Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/18/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933)

Fay Wray and Glenda Farrell in Mystery of the Wax Museum

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Allen Vincent, Gavin Gordon, Edwin Maxwell, Holmes Herbert, Claude King, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Thomas E. Jackson, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Monica Bannister. Screenplay: Don Mullaly, Carl Ericson, Charles Belden. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

The ever-imperiled Fay Wray gets higher billing, but the real star of Mystery of the Wax Museum is Glenda Farrell, playing an intrepid (what else?), tough-talking (ditto) newspaper reporter, Florence Dempsey. Flo's boss, Jim (Frank McHugh), gives her her walking papers, so she sets out to find a sensational story to save her job. She uncovers the sinister plot of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill), who is opening a new wax museum in New York. Igor had a similar museum in London, but it was losing money, so his partner in the business, Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell), burned it down to collect the insurance. Igor was trapped in the conflagration but survived. Handicapped by his wounds, he trains new sculptors to re-create the glories of the old museum. One of the trainees is Ralph Burton (Allen Vincent), whose fiancée, Charlotte Duncan (Wray), turns out to be the spitting image of Igor's most prized sculpture in the old museum, an effigy of Marie Antoinette. Naturally, Igor plans to "sculpt" Charlotte into a new Marie: His method of capturing images is, let's say, not the traditional one. By a bit of breaking and entering, Flo manages to discover the macabre truth behind the wax museum's images. The plot gimmick -- a reporter uncovers a madman's schemes -- is exactly that of Doctor X (1932), Michael Curtiz's other venture into horror movie territory filmed in two-strip Technicolor, which also starred Atwill and Wray. Mystery of the Wax Museum is the better movie, with Farrell giving a better performance as the snoopy reporter than Lee Tracy in the earlier movie. It also has a neater plot, and a real creep factor in the spooky statues -- most of which are actors standing very still. Makeup artists Ray Romero and Perc Westmore and costume designer Orry-Kelly deserve special mention.