Frank McHugh

Mystery of the Wax Museum

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A wax figure melts in the flames

Screwball but not comedy, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum is less well known than its remake, 1953’s House of Wax, but more fascinating in many respects, particularly in its portrayal of liberated young women making their way in the world. There’s sex and drugs too, though you wouldn’t bother with it for those. The Hays Code, which cleaned up American movies starting around 1934, wasn’t expressly designed to put women back in their box (discuss) but it did it anyway. The ostensible star of this pre-Code film is eminent stage actor Lionel Atwill, as the driven creator of wax effigies of great historical figures whose London museum burns down in the film’s … Read more

Ex-Lady

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Helen and Don

“A piece of junk” is how Bette Davis described 1931’s Ex-Lady in her 1962 autobiography. By the early 1960s a good chunk of Davis’s stock in trade was disdain but even so it’s a tall claim. The film was, among other things, the first to put Davis’s name above the title. It’s a Hollywood “problem movie”, the problem being the incompatibility of marriage and “young moderns”, as the film calls people like the progressive, independent illustrator character Davis plays, a woman who wants to carry on with life as it is – and not get married to Don (Gene Raymond), the advertising guy she’s currently hooking up with for clandestine sex. Then he … Read more