MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

 

(a.k.a. WAX MUSEUM; director: Michael Curtiz)

 

Storyline

“A reporter investigates a series of disappearances and murders linked to a wax museum and a strange sculptor.

 

Review

MYSTERY, a pre-Production Code film, is a fun horror flick (and the final movie made in dual-colored Technicolor).

The film features Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell as Florence, the fast-talking, take-no-guff reporter. It was remade as 3D work (HOUSE OF WAX) in 1953 by Vincent Price and director André de Toth, who was blind in one eye, and could not see the 3D effect. Another notable difference between the two films is that one of the characters in pre-Code MYSTERY is a junkie; in Code-ruled HOUSE, there is no mention of drugs, and that character is an alcoholic. (I don’t remember how the filmmakers handled that element in the 2005 remake, also called HOUSE OF WAX.)

According to IMDb, Atwill and Wray worked with Curtiz on an earlier movie, DOCTOR X (1932), a director known for being unyielding with his actors, something that rubbed Wray the wrong way. Another holdover element from DOCTOR X was MYSTERY’s morgue set, originally a laboratory set in DOCTOR X.

The story runs thusly: in 1921, wax sculptor Ivan Igor (played by Atwill) is betrayed by his business partner, Joe Worth (played with a con man’s swagger by Edwin Maxwell) when Worth torches Igor’s London wax museum for insurance money, leaving Igor to die in the fire. Cut to 1933. Igor─scarred, alive and bitter─shows up in New York with a new museum. Because of his flame-ruined hands, he has less talented artists recreating his beloved, lost-to-fire wax figures, even as people begin disappearing.

The acting in MYSTERY is good, with Atwill’s Igor suitably obsessed with his work, and willing to go to any length to bring it to fruition; Wray plays the good-hearted Charlotte Duncan, Florence’s opposite number roommate: where Florence is go-for-the-throat flamboyant, Charlotte is quiet and uncertain, which does not bode well for her, with Igor’s infatuated gaze directed at her, when they’re introduced by Ralph Burton, Charlotte’s fiancée and Igor’s assistant.

The story runs pretty much the way you would expect it to. The sets and atmosphere are convincing, and the film works on all basic levels. Good movie!