by Jason Adams
Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away we once went to The Movies. Otherwise known as The Picture Show, it turned out in 2020 there was indeed, as the prophet Peter Bogdanovich foretold, a Last one for us all. The subject of what was everyone's Last Big Picture before the COVID quarantine shut movie-going down has been a popular one -- personally I've kept that information close to the vest because mine (sigh) was the godawful horror twist on Fantasy Island, and let us never speak of that again.
Let's instead focus on one of my best big-screen cinematic experiences of the so-far short-lived year in such things, which was MoMA's January screening of the drop-dead-stunning restoration of the Pre-Code two-color Technicolor fright-flick Mystery of the Wax Museum. Michael Curtiz's 1933 film, was lost for decades until a pair of prints miraculously appeared and got cobbled together beautifully. Mystery stars Fay Wray (just a few weeks before her romantic wrangle with that big monkey) playing the love-struck, shriek-prone Charlotte Duncan. But even better as far as I'm concerned there's Glenda Farrell, the subject of this here week's episode in our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series...
It feels a little patchy to classify what Farrell's doing in this movie "Horror Actressing" since it's Wray's character Charlotte who gets the bulk of the movie's scares -- Farrell plays the wisecracking girl reporter Florence Dempsey who starts digging up a string of corpses that lead back to the terrifyingly macaroon-tinted Wax Museum of the film's title, blithely dragging her sweetly naive roommate Charlotte into danger as Florence hunts for her blessed scoop. While Wray's wringing her hands and belting out the big notes as the beasties close in on her, Farrell's popping one-liners like amphetamine pills and pushing menfolk outta the way for her above all else prized byline. She is an absolute gas.
Seriously -- you've never heard a dame deliver the line "I'm gonna make you eat dirt, you soap bubble," until you've heard it slip from Farrell's snappy lips. A few years after Farrell made Wax Museum the folks at Warner Brothers gender-flipped a well-known series of detective stories just so they could turn them into a movie starring Farrell, based on the diamond-bright pre-Girl-Friday talents she showcased here in Curtiz's film, and voila the "Torchy Blane" series was born. Nine Torchy movies were released between 1937 and 1939. One of the series' biggest fans was the writer Jerry Siegel, who in 1938 slapped together a little comic called Superman and yes my point is without the goddess Glenda Farrell hunting down wax-murdering maniacs we'd have never had the world's greatest lady reporter, the one and only Lois Lane.
P.S. This restoration recently dropped on blu-ray.