Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933)

Fittingly for Fourth of July weekend viewing, Mystery of the Wax Museum is about a guy who gets screwed over by the Brits and then comes to America to screw other people over. It's a jam-packed horror/mystery/action/comedy/newsroom drama/romance/weird tale that never drags, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Filmmaker Michael Curtiz (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, King Creole) only directed a handful of horror films in an enormous body of work, but two of those horror films (Doctor X, already reviewed on this site, and Mystery of the Wax Museum) were the last two films made with the two-color Technicolor process, which mixed red and green dyes to make a reduced-spectrum color image. The heightened, artificial look of the two-color process fell out of favor with audiences, but it works well in the context of an expressive horror movie.

Mystery of the Wax Museum begins with an eccentric wax sculptor from "the old country," Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill, great as the villains in Doctor X and Murders in the Zoo), working in his London wax museum/studio late at night. He talks to his sculptures and is a little too intense, but he seems like an otherwise harmless fella. He's visited by an old friend who has brought an art dealer with him. The dealer is impressed and says when he returns from a voyage, he'll recommend Igor's work to the National Museum. Igor is pleased, but his mood quickly turns sour when his landlord Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell) turns up and demands the rent. Worth is pissed because the museum barely makes any money, and Igor is months behind on the rent. Worth suggests torching the place and splitting the insurance money, but Igor balks at the idea. Worth sets the place on fire anyway (lots of cool images of melting wax figures), and Igor and Worth get into a massive fistfight amidst the burning wreckage of the museum. After Worth knocks Igor out, he splits and leaves his tenant to die.

Thirteen years later, both men are living in New York City. Worth is now a whiskey bootlegger, and Igor, who survived the fire with massive burns on his arms and legs, is about to open a recreation of his London wax museum in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, he's now insane. Igor, whose burned hands no longer allow him to sculpt, has a criminal crew kidnap bodies from the morgue and sometimes even murder people who resemble his former sculptures. He then preserves the bodies in wax and displays them in his museum.

To present a respectable front, Igor hires an aspiring sculptor who knows nothing of his plans, the milquetoast nerd Ralph (Allen Vincent), to assist with the non-cadaver sculptures. Ralph's girlfriend Charlotte (Fay Wray) looks exactly like Igor's old Marie Antoinette sculpture, and when Igor gets an eyeful of Charlotte, an evil plan is hatched. Meanwhile, Charlotte's roommate Florence (Glenda Farrell) is a wisecracking, fast-talking newspaper reporter whose investigation into the mysterious death of a young woman named Joan Gale leads her to the wax museum and serious suspicions about Igor. Florence also has lots of His Girl Friday-style lighting-quick banter with her equally wisecracking, fast-talking editor Jim (Frank McHugh). (At one point, she says to him, "I'm going to make you eat dirt, you soap bubble." When she blows a raspberry at him, Jim replies, "A cow does that and gives milk besides." Good times.)

An aside about Glenda Farrell. She also played a fast-talking reporter in the following year's Hi, Nellie!, leading Warner Brothers to decide she needed her own fast-talking reporter film franchise, which became the Torchy Blane series. Warners made seven Torchy Blane movies between 1937 and 1939, promoting Farrell as a woman who could say 400 words in 40 seconds. Damn, Hollywood worked its talent like dogs in those days. People had enormous filmographies.

Back to the wax. Will the lovely Charlotte get waxed on, or waxed off? Will wealthy playboy George (Gavin Gordon) take the rap for Joan Gale's death instead of Igor? Will Igor get his revenge on his former landlord? Will an arrested junkie squeal on everybody? Will Florence and Jim slow their rapid-fire witty banter enough to get the story printed? Will Igor and his evil henchmen get their comeuppance? Will Ralph get hip to what's going down?

Curtiz, a journeyman director par excellence, gets lots of creepy, eye-popping images and excellent performances, including two strong female characters when the norm in genre pictures of the era (and many other eras) was to have only one. He's good with the comedy banter, he's good with the closeups, he's good with the fights and car chases and moments of danger, he's good with the atmosphere building, he's good with the actors. He's good at making movies, period. Though this film's remake, House of Wax with Vincent Price, is more well-known, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a good and good-looking film in its own right. Fans of '30s horror should definitely give it a whirl.