The Mystery of the Wax Museum

This 1933 Warner Brothers film was made to compete with the famous cycle of horror films produced at Universal Studios and the picture, often stunningly beautiful, is a fascinating oddity. Michael Curtiz directed and the film was shot in technicolor. I'm not certain if the film-stock has faded or if the original colors were the subtle, muted pastels that the picture now displays -- in any event, the movie's palette is remarkable: peach flesh-tones highlighting cavernous turquoise-lavendar spaces sometimes decorated with arabesques of raw orange flame. The plot is familiar: a mad artist has developed a process for making exact replicas of human beings in wax. He has fallen in love with one of his creations, a wax mannequin representing Marie Antoinette. The sculptor's partner burns down the wax museum for insurance money, horribly disfiguring the artist. A few years later, in New York City, a new wax museum is opened and the corpses of beautiful women begin to mysteriously vanish...You can pretty much fill in the blanks from this summary. After a spectacular opening sequences, the fire in the museum with the wax figures wilting in the flames, the movie cuts to Manhattan on New Year's Eve with a mob of drunk celebrants crowding around an ambulance transporting the white-shrouded body of socialite who has committed suicide. The steely greys and blues of night sequence, the white cocoon of the corpse, and the contrast between orgiastic festivities and the conveyance of the dead woman to the morgue all create a powerful impression, heightened by the sudden appearance of a mutilated figure in the morque, shadows lengthened like a giant spider, who steals the corpse. The picture is a strange combination of Grand Guignol and screwball comedy. A tough-talking, plucky girl reporter sets her teeth in the story about the missing corps and won't let go of her scoop despite the skepticism of her boss. She speaks in a staccato lingo of wise-cracks and one-liners. The girl played by Glenda Farrell comes equipped with scream-queen Fay Wray as her best friend and roommate. Miss Wray, of course, ends up stripped naked and fettered to a surgical table like Maria in Lang's "Metropolis" about to be dipped in molten wax. The tragic villain is played by Lionel Atwill and his robust, perfect good looks are, of course, too good to be true. Glenda Farrell's character, alluding, I think to modern art and Picasso, notes that the monster's face is "like some kind of African mask" -- a cubist collage of keloid scars carved in old mahogany. The movie is short, efficiently constructed, and contains several sequences that are very beautiful -- in one, a guileless (and helpless) girl descends through a series of dream-like basements beneath basements, the warm rose tints of her flesh moving like a torch through bluish-green voids, a geometry of struts and metal arches as if under the belly of a vast steel bridge. The elaborate sets are cantilevered, graced with sweeping stairways that spiral sensuously down toward pinkish vats of bubbling wax. In one scene, a corpse suddenly sits up and moans loudly: the morgue attendant laughs: "It's the embalming fluid, makes 'em jump." Roaring through traffic with a playboy millionaire, the girl cub reporter flirts with the rich man behind the wheel. He says: "I've only known you for 24 hours and, already, I'm in love with you." She replies: "Normally, it doesn't take that long." See this movie if you can.