Mystery of the Wax Museum
                                                                                                                       
Director: Michael Curtiz
Year: 1933
Rating: 7.5
It's too bad that this turned out to be the last film made with the experimental two-tone Technicolor film process. To our modern eyes the greens and reds look spectacular, adding mood and horror to the scene. The street scenes at night bathed in green give it a noirish creepy mood and when Fay Wray in reddish flesh tones screams, she has never looked lovelier. But the public didn't take to it, it was expensive and Warners stopped after producing Manhattan Parade, Doctor X and this film. There had been others before this but most of the two-tone negatives were lost or thrown out. The restoration process to put this film back together from various sources with the colors intact was a momentous task.



This film has no doubt lost much of its impact since the pre-code days, but is still a marvelous film to look at. Besides the color, the set design by Anton Grot shows his European background in modernist and expressionistic art studies. Director Michael Curtiz had a similar background and the two were to work together on sixteen films. The set for the Wax Museum along with the realistic wax models of famous people is eye-catching and a little terrifying.



There is a fine cast on hand. Lionel Atwill cements his place in the horror genre with this film after Doctor X and the Vampire Bat. The respectable man on the outside; a maniac on the inside. Mad scientists were to become his forte. Also appearing in those two films is Faye Wray on her way to becoming one of the great Scream Queens with her next film, King Kong. Every time I come across Wray, I am startled at her beauty. And then there is Glenda Farrell who actually gets the most screen time in the film as the fast talking risk taking newswoman after a story. She along with Joan Blondell were to become the go to dames for cynical tough characters all soft on the inside. Her editor here is Frank McHugh who was often in the same films as Farrell.



Bodies are disappearing from the morgue. The latest a high society female who was either murdered or committed suicide. Farrell looking for a story to keep her job notices a remarkable resemblance between the disappearing corpse and the Joan of Arc exhibit at the opening of the Wax Museum. Her friend Wray is going with one of the sculptors at the museum and is introduced to the owner, the wheelchair bound Atwill who looks at Wray with abject adoration, my Marie Antoinette. Oh oh. He is of course crazy. Your beauty will live forever. Just let me mold you. In wax.