MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

Director: Michael Curtiz

Writers: Don Mullaly, Carl Erickson, Charles S. Belden (original story)

Producers (uncredited): Henry Blanke, Hal B. Wallis

Cast: Glenda Farrell, Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Frank McHugh, Edwin Maxwell, Allen Vincent, Gavin Gordon, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Holmes Herbert, Claude King, Thomas E. Jackson, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Monica Bannister 

In 1921 London, sculptor Ivan Igor’s (Lionel Atwill) waxworks museum is set on fire for the insurance money by his unscrupulous business partner Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell). The two men fight amid the blaze, and Igor is left unconscious as the museum burns down. Twelve years later, Igor is opening a new wax museum in New York City. Due to injuries suffered in the fire that destroyed his London museum, Igor is crippled and can no longer sculpt, but he instructs other artists to do the work of recreating his exhibits. Meanwhile, newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is investigating the suicide of a beautiful model (Monica Bannister) and learns that the woman’s body has disappeared from the morgue. She soon notices that the Joan of Arc wax figure in Igor’s museum bears a striking resemblance to the missing suicide victim. 

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

Mystery of the Wax Museum is director Michael Curtiz’s horror follow-up to his Doctor X (1932). It inherits many of that earlier film’s advantages, while benefiting from a more logical plot. Once again, it stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, it is filmed using the innovative two-strip Technicolor process, it touches upon some pre-Code subjects that would soon be glossed over or removed from later Hollywood films, and its depression era, big city setting provides grit and energy to the proceedings.

The film even shares set pieces with the earlier Doctor X. There is another morgue scene dealt with in more sinister fashion, another shocking reveal of the movie’s menace, a strange, vast set where we learn of the villain’s weird motives, and the final battle while trying to save the damsel in distress. 

This film’s greatest attribute is Glenda Farrell. As the brassy, beautiful, blonde newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey, she provides the mile-a-minute banter and the perseverance to dig out the story that leads us to the revelations behind this movie’s menace. She also provides plenty of caustic contrast to the innocence of her lovely roommate Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray). Despite her hard-boiled front, Farrell’s Florence Dempsey manages to be a very appealing character. Farrell would go on to star again as a feisty newswoman in the '30s Torchy Blane film series. Superman’s co-creator and writer Jerry Siegel was inspired by Farrell’s performances when he added reporter Lois Lane to his hero’s supporting cast of characters. 

The edgier topics touched upon by this pre-Code film are Dempsey’s potential love interest having a history of living with a woman out of wedlock and buying prohibition era bootleg booze, another character being a drug addict and the cops waiting for his withdrawal pains to make him spill some information, Dempsey snatching up a few bottles of bootleg booze right under the noses of the police and telling them that they’ll also take some for themselves, and Dempsey’s greeting to a cop reading a Naughty Stories pulp magazine, “How’s your sex life?” All of these bits ground the film in an earthy, urban environment that humanizes the characters and reminds us that this bizarre mystery is happening in a real world. 

Overall, the film’s construction is more measured and its characters more engaging than the earlier Doctor X. While both films have their very satisfying horror highlights, striking sets, and thrilling climaxes, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a bit more polished and rational as a whole. Both films are fine examples of horror in the early talkies era, and it is a shame that director Curtiz only returned to the genre once more with The Walking Dead (1936). 

When the film was remade as House of Wax (1953), it featured another contemporary cinema innovation/gimmick by being shot in full color 3-D. Like Lionel Atwill in the earlier version, House of Wax star Vincent Price would soon become a horror movie mainstay. 

Both versions are great fun, but I tend to lean toward the original. It seems just a bit more subversive and crackles with that hard-bitten, depression era energy radiating from Glenda Farrell that can always inspire a bit of hope in hard times.