Long past time to put aside notions of film as secondary, if that, to other performing arts. That would reverse lifetimes of snubbery, which makes the gesture all a more worth making. Writers/appreciators of film as art stood up for it from a start, Frank Woods since Nickelodeons came, Otis Ferguson a voice in 1940 wilderness (his essay, Life Goes To The Pictures, a classic). I’ll renew the argument, then, on behalf of Mystery of the Wax Museum, a 1933 release lately, and beautifully, rendered on Blu-Ray. I checked what was hot on Broadway stages during that vintage year. “Major events,” according to Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial History Of The American Theatre, were One Sunday Afternoon, Ah, Wilderness!, Maxwell Anderson’s Both Your Houses, and Men In White. Tobacco Road had begun a phenomenal run. Now then, how many of these are revived today? Consider other, more sedentary, arts. I recent read the A. Scott Berg biography of legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins. Seems work by even authors still held in reverence, certainly over anyone who wrote for movies, had their duds, copies selling in four figures where lucky. Won’t labor the point, but do submit that a Mystery of the Wax Museum belongs high on a list of lasting works, as what else from 1933 sustains so well, especially with UCLA Archive having rescued it from deep well of near-ninety years, a Dead Sea scroll of a movie we but faintly knew till now.
For decades, Wax was figured lost, all quest to see it hopeless. Add to that fifty more years (following 1970 surface of a single print), of not seeing it proper. Customary reasons were lousy lab work, corporate indifference … corporate unawareness, in fact, of treasure they had. Now Mystery of the Wax Museum is everyone’s gift from UCLA Archive and Warners. I lately looked at some You Tubes re archeological finds of ancient New Testament manuscripts, goal being to locate earliest survivors and get close as possible to “original” Gospel text. All this brought to mind ongoing struggle of film preservationists, for without first generation elements to derive from, there is no old movie for us to rediscover and enjoy. Lots are lost, Mystery of the Wax Museum intact only by skin of teeth, or nitrate celluloid, two prints in varied state of raggedness, plus some fragments, from which to derive what we may now own for eighteen or less dollars. Biblical scholars actually have more (comparatively) early New Testament drafts to work from (thousands located so far, it’s said) than Wax leavings for UCLA to consult. Looking at the Archive’s result, you’d not dream it came of such distressed remains, for Mystery of the Wax Museum looks, at least to me, as though it was minted yesterday.
Will this Grand Museum reopening generate a same excitement as when brought from hiding in the early 70’s? Based on delays meeting Blu-Ray demand, I would say it has, and then some. Let Dan Mercer tell of first-time Wake Forest screening for Halloween 1973 that was no mere movie-go --- for us both, this was a pilgrimage (patience ... we'll hear from Dan). Was it years’ wait and longing that made final consummation so meaningful? Two-hour drive, hard back chairs, a tepid Eastman print … these didn’t matter. Ease of access today makes it all a bit comical, the stuff of rose-tint memory. Imagine if Casper Gutman and associates could two-day Air their gold-encrusted Falcon from Amazon prime. The movie chase has become so easy that it is no longer a chase at all. Yet how far would any of us walk, crawl, traverse acres of barbed wire, to see London After Midnight, Hats Off, or The Magnificent Ambersonscomplete? Back in the day, we had to work for our fun, says this old man who tries not living in the past any more than he must.
Is Mystery of the Wax Museum being commercial product what keeps press and a cultural community from standing up to say, This is a very big deal! --- ? What Wax needs is a totem, opinion maker, leading flocks to wonder at this Museum, but are there such voices of cultural authority left? Plenty online, would-be’s by definition because there are so many and who bothers about online writing, but mainstream arbiters seem gone, the kind who could speak from outside our tribe to say, This you all must see. The Is It Art question can be answered straightaway, a dictionary’s definition more than apt where applied to result got by Mystery of the Wax Museum: “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Art’s criteria is more than Wax-met. There is a spell cast by the best films, sort of what I suppose a painting can do, though I’m not so moved by those as images that move, in present case, otherworldly figures to begin with (early 30’s setting, slang, modern if still gothic chilling) to which add color not of this earth, or at the least our time on earth, which for me is how UCLA’s hypo achieves a 2020 state of grace.
Is it unreasonable to imagine that people and clothes and cars of 1933 existed only within limited palette that was two-color Technicolor? I can believe it, and want to believe it. You may persuade me, easily, that fullest color, the kind we know today, was not realized in still photos, movies, or life, until the mid-thirties. Till then was variation on red or green, flesh rendered pink … chartreuse, maybe lime, for skies. Was this a world our forebears knew? Someone please go back in time and let me know if two-color was all folks had in 1933, not just in theatres but out on the street. Receipt of color when I began collecting 16mm was set always on startle, as in no experience ever like these. Senses are heightened when you are young, impressions manifold over what we’d experience again. My print of Adventures of Robin Hood had reds and blues to fairly leap off the wall. Never realized at age twenty that such a vision would not come again. Was it eyes open and receptive to miracles … closed now for losing what had been vividest sight? If so, that loss is restored by UCLA’s Mystery of the Wax Museum. They did not make the fool’s blunder of “correcting” color, an easy out thanks to technology now amok to undo work done by our ancestral betters. Authentic beats pretty every time. I do not want to see Lionel Atwill scooting along before a blue wall.
Truth is, critics of the day disparaged the two-color process, said it was work still in progress and had long ways to go. Trade reviewers wondered how that might affect the boxoffice cume. Scamp-like Rob Wagner, whose publication was Rob Wagner’s Script, gave vent to all aspect of his filmgoing … the movie, its audience, promotions outside. As there was no protocol where it came to evaluating films, Rob could be whatever flavor of iconoclast he chose, nobody caring, for since when were movies a thing to be taken seriously? In case “horrors pall,” he said of Mystery of the Wax Museum, “ … get a load of Glenda Farrell … Glenda is a jolly lass with thick lips, beautiful eyes, a charming lisp, and a smile that would melt a brass monster, let alone a wax one.” To hear trade tell it, we laughed going in, and certainly coming out. Two-color was tide turning by the time Mystery of the Wax Museum arrived. Serious critics to ponder movies, not so many in 1933, admonished the thing or ignored it. Pare Lorentz, whose reviews still resonate, called Wax a “latest boo epic … ghostly, severely cold in design,” which it was, still is, and thank providence for that. What they viewed as limitations, however, became enhancement for viewership to come.
Two-color had an abstract quality, again that other-worldliness. Mystery of the Wax Museum as retrieved by UCLA is a triumph of impressionism in movies (not planned as such, or was it?). Hindrance is virtue, so far as I see them, creeps no show then or since could touch (except Doctor X, now in restorative works at UCLA). Horror after all lies in atmosphere, not someone thrust forward with carving instruments. Universal thrilling was remote, Warners the here and now. Post-Crash and Depression themes unease me without adding monsters. Take this hard life or leave it, says all of precode. Can’t stand the guff? --- there’s the gas pipe. Where was sympathy for softness in the early 30’s? Extras on the recent Blu-Ray, and at You Tube, explain how the UCLA restoration team wove their raiment of two colors. I never knew red or green for such infinite variation. Scott MacQueen does a disc commentary detailing Waxen history back to 1933 and efforts to rescue and circulate it since. No one knows this picture like MacQueen, or has done so much to preserve and celebrate it. Greenbriar’s own absorption dates to 2008,pleading thenfor the digital fix that would wait twelve years. Briefer mention re the rescue cameearlier this year(March). At that time, I wondered if two-color should serve yet as an “aesthetic choice.” Painters have been as adventurous, why not filmmakers? (give me twenty million and I promise to make a two-color Technicolor feature).
0 Yorumlar