Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

So back in the 30s, when the original horror film boom took place, the big Hollywood studios frankly didn’t like horror films, but they did like the money horror films were bringing in for them… Warner’s, however, found them particularly distasteful and tried to sell them as anything but horror, usually as mysteries with some sort of newspaper comedy element and the horror kind of backgrounded. Hence tonight’s viewing, which famously vanished for many years and wasn’t seen again until 1970 or so… this viewing (my first in many years) was almost like a first-time watch, cos I have the blu with the recent UCLA restoration that cleans up decades of print damage and gets the colour values of the 2-strip Technicolor right (apparently the old DVD I’ve got somewhere fiddled with the colour to get more blue out of it); I suspect this now looks and sounds as good as it ever has since 1933.

Plotwise, it kind of embodies the description I gave above; there’s a new wax museum opening under the aegis of Lionel Atwill’s disabled sculptor, at the same time as corpses have been going missing from the morgue; Glenda Farrell’s screwball comedy news reporter (the real female lead in the film despite being billed below Fay Wray, who doesn’t really have that much to do) must get an accused killer out of jail to help her solve the latter and find out how it connects to the former. And it’s all perfectly fine. I’ve never thought it was quite the lost masterpiece people probably hoped it would be when it was rediscovered, maybe its remake House of Wax actually was better, and I’ve never really been convinced that Michael Curtiz was one of old Hollywood’s great directors (despite making some obviously great films); but it’s still a great example of golden age Hollywood efficiency, it’s well done enough that you barely notice some considerable plot holes amusingly outlined in the commentary, it does what it needs to do and gets out in under 80 minutes. The old Technicolor looks delightful for all its limitations, and all the film really lacks is a score…

…though the new  blu-ray does have an unfortunate side-effect; the fact that the wax statues were played by actual people (because actual wax statues tended to melt under the hotter lights required by Technicolor) is more obvious than perhaps it once was…