BY HANK REINEKE
Without question, this brand new Blu-ray edition of
director Michael Curtiz’s The Mystery of
the Wax Museum will be heralded as one of the Crown Jewels of Warner Bros. Archive
Collection series. This creaky but historically
significant 1933 classic – once believed to be a “lost film†– has been
painstakingly restored to its original two-color Technicolor glory. Such restoration was made possible through
the financial resources of the George Lucas Family Foundation and the combined
technical and artistic interventions of the UCLA Film & Television Archive
and Warner Bros. entertainment.
The
Mystery of the Wax Museum was not the studio’s first foray into
what is now revered as the Golden Age of horror films. One year earlier, Warner Bros. had released Dr. X (1932), another atmospheric horror
vehicle co-starring the villainous Lionel Atwill and 1930’s Scream Queen Fay
Wray. Like its predecessor, The Mystery of the Wax Museum was
green-lit by studio brass to syphon off at least some of the box-office energy
of several contemporary blockbusters: Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein
and Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
(all three having been released in 1931). Indeed, Glenda Farrell’s character in
Wax Museum makes a no-so-oblique
comparative reference to the competition when she describes the mysterious
caped and scarred figure in Wax Museum
as a fiend that makes “Frankenstein look like a lily.†It was, perhaps, the first popular culture
reference to confuse the monster with the monster’s maker.
For several decades the original Curtiz cut of The Mystery of the Wax Museum, the first
horror film to feature the revolutionary, but only briefly in vogue, two-color
Technicolor treatment, was believed lost. In his authoritative tome “Classics of the Horror Film†(Citadel Press,
1974), cinema historian William K. Everson suggested that a damaged and
deteriorating print of Wax Museum was
still making the rounds of cinemas in war-torn London of the 1940s. In any event, with the exception of a few
surviving dupey and tattered black and white television prints, the original
film as envisioned by Curtiz was considered lost.
The situation may have remained that way had it not been
for the success of the studio’s celebrated 3D remake of the original, House of Wax. This more familiar version, directed by Andre
DeToth and famously featuring Vincent Price as the mad and scarred wax-figure
artisan, would prove to be one of the biggest blockbuster scores of 1953. The film’s popularity would summarily – at
least among horror aficionados and film historians – reignite interest in the
1933 version. Indeed, as in the case of
many “lost†films, the reputation of the original – stoked by the hazy memories
of those who had actually had the opportunity to see the film two decades
earlier – was, perhaps, slightly over-praised and over-cherished.
It hardly mattered as the original Curtiz version would remain
a stubbornly elusive treasure. It wasn’t
until the late 1960s that a serviceable, though far from perfect, copy of a
nitrate original – apparently cobbled together from several different prints –
was found in the collection of studio boss Jack Warner’s personal library. It’s from this print that the reconstruction
team could use as their primary source in the film’s restoration. A secondary source was an inferior and later
surfacing French work print that helped fill-in the gaps where frames or lines
of dialogue from the Warner print were determined to be missing or damaged
beyond repair.