The secret of the wax museum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title The secret of the wax museum
Original title Mystery of the Wax Museum
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1933
length 77 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Michael Curtiz
script Charles S. Belden ,
Don Mullaly ,
Carl Erickson
production Warner Bros. ,
Henry Blanke
music Cliff Hess ,
Bernhard Kaun
camera Ray Rennahan
occupation

The secret of the wax museum , or " The wax museum " for short , is a horror film from 1933 with Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray in the leading roles.

content

Ivan Igor is a gifted sculptor and creator of wax figures and partner in a wax museum in London from 1921. Since the idyllic and historical motifs do not meet the taste of the public, who are more hungry for thrills, business is extremely bad. That's why his business partner Joe Worth plans to set the museum on fire in order to collect the sum insured. Igor wants to prevent this and a fight ensues. However, he is knocked unconscious and Worth abandons him to certain death by fire.

Twelve years later (Igor survived the fire with serious injuries), with burned hands and in a wheelchair, he sets out to build a new wax museum in New York . But since he is no longer able to model himself with his mutilated hands, he hires "students" who make the wax figures according to his instructions.

Meanwhile, feisty reporter Florence Dempsey is hired to investigate the alleged suicide of a popular model whose body - like the bodies of several other recently deceased celebrities - was stolen from the morgue by a stranger with a grotesquely disfigured face. Her research leads her to the new wax museum, where some of the exhibits bear a terrifying resemblance to the missing dead.

Ivan Igor has lost his mind through the loss of his beloved wax figures, he kills people who remind him of his earlier works and uses their bodies as a framework for his new wax figures and he has already caught his eye on Florence's girlfriend Charlotte Duncan , who is with Marie Antoinette , who is to be the crowning glory of his once-lost collection. Igor has lured Charlotte into his work cellar, where he processes the bodies, and also wants to make her "immortal" as a wax figure when the police intervenes at the last moment.

In the ensuing argument, he falls into a large vat of boiling wax, and Charlotte is saved.

background

  • “The Secret of the Wax Museum” was one of the last films to be shot using two-color Technicolor , an early color film process.
  • The story is based on the play "The Wax Works" by Charles Belden , who also worked on the script for the film.
  • Fay Wray was cast in a double role, so to speak, at the beginning of the film she can be seen as a Marie Antoinette wax figure - the color film process mentioned above required a larger number of spotlights and that would have melted the originally intended figures would be.
  • In the period from 1946 to 1969 the film suddenly disappeared and was already considered lost, until a relatively well-preserved copy was surprisingly found in the private archive of Jack L. Warner in 1969 . The film was restored, but suffered some damage due to the improper handling, which means that the impressive pastel colors have almost completely faded.
  • A German dubbed version was first seen on April 24, 1987 on ARD .
  • So far, three remakes of the story have been shot, Professor Bondi's Cabinet from 1953 with Vincent Price , Wax Mask from 1997 with Robert Hossein and House of Wax from 2005, which is only thematically based (dead bodies are covered with wax) on the original material.

Reviews

  • "A jewel of the horror film that was long believed lost (...)." (Rating: 2½ stars = above average) - Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz in the lexicon "Films on TV" (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 286
  • "Entertaining horror film with crime-thriller bonds, which became famous because of the perfectly applied two-tone Technicolor process and is one of the classics of the genre; The film, which has been in the archive for a long time, avoids gross atrocities, and Michael Curtiz still knows his cheeky ending today -Gay to have fun. " - " Lexicon of International Films " (CD-ROM edition), Systhema, Munich 1997

literature

  • William K. Everson: Classics of Horror Movies. Munich 1979, pages 112-119

DVD release

  • In 2005 Warner Home Video released the remake Professor Bondi's Cabinet - House of Wax on DVD. The original film The Secret of the Wax Figure Cabinet (1933) was added as bonus material - but only in an English soundtrack, optionally with German subtitles.

Web links