Fay Wray, the last great icon of the early cinema, has passed quietly away at the age of 97. She made her film debut in 1923 in "Gasoline Love", and went on to appear in over sixty movies before retiring in 1958. She came out of retirement briefly in 1980 for the cult movie "Gideon's Trumpet", but never made another film despite persistent rumours that she would one day return. Wray starred in some of early films most controversial classics, including "Street of Sin", "The First Kiss", "The Unholy Garden" and the legendary fable "The Four Feathers". Her success continued with the advent of sound, and her early talkies included "The Bowery", Pancho Villa biopic "Viva Villa" and, of course, "King Kong". The famous poster of the giant ape clasping Wray in it's hand became one of the most enduring images of the silver screen. But for my munny, her finest performance was in the 1932 horror classic "The Mystery of the Wax Museum", directed by Michael "Casablanca" Curtiz. The film was remade in the 1950s as "House of Wax" starring Vincent Price (which happened to give it's name to the first ever Angelhead EP in 1987). But Curtiz's original is by far the superior version.. The released cut of the movie was a mere 77 minutes long, but in the early Eighties, the director's original cut, running at almost two and a half hours, was discovered. I remember watching it on TV late one night with my Dad, and both of us being truly astonished with the scope and depth of the movie. It was classic Curtiz, and Fay Wray's performance has lived in my memory ever since. If you ever have the opportunity to see it, please do.

Of course, any Michael Curtiz film is worth seeing. I recently read that he was voted America's greatest director by the Motion Picture Academy. Ironic, seeing as he was born in Budapest, and made all his early films in Germany, learning his craft from such maverick German directors as G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang. Indeed it was Curtiz who first brought the edginess of European cinema to Hollywood. The reason "Casablanca" is regarded by virtually everybody as the greatest movie ever made is precisely because it is imbued with an atmosphere of cool reality that makes everything from the smallest detail to the most outlandish behaviour utterly believable and acceptable. So brilliantly are the characters drawn into the setting that there is no escape for the audience, you are drawn right in with them, their desires become your desires, their anguishes your anguishes. Before Curtiz, no other Hollywood director had accomplished this so completely, yet there are many films from the golden age of German cinema, the 1920s, that have this ability, even today. The most obvious examples are, of course, "Pandora's Box" and "Metropolis"; but so believable is Murnau's "Nosferatu" that someone actually based a movie ("Shadow of the Vampire") on the idea that Max Schrek was a real vampire. Two great films for the price of one.

Curtiz's filmography is more than just "Casablanca" however. True, that film will always remain his masterpiece, but one should not overlook such other great works as "Mandalay", "Angels with Dirty Faces", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Kid Galahad", "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (based on Maxwell Anderson's play of the Lytton Strachey book), "Mildred Pierce", "White Christmas", "Flamingo Road", "The Scarlet Hour" and "King Creole". Even lesser known films, such as the aforemention Fay Wray vehicle, as well as the likes of "The Third Degree", "Doctor X" (also starring Wray), and "Night and Day" (if you can believe Cary Grant as Cole Porter), are worthy of your full attention. And let's not forget, it was Curtiz who first brought his old pal Bela Lugosi to Hollywood.

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