Mystery of the Wax Museum


Theatrical release poster

Distributed by: Warner Bros.
Release date: February 18, 1933 (U.S.)

Mystery of the Wax Museum is a 1933 American pre-Code mystery-horror film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, and Frank McHugh. It was released by Warner Bros. in two-color Technicolor. It and Warner's Doctor X were the last two dramatic fiction films made using the two-color Technicolor process.

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Preservation

Mystery of the Wax Museum was never reissued domestically, however, it was reissued in Franco's Spain in 1940. Over time it came to be considered a lost film. In 1936, Technicolor-Hollywood ceased servicing two-color printing and is said to have issued a "last call" to their customers for prints as the final imbibition rigs were converted for three-color; records show scattered print runs of some two-color subjects after that date. But the response of most studios was to junk the two-color negatives (which had been stored at Technicolor) of their now-obsolete films. A precious few negatives survived, including the Eddie Cantor musical Whoopee!, which was taken in by Goldwyn in their vaults. Correspondence indicates that in 1940 Goldwyn wanted to make two-color prints for Spain, and Technicolor was still able to service them. Warner Bros. kept the negatives for their two-color cartoons but not their live-action product. By the late 1950s, when the Warner library was being sold in a package for television to Associated Artists Productions, Mystery of the Wax Museum was deemed lost. The title remained on the sales list, but the negative vaults held no preprint to service it.

William K. Everson reported that Warner's London exchange kept a 35 mm color print on hand and he saw the film there in 1947 in free screenings to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Sound. He reports that the print subsequently began to decay and was destroyed. A 35 mm nitrate copy of Reel 1, the "lab reference" reel (Reel 1 with the fire sequence), was still held by Technicolor-Hollywood in the 1960s and screened by historian Rudy Behlmer; today, that reel is not in the Technicolor Collection of the Academy Film Archive and is presumed to have decomposed decades ago.

In 1970 the Warner Bros. studio reference print was found by former studio head Jack Warner in his personal collection. The AFI made a new negative, rather unsuccessfully (cameraman Ray Rennahan told historian Richard Koszarski that it looked so dismal that he walked out of the screening room). United Artists made their own low-contrast negative for TV prints, losing virtually all of the color. The nitrate print screened at Graumann's Chinese Theatre in the early summer, then again at Alice Tully Hall in the 8th New York Film Festival on September 26, 1970, at 4:00 pm, as part of a retrospective, Medium Rare 1927-1933, of films not seen since their first release. It was released in UA's Prime Time Showcase television package in August 1972, first broadcast on the BBC in London before playing sixteen domestic TV markets. In Washington D.C. Mystery of the Wax Museum played on WTOP's Saturday night classic film series "Cinema Club 9" in late 1972. In New York City, it had its first airing in 1973 on WPIX-TV in a Sunday morning slot, cut by 15 minutes for commercials. Later it became a staple on the station's Saturday night Chiller Theater.

In 1988 the new owner, Turner Entertainment, made yet another negative, this one more faithful to the color but hagridden with damage, splices, and missing footage. The Jack Warner nitrate print resides at UCLA, who also hold a French workprint in the PHI collection. The workprint, uncovered by a Los Angeles collector in the early 2000s, has indifferent, pallid plus-green color, French subtitles, an English track, with some reels mute. In 2019 the Film Foundation sponsored a digital 4K restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding from the George Lucas Family Foundation. The Warner print, with superior color but still exhibiting pickups at reel ends culled from different prints, was the primary resource. Made from different matrixes, the French workprint was less pleasing but yielded shots and ends of reels that were tattered, broken or missing in the main print, along with some lost lines of audio. Other missing audio needed to be picked up from other Warner movies, including a line of Glenda Farrell's that was pulled in from Life Begins (1932). Following Rennahan's directives in his oral histories as to how he lit for two-color and what palette he aimed to achieve, the new restoration revealed subtle degrees of color that were latent in the nitrate print but obscured by cross-contamination of the color dyes.

The restored print received its television premiere on the MeTV show Svengoolie on March 13, 2021.

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