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.

Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

Lionel Atwill in Doctor X

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, George Rosener, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Harry Holman, Mae Busch, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Robert Taskner, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

In Doctor X, Lee Tracy is called on to do two incompatible things: serve as comic relief and play the romantic lead. He succeeds at the former more than he does at the latter, which is not saying much.  (The comic shtick involves things like joy buzzers and exploding cigars, which gives you a sense of the level of humor Tracy is asked to participate in.) The film is a whodunit horror about a serial killer who strikes at the full moon and who leaves his victims mutilated. (The movie calls it cannibalism, but I don't recall any evidence that the killer actually ate the people he murdered.) The chief forensic clue is that the victims were sliced up with a particular kind of scalpel, used only by one facility in the city: a research institute headed by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill). When the police detectives call on Xavier, they are introduced to his research staff, each of whom becomes a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, Lee Taylor (Tracy), one of those anything-for-a-story reporters Hollywood was fond of, is snooping around too, trying to uncover the Full Moon Killer before the police do. This involves Taylor breaking and entering at not only the institute but also Dr. Xavier's creepy gothic mansion on a cliff in Long Island, where he lurks around in some skeleton-filled closets. (Cue the obvious gags.) He also meets Dr. Xavier's lovely daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray), and they inexplicably (at least where she's concerned) hit it off. Naturally, Joanne has to be put in jeopardy and Taylor has to rescue her. Doctor X is mostly remembered for its experiment with two-strip Technicolor, which yields some interesting if washed-out looking images, but also seems inappropriate for the film's sinister old dark house setting. There are a few nice scares among all the goofiness and pseudo-scientific poppycock -- the usual foaming and smoking beakers and flasks and some sparking and arcing electric apparatus -- but in a golden age for horror movies, Doctor X is decidedly second-tier.  

The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, 1932)

Fay Wray and Joel McCrea in The Most Dangerous Game

Bob Rainsford: Joel McCrea
Eve Trowbridge: Fay Wray
Count Zaroff: Leslie Banks
Martin Trowbridge: Robert Armstrong
Ivan: Noble Johnson
Tartar: Steve Clemente
Captain: William B. Davidson

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel
Screenplay: James Ashmore Creelman
Based on a story by Richard Connell
Cinematography: Henry W. Gerrard
Art direction: Carroll Clark
Film editing: Archie Marshek
Music: Max Steiner

Director Ernest B. Schoedsack and actors Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong were literally moonlighting when they made The Most Dangerous Game: During the day they were working on King Kong (1933), which also used many of the same sets. While not the landmark film that King Kong has become, The Most Dangerous Game has some of the same sexy intensity, much of it provided by Wray's ability to look both wide-eyed and sultry. As in King Kong, she is a damsel in distress, trekking through the jungle in entirely inappropriate and flimsy attire. But although Wray is given little to do but shriek, writhe, and run, she manages to persuade us that if anyone could survive such perils, she's the one. Also like King Kong, The Most Dangerous Game carries an ambivalence about the sport of big-game hunting, articulated by Joel McCrea's Bob Rainsford when he admits that being hunted has let him know how the animals he hunted felt. Leslie Banks is the main show, however, using his war-paralyzed face to convey the madness of his supposedly Russian count -- who doesn't seem to speak Russian but instead some kind of gibberish -- with his credo of "Kill, then love." This is a pulse-pounding classic that moves along at a relentless clip from the exceptionally speedy shipwreck to the well-staged chase. It gets much of its energy from Max Steiner's score, which picks up the two notes of the count's hunting horn and embroiders on them effectively.