FANTASIA OBSCURA: The Modern, Feminist ‘House of Wax’ You Haven’t Seen
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, being first doesn’t guarantee that you’ll become famous…
The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
(Dist.: Warner Brothers; Dir.: Michael Curtiz)
Asked about horror films set in a wax museum, the average person with a better memory will discuss House of Wax from 1953, featuring Vincent Price:
The ones without a better memory might recall the film with the same name from 2005 featuring Paris Hilton, although you’re better off if you don’t.
Not everyone may realize that there was an earlier film, one that the 1953 film was drawn from, that also shared the later’s characteristic of being a trial run for a technical process the studio was working on.
The original film opens in London in 1923, where we see the talented Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwell) accepting guests at his wax museum. They admire his work so much, in fact, that they’re willing to recommend him to the Royal Academy.
While Igor is ecstatic, his business partner Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell) doesn’t much care, as he shows up with a radical business plan: in order to meet the mounting debts and pay off unpaid rent, he’s going to burn the place down that night and collect on the insurance.
Igor’s upset, but can’t stop his maniac firebug partner, and soon the collection starts to melt in the flames.
Quick transition to 1933 New York where, on New Year’s Eve, the model Joan Gale (the badly under-credited Monica Bannister) turns up dead, the main suspect in her poisoning being her boyfriend George Winton (Gavin Gordon).
However, plucky reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Ferrell), who’s desperate for a story because her publisher is forcing her to up her content, thinks otherwise after a jailhouse interview and, with her manic methods, starts to dig a little deeper.
As we follow Dempsey’s investigation, we find out that Igor survived the London fire, though badly hurt by the incident, and that he’s restarting his wax museum in New York.
The fact that Gale’s body disappears from the morgue, and that she just happens to be the perfect representation of Joan of Arc that Igor had previously sculpted, doesn’t become apparent to anyone before Dempsey’s roommate, Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray), is noted by Igor as a perfect copy for his previously rendered wax impression of Marie Antoinette, which leads to a meeting between sculptor and model that goes very badly:
The one thing viewers of the 1933 original might note that the 1953 version didn’t have was a character that was wholly analogous to reporter Dempsey. An extreme embodiment of the “girl reporter” cliché that was more popular in the early 20th Century which only survived into modern era through the character of Lois Lane in the Superman stories, Ferrell’s character is a force of nature that drives the story forward in ways that later versions do not.
Her need to keep a job, follow an old lead, and score some hooch (this being released before the 18th Amendment got repealed, after all), makes her a dynamic force that later versions of the story sorely miss, as she pries behind the facades and gets to the truth of the matter.
Ferrell’s character doesn’t exactly get the honor due her, as Wray’s Duncan gets higher billing as the lead actress. More secondary character and victim than lead, Wray probably got this position due to her perceived interest from the audience at large, considering only two months after this film’s release did audiences get to see her go up the side of the Empire State Building in RKO’s big picture of that year.
Although it’s a disservice to the work Ferrell did for the film, her plucky girl reporter still stands as a potent driver among a strong cast that included Atwell and Gordon giving everything they can in service to the story.
And the fact that Curtiz, who in later years would helm such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca, gave his actors a pre-Hays Code German Expressionist-inspired setting within which to work, makes the final result worth viewing.
The active references to drug users, bootleggers as being no big deal, and women having a career over their relationship status, gives the film a modern feel that make the later versions (yes, even the 2005 one) feel dated and less vibrant than this one.
Also of note is the technical experimentation of the production. Much the same way the 1953 version was a pioneer in terms of 3D, the 1933 film was one of two of Warner Brothers’ releases under Technicolor’s “System 3” process, which used two color filters to try and recreate the entire color palette.
While the results aren’t great from a general standpoint, the off-color, washed look works well for this film, a deranged take on a grand guignol-inspired crime spree that works better as a nightmare amid the fast folks and fast times that early-Depression America was in at the time.
Much like the waxworks in the story, careful work was needed to bring this film to an audience. Due to a clash over fees claimed between Warner and Technicolor, it was believed that the two-color prints of the film were lost, as the only version to make it into television syndication were the black-and-white prints until a color copy turned up in Jack Warner’s possession after his death in 1970.
The discovery of the color version, as well as a rising interest in pre-Code films, made people consider the work a rediscovered classic that gained more attention years after its release.
The film may not be an object of eternal beauty, which is what Igor wanted to make out of Duncan, but it deserves some remembrance for what it tried to do, and what it gave us.
NEXT TIME: So, I booked this really cheap vacation to Antarctica via U-boat…
