Tag: Michael Curtiz

This seemed like a logical-ish follow-up to Wax Museum, in that it’s another Warner’s horror, it’s another Michael Curtiz film, I haven’t seen this in years either, and I bought it on blu-ray in the same order with it… plus, at just 66 minutes, it’s even more ruthlessly efficient than the earlier film, and feels, frankly, like more of a B-film. Not actually a B-film per se, I’m sure, but it has the feel of one somehow… It moves in quite curious fashion from old-school Warner’s crime saga to, well, Frankenstein; things open with a criminal going to jail and his associates, including Ricardo Cortez’s crooked lawyer, plan to frame Boris Karloff’s recently released jailbird for murdering the judge responsible. Karloff is duly sprung, and duly wiped out in the electric chair… and then duly restored to life by a scientist experimenting with that sort of thing. Which complicates the gangsters’ plan a little bit, before everything ends with a Things Man Was Not Meant To Know climax… As good as the revival scene is—not quite Frankenstein-grade but not far off—it’s the highlight of a good but kind of minor film which I think is otherwise mostly memorable for Karloff in the lead role. Karloff had quite some influence over the writing of his character, and I reckon every change he suggested was an improvement to what was apparently in the original script; he delivers a first-rate performance as the man who didn’t ask to die and even less asked to live again, subtle and affecting, but the stroke victim bearing of the revived man also makes him menacing when necessary. All of this is filmed in quite lovely fashion, too, Hal Mohr pulls off some great cinematography here… but on the whole it’s not really a great film, and gets by mostly on Karloff. Mind you, from what I read and what I hear in the blu-ray commentary, at least the film we got is a good one and a fair piece of entertainment; if they’d gone with their original ideas for it, I feel we wouldve got something pretty shit instead…

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…