Waxworks
About Waxworks
A poet takes a job at a fairground waxworks, writing stories for the figures of Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper while the owner's daughter Eva sits beside him. In the Baghdad tale he is the baker Assad: he cuts what he thinks is the Caliph's arm and finds wax, and his wife hides the real Harun in the oven. In the Russian tale Ivan has victims' names set in hourglasses, abducts a bride, and dies turning his own glass. The poet then dreams that the Ripper figure stalks him and Eva through the halls, and wakes.
Cast & crew
More about Waxworks
Paul Leni directed from a screenplay by Henrik Galeen. Neptun-Film produced it and UFA distributed it. Shooting ran from June to September 1923. A fourth story, Rinaldo Rinaldini, was planned and then dropped. Austria saw the film on 6 October 1924; the Berlin premiere was 13 November 1924 at the U.T. Kurfürstendamm.
Themes
Making
Sequences for a Rinaldo Rinaldini episode, with Dieterle as the bandit, were to have been shot in Italy in 1923. The money ran out and the episode was never included.
Reviews
Joel Westerdale, writing in The German Quarterly, noted that the episodes play for laughter as well as for fear.
Look
Helmar Lerski photographed the three episodes. The Baghdad story is played on the crooked palace architecture Paul Leni built for it.
Music
Jon C. Mirsalis wrote a piano score for the 2002 Kino DVD.
Preservation
The film survives in 35mm export prints. An English-language print is in the National Film Library. Deutsche Kinemathek and the Cineteca di Bologna restored it in 2019, with lab work by L'Immagine Ritrovata. Kino International had issued a DVD in 2002 from an earlier Bologna restoration.
Notes
- The German title is Das Wachsfigurenkabinett.
- Emil Jannings plays Harun al-Rashid, Conrad Veidt plays Ivan, Werner Krauss plays the Ripper figure, William Dieterle plays the poet, John Gottowt the proprietor, and Olga Belajeff plays Eva.
- British prints renamed the Ripper figure Spring-Heeled Jack for the censor.
- The Berlin premiere opened with the Ivan episode. Later prints follow Henrik Galeen's script order.
- Leo Birinski is named beside Leni on some credit lists and as a producer on others.
- The wax Harun is missing an arm, and the poet writes that gap into the story.
- Wikidata lists 83 minutes. The Wikipedia article gives 82.
Scenes
- Assad hacks off an arm and finds it is wax.
- Ivan keeps turning the hourglass that has his own name on it.
- The Ripper figure multiplies in the museum corridors until the poet wakes.
Influenced by
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Also available
- Kino International DVD (2002)