Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

A wisecracking young reporter is told she must either get a scoop or be fired.

It’s a good thing it’s New Year’s Eve in 1930’s New York and there’s always a high possibility of finding something good between a judge’s recent disappearance; corpses stolen from various morgues; a socialite’s death which might either be suicide or might implicate her millionaire ex-boyfriend and her subsequent body snatching.

Her roommate’s boyfriend is a starving artist at a wax museum where suspicious looking likenesses have begun to appear…

A prologue set twelve years earlier establishes an insurance scam in which the first incarnation of the museum is burnt down and leaves its main sculptor in a crippled state.

While generally remembered as a Horror film, the focus here is very much on its plucky girl reporter and her humorous meetings with her boss, the cops, the museum workers, etc. making this more an atmospheric murder Mystery and very nearly a romantic Screwball Comedy (with a surprise last minute selection. Why do people feel the comedy is unfunny or dated? It seems fresh to me!) not that all the necessary elements of a Gothic Horror aren’t there: Corpse snatching; a deformed monster; suicide; murder; junkies; creepy wax statues; amazing Expressionistic sets, (a similar London exhibit ran into financial trouble due to lack of interest, but the American set one can afford these impressive sets? Wow!)

The ‘wax’ sculptures are realized sometimes also with live actors (sometimes betraying movement) and still photography of them; but also, with mannequins and during the fire sequence their melting effects are gruesome as all get out.

Of course, the plot doesn’t make sense. How long would it take for the museum to have odor problems? But not even that, if you were to cover a corpse in boiling wax you’d simply end up with a boiled corpse! Weirdly enough, the reporter suspects death masks are being made; something which makes a hell of a lot more sense.

The early two-color Technicolor photography now gives us blues, pinks and greens and nice, deep, black shadows. It is still washed-out with a limited palette, but it’s closer to nature than Doctor X’s greens and oranges.

The dialogue and slang sound remarkably fresh and contemporary, so probably more realistic than the very stylized dialogue of other features from the same period.

Pre-Code elements are an autopsy sequence at a morgue, necrophilia; a (never made explicit but referenced several times) opium junky undergoing withdrawal; less than by-the-book police procedure; bootlegging; pornography (a single magazine is showcased, but the intent is obvious); suicide; murder and body snatching.

With Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, and Frank McHugh.