NFR Project: 'House of Wax' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “House of Wax”

Dir: Andre de Toth

Scr: Crane Wilbur

Pho: Bert Glennon, Peverell Marley

Ed: Rudi Fehr

Premiere: April 25, 1953

88 min.

“I’m going to give the people what they want – sensation, horror, shock. Send them out into the streets to tell their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death.”

Thus sayeth Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod, a sculptor who specializes in creating wax works in the images of the famous – and infamous – dead. House of Wax is the film that establishes actor Price as the modern Master of the Macabre.

He had played sinister characters in film before. He essayed a Gothic antihero to perfection in Dragonwyck (1946); he appeared as Cardinal Richelieu in Gene Kelly’s Three Musketeers in 1948. True, he was the Invisible Man in The Invisible Man Returns (1940), but Jarrod is his first monster.

In this case, the film is a lavish recreation of an older horror hit. Universal turned The Phantom of the Opera (1925) into a musical extravaganza in Technicolor in 1943; this was Warner Brothers’ version of that. They took the visually innovative Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) – one of the last of the two-strip color features – and made it in color, 3D, and stereophonic sound. It was derived from the 1932 work by Charles S. Belden, who had made a play of it as well as an unpublished short story. That movie featured the inimitable Lionel Atwill as the accursed sculptor.

It is set in New York at the turn of the 20^th Century. Jarrod (Price) runs a “respectable” wax works, but his business partner wants out of the not-so-profitable venture. He proposes burning down the building and taking the insurance money. Jarrod violently disagrees, calling the wax figures his children. The partner sets fire to the place, and after an epic battle Jarrod vanishes into the flames.

The partner gets all the insurance money. A disfigured monstrosity clad in black strangles him and makes his death look like a suicide. He then murders a young woman (Carolyn Jones) and steals her body. The victim’s friend, Sue Ellen, interrupts the murder and becomes the maniac’s target.

Jarrod reappears, wheelchair-bound, hands crippled by the fire. He is determined to reopen his wax museum, but he time he intends to fill it with bone-chilling recreations of famous crimes. He has two assistants (one of them, a deaf-mute, played by Charles Businski, soon to be Charles Bronson) who prepare the, uh, bodies for display. The museum opens, and we are shown a rendering of Joan of Arc that looks exactly like her dead friend.

Suspicious, Sue Ellen breaks into the museum – and discovers that her friend’s corpse is under the coat of wax. Jarrod suddenly appears, able to walk after all. Jarrod has been killing people and turning them into wax figures. Sue Ellen pounds at his face – which shatters, being a wax mask that shows the monster underneath. He subdues her and prepares her to be turned into a statue, his Marie Anntoinette. The police break in and save her and Jarrod falls to his death in a vat of boiling wax.

The film works, although it has a gimmicky aspect that greatly influenced its reception. It’s the first 3D feature film released by a major studio (Bwana Devil [1952] was first). It boasts a gorgeous if garish Technicolor look, and boasts stereophonic sound. All these innovations were designed to woo viewers away from their television sets – TV being the cutting-edge technology of the day. You couldn’t get 3D thrills at home!

The director, Andre de Toth, only had one eye – which rendered him unable to judge 3D effects. They are confined to bodies falling into the screen, a ludicrous demonstration of paddle-ball skill, and the display of ladies’ limbs as they dance the cancan. Still, the novelty sold tickets, and House of Wax came in second at the box office that year.

Ultimately, it is Price’s movie. He was at his best playing men “besieged by fate and out for revenge,” as he put it. Here he plays the erudite artist and the ravening monster beneath it with inestimable skill.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Little Fugitive.