House of Wax (1953 film)

House of Wax
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Andre DeToth
Screenplay by	Crane Wilbur
Based on	The Wax Works by Charles S. Belden
Produced by	Bryan Foy
Starring	Vincent Price Frank Lovejoy Phyllis Kirk Carolyn Jones Paul Picerni
Cinematography	Bert Glennon J. Peverell Marley Lothrop B. Worth
Edited by	Rudi Fehr
Music by	David Buttolph
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	April 10, 1953 (1953-04-10) (New York) April 25, 1953 (1953-04-25) (US)
Running time	88 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1 million
Box office	$23.75 million

House of Wax is a 1953 American period horror film directed by Andre DeToth. A remake of Warner Bros.' Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the film stars Vincent Price as a disfigured sculptor who repopulates his destroyed wax museum by murdering people and using their wax-coated corpses as displays. It premiered in New York on April 10, 1953, and had a general release on April 25.

House of Wax was the first color 3-D feature film from a major American studio and premiered two days after the Columbia Pictures film Man in the Dark, the first major-studio black-and-white 3-D feature. It was the first 3-D movie with stereophonic sound to be presented in a regular theater.

In 1971, it was widely re-released to theaters in 3-D with a full advertising campaign. Newly struck prints of the film in Chris Condon's single-strip StereoVision 3-D format were used. Another major re-release occurred during the 3-D boom of the early 1980s. In 2005, Warner Bros. released a new movie also called House of Wax, but its plot is very different from the two earlier movies, and the 2005 version received negative reviews from critics.

In 2014, the movie was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot

Professor Henry Jarrod is a talented wax figure sculptor with a wax museum in early 1900s New York City who specializes in historical figures such as John Wilkes Booth, Joan of Arc, and Marie Antoinette, which he considers his masterpiece. Jarrod is aware that his business partner, Matthew Burke, wants out of their partnership, especially since he refuses to add more sensational exhibits, giving a private tour to renowned art critic Sidney Wallace, who agrees to buy Burke out after returning from a Continental trip. But Burke refuses to wait that long and sets the museum on fire for the insurance money. Jarrod attempts to stop Burke and save his precious sculptures, only to be doused in kerosene and left for dead in the fire. Some time after getting the insurance money, Burke is murdered by a disfigured man in a cloak who stages his death as an act of suicide.

Burke's fiancée, Cathy Gray, is murdered by the cloaked figure weeks after Burke's body was stolen from the morgue, who is then caught in the act by Cathy's friend Sue Allen, who flees to the home of Scott Andrews. When Sue visits the police station the following day, she learns that Cathy's body was taken from the morgue. Wallace meets a wheelchair-bound Jarrod at that time, the sculptor having survived with his hands too damaged to sculpt. Jarrod explains his intention of building a new wax museum with his assistants, the deaf-mute Igor and Leon Averill, conceding to popular taste by including a chamber of horrors showcasing both historical crimes (beheading of Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Corday, Anne Askew, and Jean-Paul Marat) and recent events that include William Kemmler's execution and Burke's apparent suicide.

Sue attends the opening of the wax museum and is troubled by the strong resemblance of the figure of Joan of Arc to Cathy. Jarrod claims that he used photographs of Cathy to make the sculpture. But Sue remains unconvinced while Jarrod hires Scott as an assistant, with Jarrod developing an interest in Sue over her resemblance to his Marie Antoinette sculpture, the police agreeing to investigate the museum while recognizing Averill from his criminal background. Sue arrives after hours to meet with Scott, whom Jarrod sent on an errand, and uncovers the horrifying truth that many of the figures are wax-coated corpses, including Burke and Cathy. Sue is confronted by Jarrod, revealed to have pretended to be bound to his wheelchair while wearing a wax mask to conceal his disfigured face and identity as the murderer. He subdues Sue with Igor's help and straps her to a table, preparing to coat her living body with wax. The police, having learned the whole truth from Averill, arrive at the museum and arrest Igor, who attempts to kill Scott before they storm into Jarrod's workshop. They manage to free Sue in time while Jarrod is killed in the struggle when knocked into the boiling vat of molten wax that he prepared for her.

Cast

• Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod
• Frank Lovejoy as Lt. Tom Brennan
• Phyllis Kirk as Sue Allen
• Carolyn Jones as Cathy Gray
• Paul Picerni as Scott Andrews
• Roy Roberts as Matthew Burke
• Paul Cavanagh as Sidney Wallace
• Dabbs Greer as Sgt. Jim Shane
• Angela Clarke as Mrs. Andrews
• Charles Bronson as Igor (credited as Charles Buchinsky)
• Nedrick Young as Leon Averill (uncredited; his name was removed from the credits when he was blacklisted in 1953)

Production

House of Wax, filmed under the working title The Wax Works, was Warner Bros.' answer to the surprise 3-D hit Bwana Devil, an independent production that premiered the previous November. Seeing promise in 3-D's future, Warner Bros. contracted Julian and Milton Gunzburg's Natural Vision 3-D system, the same one used for Bwana Devil, and filmed a remake of their thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), based on Charles S. Belden's three-act play The Wax Works. Among the significant changes: The earlier film was set in the year it was released (1933) whereas House of Wax was moved to circa 1902; the entire newspaper angle in the earlier film and the characters played by Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh were eliminated; and although the masked figure was seen sparingly in Mystery, he is shown early and often in this remake.

Among the foregrounded uses of 3-D in the film were scenes featuring a wax museum fire, can-can girls, and a paddleball-wielding pitchman. In what may be the film's cleverest and most startling 3-D effect, the shadowy figure of one of the characters seems to spring up out of the theater audience and run into the screen. Director Andre DeToth was blind in one eye and unable to experience stereo vision or 3-D effects. "It’s one of the great Hollywood stories," Vincent Price recalled. "When they wanted a director for [a 3-D] film, they hired a man who couldn’t see 3-D at all! André de Toth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He’d go to the rushes and say 'Why is everybody so excited about this?' It didn’t mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened—there weren’t a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody." Some modern critics agree that DeToth's inability to see the depth is what makes the film superior because he was more concerned with telling a thrilling story and believable performances from the actors than simply tossing things at the camera.

Release

House of Wax was one of the big hits of 1953, topping the charts for 5 weeks and earning an estimated $5.5 million in rentals from the North American box office alone. To accompany its stereoscopic imagery, House of Wax was originally available with a stereophonic three-track magnetic soundtrack, although many theaters were not equipped to make use of it and defaulted to the standard monophonic optical soundtrack. Previously, films with stereo sound only were produced to be shown in specialty cinemas, such as the Toldi in Budapest and the Telecinema in London. Only the monophonic soundtrack and a separate sound-effects-only track were said to have survived. As of 2013, no copy of the original three-channel stereo soundtrack is known to exist. A new stereo soundtrack has been synthesized from the available source material.

The 3-D screenings of the film included an intermission, which was necessary to change the film's reels, because each projector of the theater's two projectors was dedicated to one of the stereoscopic images.

Reception

Initial reception

Early reviews were mixed to negative. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found the film "disappointing," writing: "This picture, apart entirely from the fact that it is baldly, unbelievably antique in its melodramatic plot and style, shows little or no imagination in the use of stereoscopic images and nothing but loudness and confusion in the use of so-called stereoscopic sound. The impression we get is that its makers were simply and solely interested in getting a flashy sensation on the screen just as fast as they could." Variety was considerably more excited, writing: "This picture will knock 'em for a ghoul. Warners' House of Wax is the post-midcentury Jazz Singer. What the freres and Al Jolson did to sound, the Warners have repeated in third dimension." Harrison's Reports called the film "a first-class thriller of its kind," and "the best 3-D picture yet made," though it felt that "the added value of depth is not significant enough to warrant the annoyance of viewing the proceedings through the polaroid glasses, and that the picture would have been as much of a chiller if shown in the standard 2-D form, and probably even a greater thriller if shown on a wide screen." The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that as a 3-D film it was "a smoother effort than its predecessors, obviously made with more care and less tiring to the eyes," but that "[i]n all but technical respects, the film is a childish and inept piece of work." Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote: "It's supposed to be a horror movie and it's horrible alright... The novelty has some appeal especially through its long shots into depths, but there is also a feeling of limitations once what novelty there passes. Then it is we go back to the gaga script devised by Crane Wilbur from a story which served one of the early talking films and one is inclined to shudderingly ask: Are we to go through all that again?" John McCarten of The New Yorker also hated the film, writing that he thought it had "set the movies back about forty-nine years. It could have set them back further if there had been anything earlier to set them back to," concluding that "when Mr. Price started clumping around and choking ladies with knots that wouldn't pass muster at a Cub Scout meeting, I took off my glasses once and for all, put on my hat, and left."

Later Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 39 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads "House of Wax is a 3-D horror delight that combines the atmospheric eerieness of the wax museum with the always chilling presence of Vincent Price."

Impact

House of Wax revitalized the film career of Vincent Price, who had been playing secondary character parts and occasional sympathetic leads since the late 1930s. After this high-profile role, Price was in high demand to play fiendish villains, mad scientists and assorted other deranged characters in genre films such as The Tingler, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Supporting player Carolyn Jones, whose career had begun when she appeared in House of Wax, gained a much higher profile more than a decade later in the TV comedy horror spoof The Addams Family as Morticia Addams.

Home media releases

• House of Wax was released in 2-D on DVD by Warner Bros. Home Video on August 5, 2003. As a bonus, the DVD included Mystery of the Wax Museum, the 1933 version of the story, starring Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill, and filmed in the early two-color version of the Technicolor process.
• A 3-D Blu-ray disc was released in the U.S. on October 1, 2013, to celebrate the film's 60th anniversary. Like the DVD, it includes the original 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum. A reissue of this format will be released through Warner Archive Collection on June 23, 2020.

See also

• House of Wax (2005 film)
• List of 3D films of the era
• Mystery of the Wax Museum
• Vincent Price filmography
• Terror in the Wax Museum

External links

• House of Wax essay by Jack Theakson on the National Film Registry web site [1]
• House of Wax at IMDb
• House of Wax at AllMovie
• House of Wax 3-D Expo: Q&A with Actor Charles Picerni at Hollywood Gothique
• Cinefantastique retrospective article