Campy Horror in Living Color – The New York Times

Newly restored, Roger Cormans riotously colorful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poes The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Michael Curtizs shimmering pink-and-green Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) are as gaudy as the day they opened if not as scary.

The two vintage horror films are showing as a de facto double bill on Friday and Monday as part of the Museum of Modern Arts annual festival of preservation, To Save and Project.

The Masque of the Red Death was Cormans audacious attempt to make an art film for the drive-in crowd a feast of roistering revelry with intimations of Buuel, Fellini and Bergman. Eugene Archer, the most auteur-minded of the critics at The New York Times, was enthusiastic: The movie represents the dauntless young filmmaker at the top of his form, he wrote.

Also in top form is Vincent Price as a supercilious Satanist prince who terrorizes his subjects by contriving sadistic spectacles of humiliation. His foils include Jane Asher, who wanders through the proceedings in a state of wide-eyed alarm. Asher, who, as Paul McCartneys girlfriend, personified Swinging London, is one of several local elements. Red Death was shot in England using the sets left over from the seriously medieval Richard Burton-vehicle Becket, of which it might seem a travesty.

Much of the credit for its color-coded look belongs to the British cinematographer Nicolas Roeg. Whether or not Roeg framed the climactic doomsday images to suggest Luca Signorellis Last Judgment frescoes, some critics have taken the movie, which opened the same year as Kubricks Dr. Strangelove, for a Cold War nightmare. (Red Death to be sure.) Indeed, for all its campy excess, Cormans film ends with the Poe storys grim epitaph: And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Archer found The Masque of the Red Death to be vulgar, nave and highly amusing something that could also be said of The Mystery of the Wax Museum. Its color version was assumed lost until a print was discovered in the personal vault of the studio boss Jack Warner after his death in 1978. (For cinephiles, To Save and Project is the equivalent of browsing a used-book store; you never know what might turn up.)

Lionel Atwill, rolling his rs with gusto, plays the Francophile proprietor of a London wax museum whose likenesses of Joan of Arc, Voltaire and Marie Antoinette melt in the orange inferno of a spectacular arson fire set for insurance reasons. A dozen years later, he seeks to revive his operation in New York.

As much a breezily working-class Warner Bros. comedy as a horror film, Wax Museum is rife with body-snatchers and bootleggers as well as things that go boo, and was subject to local censorship. (One shot that drew objections showed Atwills unscrupulous partner using a cigar to torch the museum; another discussed the availability of a particular poison.) Disturbed by the of the movies two-strip Technicolor, the Times critic Mordaunt Hall thought it too ghastly for comfort, observing that after witnessing this unhealthy film, it is very agreeable to gaze upon a short subject dealing with the wonders of Yellowstone Park.

In addition to Atwill, Wax Museum features Fay Wray as the young woman measured to be his new Marie Antoinette, and the last reel is enlivened by her famous shriek of terror. (King Kong, the movie that immortalized her scream, opened two months later.) But Wax Museum belongs to Warner contract-player Glenda Farrell, a slangy, insouciant reporter who could have given lessons in newsroom banter to Rosalind Russell of His Girl Friday. Four years later, Farrell had her own series as Torchy Blane, the lady newshound with a nose for news.

To Save and Project

Through Jan. 20 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.

Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies playing in New Yorks repertory theaters.

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Campy Horror in Living Color - The New York Times

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero