Even an obvious effect, like the sudden twang of a barrel organ being set in an exhibit, is so clear and dynamic that it finally achieves its original purpose of making the audience jump. These sounds would have been barely audible in 1933, when a typical theatrical speaker reproduced little higher than 8000 Hertz. We now hear the subtle sound of a museum employee slipping a dagger into the chest of the wax figure of Marat. Subtleties that have been forever masked, like the heavy breathing of the morgue monster, are heard for the first time. It has a clarity now we’ve never experienced, quiet without sounding processed. We worked with Audio Mechanics to restore the sound, removing any noise and adding the missing words. The restored color is more consistent than the original print. It was clear that the Jack Warner print had been cobbled together from a variety of prints with different color balances.
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We partnered with Roundabout Entertainment on the picture clean-up and grading they digitally cleaned the damage and made major repairs and full color correction, as dye transfer prints frequently don’t match across reels. The two nitrate prints were scanned at 4K resolution at Warner Bros.
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We had to borrow Miss Farrell’s words from her 1932 movie Life Begins to fill in the missing dialogue.įrench work print used in the restoration We were also able to get lost frames back, including a line of Glenda Farrell’s: “I asked you to keep your trap shut!” The Warner print has a splice there. We were able to electronically grade it to match the Warner print. We probably picked up half a dozen shots from it, though it had inferior color. There were places where it was undamaged and had additional frames compared to the Jack Warner print. It’s a French work print of some kind for subtitling-some reels with English sound, some reels with no sound, most reels with French subtitles. A second nitrate copy was found in the 2000s by a collector and is now in the Packard Humanities Institute collection. We used a 1933 nitrate print that was discovered around 1969 in Jack Warner’s vault at Warner Bros. What were the source materials for this restoration? Ross, “The Movie Star Who Lived Up the Road.” I began doing film research and discovered that she was in Wax Museum, so I cold-called her one morning and she gave me a phone interview. I got a paper route in the late-'60s on my little country road in New York and actress Glenda Farrell was one of my customers. So it was always in the back of my mind, as it was for many of my generation who started to embrace old movies growing up.
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I had seen the remake House of Wax (1953) on late-night TV so I knew the story and thought, “There’s an earlier version? And it was in color in the 1930s? And the girl from King Kong is in it? Wow, I want to see this.” And then I heard it was lost. It’s a film that’s fascinated me since I was a youngster.
What’s your personal connection to this movie? He also provides in-depth audio commentary as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray/DVD. In this interview, the Archive's Head of Preservation Scott MacQueen discusses the film's production history and recent restoration.
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This restored version will be released on Blu-ray/DVD by the Warner Archive Collection in May. In 2019, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation undertook a new restoration with funding from the George Lucas Family Foundation, combining and repairing the best surviving 35mm elements.
Now a classic, Wax Museum was believed to be lost for decades until an original nitrate print was located in the collection of studio mogul Jack Warner. film reunited legendary director Michael Curtiz with his Doctor X (1932) cinematographer Ray Rennahan, a master in the art and technique of early color film, and actors Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. Released at the tail end of the 1930s horror craze, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) delivered chills with its macabre plot (thought “too ghastly for comfort” and “unhealthy” by one New York Times critic) and effective use of the surreal two-color Technicolor palette, which was soon phased out for the more realistic three-color process. Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum
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