The New Pictures

The Mystery of the Wax Museum

(Warner). Warner Brothers started the vogue for gangster pictures and, in the opinion of Vice President Jack Warner, almost every other trend in the cinema since 1927, except the trend toward bankruptcy. This picture, a new experiment in color, is better than the ones which most major companies tried a year or two ago. At once lurid and realistic, colored cinematography is appropriate to mystery stories, particularly to this one which starts with a conflagration in a waxworks gallery.

Connoisseurs of mystery fiction may well despise The Mystery of the Wax Museum because it breaks the rule that everything must be explained at the finish. Otherwise its garish ramifications should be pleasantly exciting. It shows how a sculptor of wax statues (Lionel Atwill), apparently driven insane when his effigies go up in smoke, decides to reproduce them by the highly unlikely process of stealing suitable bodies from the morgue and embalming them in tallow. When a live person suits the purposes of the waxworker, he has no hesitation about resorting to murder. The picture hints rather broadly that the corpse of Justice Joseph Force Crater (who disappeared in Manhattan in 1930) is now a rouged mummy in an exhibition. Just when you expect to learn more about how the proprietor of the wax works conducts his business, the picture ends--because the proprietor falls into a puddle of his own wax and because the girl reporter who discovers his thefts from the morgue becomes engaged to her city editor. Good shot: Marie Antoinette winking sadly as she melts.

The Woman Accused (Paramount). When the editors of Liberty called upon ten contributors for a chapter apiece of a serial story, they solved Paramount's problem of finding a second story with which to follow the symposium-picture, If I Had a Million. The Woman Accused has compromising situations by Ursula Parrott, faux pas by Polan Banks, neurotics by Vicki Baum, plumbing by Vina Delmar, further ingredients by Rupert Hughes, Zane Grey, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Sophie Kerr. It turns out to be a surprisingly unified but solidly routine story about a pretty woman (Nancy Carroll) who, to spare the feelings of the man she loves (Gary Grant), has to murder the villain (Louis Calhern) by hitting him on the head with bric-a-brac. A jury decides she is innocent. Good shot: Nancy Carroll trying to make up her mind to open her suitcase in a cabin on an excursion boat.

The Great Jasper (RKO) is Jasper Horn (Richard Dix), a swaggering horsecar conductor, burdened with a solemn, shrewish wife and blessed with a gracious though dangerous mistress. The mistress is dangerous because she is the wife of Jasper's employer. When the employer finds out, Jasper goes off to Atlantic City, sets up as an astrologer "for women only," wonders light-heartedly why his wife, who comes to Atlantic City also and independently opens a hot-dog stand, disapproves.

Jasper is still vaguely hoping for a reconciliation with his wife a dozen years later when his old friend Mrs. McGowd comes to town. By this time Jasper's sons --one Mrs. McGowd's, one Mrs. Horn's-- are old enough to want to marry the same girl. Jasper tries to straighten out the situation, only succeeds in getting the stroke that kills him. Dying, he becomes morose about his gay life and tries to make amends to his wife by saying, "You're my right hand, Jenny. When I'm with the angels, you will know I'm being true to you. . . ."

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