Charles bronson house of wax9/5/2023 ![]() But it’s Bronson’s physical presence that is most perfectly utilized. ![]() It is, of course, Price’s film, as all films featuring the late actor irrevocably become his, his ownership, his to command. House of Wax is at its core a minor film, both in the resumé of its stars and its place in the genre. But it’s Jerrod’s quest for his new Marie Antoinette-his prized possession-that leads him down his most insidious path. Here, Jerrod recreates the “children” Burke burned down: William Kemmler, the first person ever executed in an electric chair, whose wax figure resembles his former investor and a Joan of Arc to Cathy, down to a pierced ear. At this same moment, Professor Jerrod reappears, with a trusty mute assistant (Charles Bronson) in tow, looking for a new investor for a museum that promises the shocking and morbid sensation Burke desperately wanted. Once we flash forward an undisclosed amount of time, we see a web of characters begin to connect: Burke wooing Cathy (Carolyn Jones), a sweet blonde whose good friend and roommate, Sue Ellen (Phyllis Kirk), begins to suspect fowl play when both Burke and Cathy wind up dead, their bodies vanishing mere hours after being brought into the morgue. But Burke doesn’t wait around long enough to find out, burning the museum (and the professor down with it) in an effort to collect the insurance sum of a failed business that preaches “beauty” over profit. ![]() Perhaps Burke is right, and perhaps he predicts an audience’s desire before they can even pinpoint it themselves. “They want shock, sensation, the morbid,” says Burke. “There are people out there who want beauty,” says Jerrod. In some of the film’s opening bits of dialogue, Price’s Professor Jerrod speaks to his museum’s sole investor, Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts), lamenting their differing views of what draws an audience and, thus, a profit: His chronic concern is maintaining elegance, and staying true to the beauty of his “children,” his delightfully eerie yet lonesome pet name for his figures. Here, Vincent Price (ever eccentric) is Professor Henry Jerrod, a sculptor whose museum features wax figures of famous faces throughout history. The film-a certifiable B-movie-is delightfully paced, and we move quickly and eagerly across the landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Whereas the latter was a foray into expected slasher tropes, de Toth’s film falls more in place with Britian’s early-melodramas, finding ties with Gainsborough pictures more so than the Hammer films. (He later changed it at the height of the Red Scare for fear that studios and politicians might find him too Eastern European.) Bronson’s role in House of Wax, while understated and lacking in screen time to the point of non-existence, still manages to play key in this André de Toth-helmed remake of 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (which was also dismally remade in 2005). ![]() This is true both figuratively and literally, as he is credited as Charles Buchinsky in the film. Charles Bronson had yet to become Charles Bronson in 1956’s House of Wax. ![]()
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