The genius behind the sideshows and vendors’ gimmicks is the Grand Master of the Spin-Off, Walt Disney, and needless to say, he and his Disney Imagineers have reserved a number of key corner locations for their own Mouse Factory specials: a rocking model of Steamboat Willie’s tub, the Dwarfs’ cottage, the belly of the Whale, and an adults-only show of the girl centaurs from Fantasia with their nippleless breasts and oddly disquieting horse-rumps. Not that the spin-off is original with Walt: he learned the trick from the great granddaddy of them all, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But Disney, a semiliterate cartoonist who can’t draw a straight line and color it brown, seized on the G-man’s invention with all the desperation of a drowning wood-carver and turned it overnight into one of the monumental fortunes of the Western World — already back in the Depression he was admitting to gross sales of over $300,000,000 in Disney products, and there were reported to be tribes in Africa who wouldn’t even accept free bars of soap from missionary doctors if they didn’t bear the Mickey Mouse imprint. Here in Times Square today, his beautiful-beasts exhibits run from pure political drama like “The Three Little Pigs” to good old-fashioned Americanist celebrations, as in the tent where Donald Duck keeps playing “Turkey in the Straw” while Mickey Mouse is trying to conduct everybody else in a performance of the William Tell Overture. He has also built a scale model of Sing Sing prison, using all the little braying schoolboy truants from Pinocchio for the prisoners, and an imaginative simulation, using life-size models with moving eyeballs, of Harry Gold’s complicated fantasy love life. A little far out maybe, but as Professor Jarrod says: “A man has to be a little nuts to be a good showman.” Some say he’s just a quick-buck hustler, but that only means Walt Disney is a man in tune with himself. Hucksterism after all is part of the human constitution: repress it (as that old Yankee Peddler Uncle Sam himself always says, explaining what’s sick about socialists), you get the same results as repressing sex.
While Walt sits in the Whale’s mouth, studying the Death House set and dreaming up further novelties, and Matty Burke burns down Professor Jarrod’s wax museum to collect the fire insurance (“All you have to do is strike a match and the thing is done!” he chortles), New York State Troopers deploy themselves in a concentric series of barricades and roadblocks to defend the Square against protest marches. Commissioner George Monaghan puts his city cops on alert, and all precinct captains and detective squads are ordered to remain on duty through midnight. Newsreel cameramen move cameras and klieg lights into position, and TV generator trucks are brought in before the thickening crowds make it impossible. A concert is arranged up in Central Park — the Goldman Band opening their thirty-sixth season with Honegger’s “March on the Bastille”—to take, up part of the overflow; indeed, the crowds are already pushing north into the Park, east and west toward the rivers, south to Macy’s, which is jammed to the walls this afternoon with shoppers seeking those novel “Dr. T Caps” with five rubbery fingers sticking up on top, inspired by the new Dr. Seuss movie premiering this afternoon at the Criterion. These caps are the occasion among the boys for a lot of wisecracks and naughty monkey business, all of which causes the girls to groan and shake their ponytails and snigger conspiratorially amongst themselves, fanning themselves with movie magazines and shaking their skirts out: my, but it’s hot! The boys agree, but that’s how they like it. They don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tonight, but all squeezed up like this, they can hardly wait. They’ve got knuckledusters and cherry bombs in their pockets, carry signs that read TWO FRIED ROSENBERGERS COMING RIGHT UP! and IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN!
Which is just what the House of Wax heroine Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) would like to do…but not a chance. She has been stripped naked by Professor Jarrod and is about to be plunged into a bath of boiling wax: “There is a pain beyond pain, my dear, an agony so intense it shocks the mind!” Jarrod knows what he’s talking about. When his partner set fire to the wax museum, he tried to save his beautiful creations and was horribly mutilated in the conflagration: his flesh was literally melted. So much for idealism. Unable to use his hands after, he conceived the idea of murdering his models and fixing them in a wax bath, and it’s now his heart’s desire to metamorphose Sue into Marie Antoinette. Her boyfriend, unwaxed, is out cold with his head in a guillotine and is about to get sliced like Globaloney by the Professor’s mad-freak assistant. The cops arrive and break it up, but not before enjoying a stupendous brawl in Natural Vision 3-D in which everything but Sue’s pudicity gets thrown out at the audience. It’s as though, without this moment of unmitigated whoopee in the last reel, it would all be for nothing. Finally, of course, Sue and her boyfriend are rescued as they must be, Professor Jarrod himself perishes in his tub of hot wax, and his crazy assistant gets busted. Lieutenant Brennan (Frank Love-joy) picks up a sculpted head of Jarrod’s assistant and remarks with a wry grin to a fellow cop: “Ya know, Shane, by the time that guy gets outa Sing Sing, this head will grow a long beard!”
The movie lets out and the people pour out onto the street, moving as one aroused body toward Times Square. The sun’s at its hottest, and they gasp for air after the refrigerated atmosphere of the Trans-Lux. One man, still somewhat possessed by the images of famous historical persons going up in flames, their waxy faces melting horrifically, their stiffened bodies crashing forward into his lap, is disoriented by this new swirl of pictures out in the street. Sometimes he staggers forward, sometimes he gets turned around and pushed backwards. It doesn’t help that he has forgotten to remove his 3-D glasses with the cardboard frames, and so sees everything through the eye-straining H-Polarizer haze of alcohol and iodine. He gets swept along in the rush, spinning and stumbling, feeling like Vincent Price lurching about out of his wheelchair. He has had no difficulty in bringing the two film images together in the theater, and in fact he still has an ache in his forehead and the back of his neck from trying not to flinch when the fellow with the bat and ball started whacking the thing right between his eyes, but now, tumbling along out here on the street, he seems to see two separate and unassimilable pictures, each curiously colored. Everything is flat, distances are deceptive, and he keeps crashing into people, getting angry wary stares in reply. An elbow, while remaining very plainly at least eight theater rows out in front of him, nevertheless hits him in the nose. He feels like he’s grown a beard from his forehead down. Somewhere Julius LaRosa is singing “Anywhere I Wander,” and he wonders if it’s possible after all that the world is turned by some malevolent design.
The scene to the right now seems to show a street with laughing shouting people, and the sound track confirms this; the scene to the left, a long row of buildings with large doors and display windows full of flashing reflections. He leans to the left — but he is again deceived: he stumbles off an unexpected curb into the mob’s path: now I’m John Wilkes Booth slumping forward on melting ankles, he thinks, attracting more attention for some reason than usual and worried about his inability to get his own extremities and the feet pounding over them into the same picture. He crawls hand over hand through the stampede, recalling that moment, early in the picture, when the wax museum is ablaze, waxen heads are melting and tilting bizarrely onto collapsing shoulders, glass eyeballs are bulging and falling out, fingernails are dripping, and Vincent Price is dragging himself painfully across the floor in all the fiery havoc, past a little sign that reads MOTHER LOVE. And then the whole room explodes, strewing the audience with burning debris. He reaches, his clothes smoking, feeling like one molten in the furnace, hit by the winged shaft of fate, and run over on the tracks of history, a curb: he pulls himself up over it and presses on until he smacks up against a building which wasn’t in either of his lenses, but which now appears in the right one. He slumps there briefly, thinking: God has not favored my undertakings, my condition is not fundamentally sound.