March To Full Color!

Lionel Atwood exposed! Fay Wray horrified!!

This week in 1933, the last two-strip Technicolor feature to be made is released by Warner Bros. The Mystery of the Wax Museum, starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell, directed by the omnipresent Michael Curtiz, opens across the fruited plain and ends up making the brothers Warner a profit of $800,000, much of that profit coming from Europe.

Mystery tells the story of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) who arrives in New York to reestablish a Wax Museum he lost in a fire in London. Bodies begin disappearing from the morgue, with close facsimiles of the dearly departed showing up in museum exhibits. Hard-driving reporter G. Farrell begins to suspect something is amiss ...

Production began the second week of October, 1932 with Curtiz directing in his usual dynamic way. The stylish art direction was done by Anton Grot, a Polish emigre who's first Hollywood assignment was on Douglas Fairbanks's Robin Hood. (Grot worked on multiple DeMille features, then became a prolific Warner Bros. art director, designing Noah's Ark, Captain Blood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and The Sea Hawk among numerous others.)

At the time of The Mystery of the Wax Museum's release, Technicolor was phasing out its two-strip color work, and full, three-strip Technicolor was on its way.

In fact, the complete color spectrum had already arrived. By the time Museum came out in early '33, Walt Disney Productions had released five full-color shorts in the Technicolor's new process. Disney would continue to produce color cartoons straight into the 21st Century. The first live-action feature in three-strip Technicolor, a sample of which is seen directly below, would not be released until June, 1935. (Snow White, Disney's first color feature, would arrive eighteen months later.)

Walt had an exclusive contract for producing full-color cartoons until 1935. The Fleischer brothers (and other animation rivals) were forced to limp along with two-color animated shorts until Disney's lock on full Technicolor expired. Some cartoon studios used the two-color option until the late 1930s.

As for the last two-color live action film, a complete color copy of Wax Museum was considered non-existent for decades. But after Jack Warner's death, a well-preserved print was discovered in Warner's personal film collection. Since then, the flick has been released on DVD and shown on Turner Classic Movies in all its original glory.