House of Wax (3D)
Images Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures
House of Wax has long held a special place in debates on 3D cinema, paradoxically directed by André De Toth, who was blind in one eye and couldn’t perceive depth. Is the film a masterpiece precisely because De Toth approached each frame with much more deliberation than his two-eyed peers? What’s certain is that no other 3D movie of those years looks so vivid, so sculptural. Which, in turn, is a perfect fit for a tale of a broken-faced sculptor presiding over a macabre wax museum—played by Vincent Price, ostensibly Hollywood’s most famous art collector of his generation. (Olaf Möller)
OPENING SHORT FILM
Souvenir
Elbert Tuganov, SU, 1977, 9′
Soviet puppet animation propaganda in 3D: The devastating effects of imperialism come back to haunt the ostensible winners of the war.
André De Toth (ca. 1913–2002) was a fabled Austro-Hungarian-born B-movie filmmaker. Starting out in Hungary, he emigrated to England, where he worked for Alexander Korda, then to the US, where he worked for Columbia and United Artists. In 1951, he received his first and only Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for The Gunfighter, a western. Blind in one eye after a childhood accident, he himself was not able to experience the effects of his most famous offering, the 3D movie House of Wax (1953). Frequently working in western, his career declined along with the genre’s popularity. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) saw him in the role of an (uncredited) second-unit director. His last notable work as a filmmaker was the war movie Play Dirty (1968). A man of many tales and stories, de Toth chronicled his life in his autobiography Fragments: Portraits from the Inside.
Screenings
