"Made Frankenstein Look Like a Lily"

There's a good idea here. "Mystery of the Wax Museum" is essentially "The Phantom of the Opera," except the madman's art is wax sculpture instead of opera. This has three benefits as I see it: 1) it's a visual art, and this is a film, after all, 2) the murders are embedded--quite literally--in the art, and 3) it's part of the murderer--his face is waxed. Regardless, he still winds up haunting a building housing said art while wearing a mask and seeking out his muse.

There's also a kinship with "Frankenstein," which had more recently been made into a hit film in 1931 and is specifically referenced in this film with the quotation in the headline of this review. Here, the picture is born of fire instead of destroyed by it, and there's the madman assembling his masterpieces from various corpses. What a coincidence, too, that there's a character named "Igor" here, which sounds similar to Bela Lugosi's likewise crippled character in "Son of Frankenstein" (1939) (and which also co-starred Lionel Atwill, by the way). It's as though "Mystery of the Wax Museum" were not only written by two different screenwriters, as indeed it was, but as though it were the merging of two separate scripts--one of them this variation on "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Frankenstein" and the other a similar derivation but from "The Front Page." Indeed, it makes a lily out of Frankenstein's monster--bulbous and yet too cute.

I'm a fan of "The Front Page," too--that is, at least, its filmic adaptations, including the 1931 version and the 1940 "His Girl Friday." A lot of great rapid-fire wisecracking there. Glenda Farrell is no Rosalind Russell, but she does well enough. Plus, it offers its own reflexivity, as with the sculpture business. It's a story about newspaper reporters writing that very story. All very meta, indeed, but both of these scripts put together is very incongruous. Grotesque shocker one moment, amusing repartee the next, and quite a few minutes where there's neither or where the two get in the way of each other. That some of the editing is off and that the policemen tend to seemingly come from nowhere doesn't help, either.

Oh, and it's in two-strip Technicolor--as were the most reflexive bits, the Bal Masqué and originally the opera stagings of "Faust," of the 1925 "The Phantom of the Opera." The restoration of "Mystery of the Wax Museum," which was once considered a lost film, looks great, too, in all its garish glory of reds and greens. Unlike some other early Technicolor films (the 1937 "A Star Is Born" comes to mind), the insertion of color is apt here. The wax sculptures look appropriately more fleshy.