavish full colour, 3-D remake starring Vincent Price in the Atwill role although, despite some memorable moments, is the lesser of the two. The story was also later remade as House of Wax (2005), a slasher film that has little to do with either previous version. The theme of mad sculptor/artist covering corpses in wax/plaster also appears in films like A Bucket of Blood (1959), Color Me Blood Red (1965), Blood Bath (1966), Nightmare in Wax (1969), Cauldron of Blood (1971) and Crucible of Terror (1971).
Michael Curtiz made several other ventures into horror with The Mad Genius (1931), Doctor X (1932) and The Walking Dead (1936).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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