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…
Oh, SPLENDID. It’s been a long time between bites of toast for the dynamic duo, but it’s been well worth the wait; apparently Nick Park found the experience of making Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Dreamworks so enervating he was in no rush to repeat the experience (Netflix seem to have been more accommodating, which I find hard to believe for some reason). So here we are, sixteen years since the last W&G short; Wallace is still inventing things—this time round it’s a robot garden gnome, Norbot, who frankly has a kind of weirdly alarming vibe to him even before he gets reprogrammed for evil—and Gromit is still kind of despairing of him, while the local police chief is more interested in his impending retirement than the impending return of a former foe from long ago. It’s just beautiful. I applauded so many bits of this film. Most notably, I don’t think I noticed that Wallace is no longer voiced by Peter Sallis, who retired after the previous short and then also died; Ben Whitehead, who’s previously been Wallace’s voice in video games, steps up for his first screen performance, and apart from an initial shock at realising just how much he sounds like Sallis, I actually quickly forgot it wasn’t the latter. It was Wallace’s voice. I think the only thing I seriously have against the film is that, though it’s obviously made in Aardman’s classic claymation method, it’s been shot digitally, and it didn’t feel like it had the same sort of “handmade” vibe of the older films. Maybe it was just me, I don’t know. But whatever, it was great; somehow this claymation thing felt more actually thrilling than a lot of live action films I’ve seen, especially ones with preposterous CGI effects… of which there obviously are some in this one, but the heart of it is the physicality of the clay modelling and the fact that they’re real objects, even if I couldn’t quite see the fingerprints in the way I could before. Terrific.
Finishing off that Criterion Tod Browning set with what is evidently the least known of the three films therein… Interesting that the titular mystic is actually a somewhat secondary character; she’s one of a group of circus gypsies recruited by an American crook, Michael Nash, as part of a scheme to part people from their money through staged seances. But Nash gets greedy and this ultimately results in a somewhat unexpected complication. Not a million miles removed from something like Nightmare Alley, I suppose, albeit a couple of decades before that… Browning couldn’t get any of his usual cast (including Lon Chaney) so he had to make do with a bunch of people who seem to be pretty obscure now, though they all acquit themselves well enough, even if I never entirely bought Nash’s change of heart which drives the plot in the last third or so of the film. I’m mostly puzzled by the score Criterion used for the film, though… not that it’s bad, cos it’s not, it actually suits the film pretty well; it’s just that, frankly, it comes off sonically like an old Vitaphone track despite being newly written, i.e. not just music but sound effects as well, and the latter tend to be distracting just like they did in the old Vitaphone soundtracks I’ve heard. (Doesn’t help that Criterion presents the soundtrack in mono for some reason.) But on the whole it’s pretty well made and well presented; the production is solid early MGM, and the seance fakery actually produces a surprisingly ominous mood that’s more effective than you might expect. This whole set was well worth getting.
I first saw this, as I recall, back in 2002, at which time I was quite panicked by the climax of this film and seriously thought it would in fact end with Norman Kerry’s arms being ripped off, and I was making some very odd squealing noises while watching it. If a then-75 year old silent film could have that effect on me, it had to be something remarkable. 22 years later, as The Unknown approaches its centenary, it perhaps didn’t quite have that effect on me tonight, but it wasn’t that far off… plus in those intervening a second print of the film turned up, thus returning it to its original length and proportions. If Freaks was an odd choice for MGM to make and release in 1932, this was even odder in a way for them to have made five years earlier; it really is one of the most fucked-up romances in 20th century cinema, the criminal trying to keep his… distinctive hand concealed by posing as an armless circus knife thrower and the young woman terrified of the touch of men’s hands, leading to an… extreme makeover, shall we say. This must’ve seemed amazingly grotesque in 1927, cos it sure as hell does in 2024, and I’ve always seen it as the sort of thing which demonstrates how good an actor Lon Chaney was quite apart from his obviously formidable make-up skills. The Unknown is melodrama of somewhat preposterous luridness, but somehow Chaney sells this bizarre proposition, even though Alonzo the Armless is a character that even Werner Herzog might have found excessive. I did kind of miss the Alloy Orchestra’s score from the older release, but that was written for the 49-minute version so wouldn’t have worked the same for this restoration; whatever, though, it’s good to have it back to what appears to be almost its original length. Pleased to see this again too.
As I was saying about films I need to rewatch, this was one of them, having recently scored the Criterion blu-ray with this (ludicrously, I don’t think I’ve ever actually owned this in any form until now), The Unknown and The Mystic… both of which will also be making appearances here. This wasn’t Tod Browning’s first 
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