Halloween will be here in two days so today's Cinema Sunday looks at two classic thriller movies.
Starting us off is House of Wax from 1953 starring that master of thrills and horror, Vincent Price.
In New York City in the early 1900s, Professor Henry Jarrod is a talented sculptor who runs a wax museum. He takes extreme pride in his wax statues of historical figures.
Jarrod is particularly fond of his Marie Antoinette.
But Matthew Burke, Jarrod's business partner, is impatient with Jarrod's refusal to create more lurid sensational exhibits that will lure more ticket buying customers so he decides to burn the place down for the insurance money.
Jarrod is horrified as he watches helplessly as his precious wax works melt. The doomed sculptor is still trapped inside the building when it explodes.
Burke collects the insurance money but doesn't get to spend it. A cloaked, disfigured man strangles him and stages it to look like a suicide.
A few weeks later the same man murders Burke's fiancée, Cathy Gray. Her roommate, Sue Allen, comes home and stumbles upon the murderer. The cloaked fiend gives chase but Sue is able to escape to the home of her friend, artist and sculptor Scott Andrews.
Later, the cloaked killer arrives at the morgue where he steals Cathy's body. Damn, that's the 2nd time the morgue as lost a body like that. Someone took Burke's body out of the morgue as well.
Elsewhere and elsewhen, we find out Professor Henry Jarrod is alive (I know, I know. Stop jumping ahead of the plot, guys!) but not exactly well. He is confined to a wheel chair and his hands are deformed. Jarrod is restarting his wax museum but is relying on accomplices, I mean henchmen, no I mean apprentices (that's the ticket) to rebuild his creations.
Scott arrives at the museum, hoping to work with the great master Professor Henry Jarrod. He brings Sue with him who is a bit unnerved by the wax figures.
Especially the waxwork of Joan of Arc which looks disturbingly a lot like Cathy Gray.
Jarrod agrees to take on Scott as a student which also gives him a chance to get closer to Sue. He is amazed by how much Sue looks like his dear long lost Marie Antoinette and asks if Sue would agree to model for him someday.
Yeah, it's creepy.
And Sue is really freaked out at how exactly Joan of Arc looks like Cathy Gray.
So Sue goes to the police. They recognize one of Jarrod's accomplices henchmen apprentices as a known miscreant with a rap sheet so they bring him to ask some questions.
Like what is he doing with a pocket watch belonging to a dead attorney whose body is also missing?
(Yes, I know you know. You figured it out at the start of the post. Just let me do my thing here and let me get to the end of this thing in my own way.)
Sue arrives at the wax museum to meet Scott. Jarrod sent him away on an errand to....
(He's gonna trap Sue and then he's gonna....HEY! HEY! HEY! What did I say about jumping ahead of the plot?)
Sue is alone as she pokes around the Joan of Arc statue and pulls off it's brunette wig... and HOLY CRAP! The statue is Cathy Gray.
(Yes, I know you knew that.)
All the statues are dead bodies dunked in wax.
(Just shut up, OK?)
Then Sue exposes that Jarrod is not confined to a wheel chair but is quite ambulatory. And his normal face is a wax max hiding his disfigured visage!
(Yes, I know this surprises no one.)
And then Jarrod subdues Sue, strips her naked, straps her to a table underneath a spray nozzle hooked up to a vat of boiling wax!
(Yes, I said stripped naked but this is a movie made under the Hays production code. You're gonna have to settle for some nude shoulders and bare feet, you pervs!)
The cops show up after that dude they arrested finally crackded and gave up the deal that Jarrod's new wax museum is a veritable morgue of wax encased corpses.
Jarrod gets knocked into his wax vat and Sue narrowly escapes being turned into a wax statue.
The End
Now it's time for the...
"What's Up With That?" Department.
What's up with dude with the paddle ball knocking the ball towards the camera lens?
House of Wax was made as a 3-D film and some shit had to come towards the camera. Hence the paddle ball guy and that awkward date where Scott takes Sue to see can-can dancers.
Next up for today's Cinema Sunday post is 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera starring Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster and Claude Rains.
Violinist Erique Claudin is dismissed from the Paris Opera House after revealing that he is losing the use of the fingers of his left hand.
Claudin is totally screwed because he has no money, having used all that he earned as a violinist to anonymously fund voice lessons for Christine Dubois, a young soprano to whom he is devoted.
(No, you do not remember any of this from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical because this adaption is definitely going it's own way from the source material.)
In a desperate attempt to earn money, Claudin submits a piano concerto he has written for publication to Maurice Pleyel. Thinking Pleyel is trying to cheat him and steal his music (Pleyel is not trying to cheat Claudin, he's just rude), Claudin strangles the music publisher. Pleyel's assistant throws etching acid in Claudin's face which horribly burns him and damages his face.
Claudin escapes to the opera house where he hides in the tunnels underground, donning a prop mask from the opera house, he becomes....
The Phantom of the Opera.
Meanwhile....
Christine dealing with attention from two different dudes she really isn't all that in to.
- Inspector Raoul Dubert wants her to quit the Opera and marry him.
- Famous opera baritone Anatole Garron hopes to win Christine's heart.
Wait until she finds out about the Phantom. He's off on a mission to make Christine a star, a mission he seeks to accomplish through intimidation, terror and MURDER!
His plans and schemes coming to naught, the Phantom abducts Christine to his underground lair where he professes his love and his desire to hear her sing but only for him.
Raoul and Anatole come charging to to rescue. Raoul fires his gun at the Phantiom, but Anatole knocks Raoul's arm, and the shot hits the ceiling, causing a cave-in. Anatole and Raoul escape with Christine, while the Phantom is seemingly crushed to death by falling rocks.
In the last scene, Anatole and Raoul demand that Christine choose one of them. She chooses neither of them so Anatole and Raoul go off together to have dinner.
I left out a lot of intricacies and nuances of the Phantom's schemes. There's a lot more going than this cursory summation would suggest. This version of Phantom of the Opera is competently made and Claude Rains does very well with the role of the Phantom. But the efforts expended to humanize the Phantom, to fill all the details of his life as Erique Claudin before he became the Phantom sort of undermines the gothic energy of the core story.
Next month, I'm So Glad My Suffering Amuse You will have several posts around the theme of "November Nineties" and we will have 4 weekly Cinema Sunday posts spotlighting movies from the 1990's.
That starts next week.
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