Dracula’s Daughter

Gorier Holden’s
Girl On Girl Suction

Dracula’s Daughter
USA 1936 Directed by Lambert Hillyer
Universal  Blu Ray Zone B

Directed by the man who would go on to direct the first theatrical Batman serial seven years later, Dracula’s Daughter is one of those charming oddities which almost but, doesn’t quite, make sense when you inject it into the overall franchise. The next of Universal’s big ‘monster movies’ after Werewolf Of London (reviewed here), the film takes place literally seconds/minutes after the events of Dracula, with the one recurring character from that film returning... kind of. Once again, Edward Van Sloan does a wonderful job as Professor Van Helsing but, for some strange reason, his name has been changed slightly to Von Helsing for this one.

The film was originally supposed to have been based on the, then unpublished, Dracula short story (aka missing chapter) Dracula’s Guest by Stoker but I think legal issues surrounded it although, conveniently, Dracula had been accidentally left in the public domain and it was back to John L Balderston (among others) to pen a totally new, 'Dracula inspired' adventure... despite the screen credit that it’s based on a work by Bram Stoker.

So we start off quite bravely and unusually, I think, with Van Helsing (wearing a hat I’m sure he isn’t wearing in the prior film) being arrested by two policemen for the ‘murder’ he happily admits to, as they find him standing over Dracula’s corpse. They promptly take the corpse, which really is a poor waxwork’s dummy of Bela Lugosi in the few shots where you can catch a glimpse of the features, to the local lock up and there then ensues a truly unfunny and protracted scene of ‘comedy policemen’ shenanigans before Dracula’s corpse is stolen by none other than the title character, played by a young Gloria Holden.

Meanwhile, Van... sorry... Von Helsing enlists the aid of his former student, the main heroic lead psychiatrist, played by Otto Kruger, to help keep him from the gallows. Kruger looks quite a bit old for the part, honestly... but he’s pretty good in the role and the script between him and his secretary, played by Marguerite Churchill, is excellent. It’s as though the two stepped right out of a 1930s screwball comedy and the chemistry and dialogue is wonderful in the scenes they share together.

Actually there are quite a few good lines in this film, such as Gloria Holden’s lovely parody of Shakespeare... “There are more things in heaven and earth then ever dreamed of in your... psychiatry”. It’s an interesting story too as it follows Gloria Holden’s Countess Marya Zaleska... a reluctant vampire who seeks, coincidentally from the same psychiatrist, a cure for her vampirism. She doesn’t tell him why she keeps seeking him out but she wants to stop having to bite up some young man or woman each night to keep herself alive. She seems to be a strangely reluctant vampire and even goes to the trouble of burning her father’s staked body so he can never rise again (well, I guess that put a stop on anymore films being made about Dracula then, right?). She also seems to have a strange relationship with her truly sinister and, perhaps, somewhat out of place assistant Sandor, played by Irving Pichel.

The film soon becomes a straight ‘solve the murders and then chase the vampire back to Transylvania’ kind of movie by the last reel but there are things touched on such as the suggestion of an idea, at least at the start of the film, that the term ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ could metaphorically mean any young lady who Dracula has bitten and turned into a vampire. Alas, by the last act she has definitely confirmed she is the true heir to Dracula’s castle which is, perhaps, a little less interesting.

The film also features one of the earlier lesbian/bisexual seductions on screen as the countess, an artist, asks a ‘model’ played by Nan Grey to pose for her but can't help but give in to the blood lust which takes her and ends up vamping her up and, ultimately, providing the good guys with a clue as to her whereabouts. The scene doesn’t really pull any punches because the subtext of the thing is pretty overt even now and would have been a lot more stronger on its release in 1936... indeed, while some reviewers either missed it completely or turned a blind eye, others were more condemning in their reading of the scene as it plays out (it was very tightly controlled/censored before it was even shot, too).

The writers have gone out of their way to put in a lot of references to the 1931 Dracula, in ways you wouldn’t expect... especially as a lot of the references come quite late in the picture when the Countess is back at Dracula’s castle. For instance, the set at the start where Edward Van Sloane is recreating his final scenes from Dracula is reminiscent of the original (indeed, lovers of Dracula and Frankenstein will also recognise the hospital set in the film). There are also references to Borgo Pass in Transylvania and some ‘bit part’ actors you may remember from the first film... not to mention that same damned spider web across the entrance to the stairway when Otto Kruger finally arrives at Castle Dracula. One of my favourite references is when, in a party scene in the earlier part of the movie, Holden slips into conversation, in a completely different way to how Lugosi said it, the line... “I never drink... wine.” In that party scene, by the way, you may spot a young Hedda Hopper, who would start up her famous ‘Hollywood star career-killing’ gossip column in the same year.

Also, remember that time when I discovered (young thing that I am), on reading and reviewing the single issue Gold Key Doc Savage comic (review here), that Croydon used to have an airport back then? Well the same airport is referenced here, when the main protagonist takes a plane from Croydon to Transylvania.

And then we have the score... composed, uncredited, by Heinz Roemheld, who did such a good job on Werewolf Of London. Alas, he doesn’t do that great a job here during the comedy sections of the film... the way too ‘on the nose’ and ‘funny music hitting all the action and comments’ moments really don’t work that well here. That being said there’s a nice moment where Gloria Holden is playing the piano, heavily augmented by the orchestra somehow and, as she finds the music she is playing is getting more dark and sinister while Sandor fills her head with malevolent thoughts, she jumps up and shouts “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Well, not only the piano but all the orchestral augmentation stops too, like a bizarre, metatextual musical joke... so that was nice and, perhaps, a little unexpected.

That being said, I loved Roemheld’s score for the montage scene following the chief of police ordering a dragnet be thrown around London... because it’s the same music used for many of the fighting and similar montage scenes in the first of the three Flash Gordon serials (and possibly the two sequels too) released the month before. I’m not sure which of these two Roemheld actually wrote it for though... one was needle dropped (or possibly re-recorded in those days) into the other.

Looking at the film again now, I would say that Gloria Holden’s performance seems, at times, just a little over the top to me and perhaps a bit wooden but it depends what she... and her director... were going for. I could easily say it’s a highly stylised performance done to deliberately invoke a kind of off-kilter strangeness in the character but, either way, it’s certainly one people remember her by, I suspect.

Not much else to say here other than, with the exception of the first Mummy movie, out of all the Universal monster films it’s the Dracula franchise which is the most troubled. It doesn’t, past this one sequel, really hold up as a continuing franchise at all and has new starts and jumps in logic when Dracula reappears (and arguably doesn’t in one case, depending on your view of Son Of Dracula) over the following films... as you’ll see when I continue to review them as I slowly work my way through the Universal Horror franchises over the coming year. Dracula’s Daughter, though, is certainly a fun film and one I’m sure I’ll watch a fair few times more over the coming years.

The Mummy

Of Human Bandage

The Mummy
USA 1932 Directed by Karl Freund
Universal  Blu Ray Zone B

After the surprise success of Dracula (reviewed here) and Frankenstein (reviewed here), Universal embarked on the next of their big horror franchises, once more using their star Boris Karloff (who was by now being billed as Karloff The Uncanny) in the title role of Imhotep, The Mummy who was buried alive for breaking the holy codes of his people and attempting to bring his great love, Ankh-es-en-Amon, back from the dead.

This film was obviously made as a response to Howard Carter’s ‘Tutankhamun’ expedition which had finally struck lucky in 1922 (read more of the whole Egyptian invasion of popular culture around the world in my review of Eyptomania Goes To The Movies right here). One of the news reporters sent to cover that discovery was none other than John L. Balderston, who had of course written the screenplay of Dracula and the stage adaptation which gave rise to that movie.

Here, he writes a mummy movie for Universal but, really, it’s... how can I put this diplomatically... it’s pretty much a stealth rewrite of Dracula in all but name. Several elements which were in Dracula feature here, such as the pseudo-romantic pull of the titular monster on the leading lady, played here by exotic beauty Zita Johann, who is the living embodiment of Princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. To further seal the deal in terms of trying to capitalise on the success of their earlier pictures (not to mention casting the Frankenstein’s monster actor himself as the main antagonist) we also have David Manners reprising his role as the lover of the leading lady who is trying to save her from 'the monster who wants to have his way with her' and Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing in the two Dracula films before and after this, as Dr. Muller, a similar ‘enemy of the monster, knowledgeable in the ways of destroying him’ kind of character.

And every time I watch this film I remember I really liked it and thought I remembered it well, only to find myself seeing it with fresh eyes and having forgotten most of it. It is quite a gripping watch, though and we have Karloff in two different make-ups by Jack Pearce. The bandaged mummy version of Imhotep is quite striking and effective but you only see Karloff in this in one close up shot as he opens his eyes and moves his hand... what a shot though, completely effective with Karloffs inky black whirlpools of eyes slowly imbibing life (the bandaged up ‘dummy version’ of the mummy in his sarcophagus in the long shots never quite matches the close up, sadly). And we see his hand reaching out for the scroll which brought him to life, as we also admire Bramwell Fletcher’s brief appearance as the man who is sent mad by witnessing the wanderings of this reincarnated, bandaged Boris. There were obviously some full mummy sequences shot for this scene in this make up because there is photographic evidence and one shot even made it to one of the lobby cards but, alas, that's it for the bandaged version of Karloff in this movie.

The other make up we see Karloff in, is that of his ‘alter ego’ character Ardeth Bay, once he has assimilated himself into the modern Egyptian landscape of 1932 (ten years after he is resurrected in the opening scenes of the movie). This is absolutely brilliant make up where his skin has completely wrinkled over (goodness knows why nobody in the movie notices this) and it’s helped by some wonderful lighting on some shots, where his black eyes are lit up to become piercing, hypnotic beacons. Of course, in the 1999 version of The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, Ardeth Bay is not the same character as Imhotep at all and is one of the ‘good guys’.

The film is, as I said, pretty much a rerun of Dracula in a lot of ways but it works really well in terms of ‘slightly less original’ entertainment and the chemistry between Karloff and Johann is amazing. Actually, a lot of unused stuff was shot for this movie as we were supposed to see Johann’s Helen Grovesnor/Ankh-es-en-Amon reincarnated over several historical periods such as Ancient Rome and the times of the Saxons, for example. Photographic stills exist for these scenes but they were removed from the movie before release (never to be seen again, alas) and that may be why, compared to the two previous Universal movies, The Mummy is about a quarter of an hour shorter than what we’d expect from these specific ‘monster pictures’ at this period of their history.

Director Freund, who famously got on very badly with his leading lady here, does some amazing work and his German Expressionist cinematography skills are certainly in evidence. The film looks fantastic, it has to be said. This new Blu Ray from Universal certainly does justice to the visual richness of the shots and is definitely a necessary purchase, as far as I’m concerned.

One thing which doesn’t seem to be discussed much... and it really should be... is the use of music in the film. There really shouldn’t be a score here because, after all, we all know that the film which brought the musical score back to talking pictures was Max Steiner’s score for King Kong in 1933 (reviewed by me here), right? Even though he also provided a score for The Most Dangerous Game the year before. Well, whatever you believe, The Mummy certainly has a fair few ‘scored’ passages in it... although I think Kong can certainly be credited with the film that gave Hollywood filmmakers the confidence to reintroduce music properly into their films once more.

So, after going into the music from Swan Lake again during the opening titles, attempting to tie it in with Dracula as a branded Universal horror picture, no doubt... we actually get some sections introduced with underscore, as the titles finish and the music doesn’t stop. It’s not an abundant score by any means but James Dietrich’s compositions are used in a few scenes in the movie as proper underscore as opposed to just standing in for source music, perhaps most notably in what remains of the flashback sequence, where Imhotep shows Helen Grovesnor her past life and again in the sequence where Inhotep causes Arthur Byron, playing the father of David Manners’ character, to have a deadly heart attack by remote control, as it were.    

Unlike the sequels to Dracula and Frankenstein which were soon to be unleashed into the world, the sequels to The Mummy would feature a completely different central character (Kharis the mummy) and have not much to do with this one at all... although the back story to Kharis is pretty much the same as Imhotep and the flashbacks utilise long shots of Karloff from this movie mixed in with Tom Tyler for the close ups during the first one.

If you like your Universal monsters, well this is the first entry in the franchise of one of the big five (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolfman and the Creature From The Black Lagoon) and its importance in the history of the series can’t be overlooked. Also, the 1999 version was pretty much an adventure reboot of this film. But beyond all that, it’s a well made movie which is always entertaining and fun... although a lot seems to be unsaid or possibly just cut from the running time. And Karloff, without moving much and understating his lines, still has such screen presence that he’s... well... ‘uncannily good’, I guess. Definitely one that every film lover should take a look at some time.

Frankenstein

Strickfadenmageddon!

Frankenstein
USA 1931 Directed by James Whale
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Okay so... next up on my Universal Horror rewatch list is James Whale’s Frankenstein, which would eclipse even Tod Browning’s Dracula from the same year and re-enforce the idea that these brand new motion picture spectacles focusing on the, as yet unnamed, genre of ‘horror’ can really bring in a lot of box office take for the studio. So this one was rushed into production with Robert Florey originally scheduled to direct, along with new Dracula star Bela Lugosi as the monster. After some twenty minutes of, sadly lost, test footage of Lugosi in a quite different make up as the monster, the actor turned the job down which, considering what shape the script was in at the time, wasn’t necessarily something you can blame him for but it was certainly a missed opportunity and rocketed Boris Karloff to fame when the final choice of director for the film, James Whale, was brought in and spotted Karloff in the canteen.

After some gruelling evenings of various make up tests with studio monster make up genius Jack Pearce, Karloff was ready. One of Karloff’s contributions to the make-up came by way of a dental bridge in one of his cheeks, which he was able to take out to leave a hollowed out side to his face, something which Pearce accentuated with his brushes. That being said... the haunting make up from this film never looked the same on Karloff in the sequels and one of the contributing factors to that is that, due to his new found fame, popularity and success that this role and others subsequently brought him (in his mid 40s, after already having made over 80 films in Hollywood in minor roles), he was able to afford to get his teeth fixed up properly and so he couldn’t repeat the same trick twice for his subsequent roles as the monster in The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) and Son Of Frankenstein (1939). Indeed, Karloff’s name wasn’t even included in the opening credits of the first movie as he was just left with a question mark where his name should be as “The Monster........?”, just as Elsa Lanchester would have the same treatment in the opening credits of the first sequel. His name was, however, obviously restored for the end credits... ‘a good cast is worth repeating’ as Universal pictures of that period often used to say at the end. Although the typeface they chose for certain words here use these terrible, sideways versions of the letter ‘s’ which I can never get used to.

The film begins with a mirror of something from another film which people haven’t been able to see for about 88 years and which is now deemed lost to time, alas. I’m talking about the lost footage from the 1931 film Dracula (which I reviewed here) in which Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing, came out and gave little monologue to calm the audience down after the picture had finished. It’s a shame that this footage that has never turned up since the first release but Whale, or his studio bosses, chose to open Frankenstein in exactly the same way. This gives it some continuity in terms of Universal trying to create some horror branding in a way... although they possibly didn’t know it yet. So we once more have Edward Van Sloan, who plays Dr. Waldman in this production, come out from behind some curtains and do a little pre-credits speech to warn the ‘faint of heart’ and sensitive souls in the audience of what they are about to see. Of course, by now and after the roaring success of Dracula, this is as much about showmanship as it is about anything else but it’s a nice moment before we go into some opening titles (where Mary Shelley is billed, unbelievably, as Mrs. Percy B. Shelley) and the film starts proper.

The film opens with the end of a funeral with Henry Frankenstein (not Victor as in the original novel) played by Colin Clive and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz played by Dwight Frye, who was so brilliant as Renfield in Dracula, looking on from behind cover and ready to rob the grave in the aftermath for Henry’s experiments. Clive was, in fact, a direct descendent of Clive of India and even acted in a film four years later about his ancestor although, bizarrely, Ronald Coleman actually played the famous Clive. Colin Clive, however, had his own problems and struggled with alcoholism which would lead to complications and help kill him just six years after he filmed Frankenstein (and two years after he reprised his role for the sequel).

Once the mourners are gone we have Frankenstein and Fritz digging up the body and the whole sequence from the funeral to the finish of the scene is a strangely long and protracted affair, taking time to build the atmosphere over many minutes where the later Universal Horrors of the 1940s, which were admittedly more B movies, were as likely to do this kind of set up with visual shorthand. Thanks to film historian Rudy Behlmer on one of the wonderful commentary tracks provided on this latet Blu Ray Legacy Edition (the other is by Sir Christopher Frayling) for pointing out that, with a statue of death present in the background, we have Henry Frankenstein literally shovelling the soil from the grave (amplified with a microphone hidden below) and, literally, throwing dirt in the face of death, via this tombstone statue. It’s a nice comment on Frankenstein’s target of facing down death and bringing life, albeit in monstrous fashion, into the world and, given the placing of the statue and the obvious choice to literally fling the dirt in this particular direction, I think it’s more than likely that Whale or one of the actors probably introduced this concept on the day of shooting and were more than aware of this visual metaphor they were creating.

Following this scene, as Frankenstein and Fritz are wheeling the corpse home, they come across an executed man (or dummy) on a gibbet and Fritz is told to cut him down to add to the good professor’s stock of cadavers and Frye deliberately plays Fritz as nervous and jumpy in the face of all things to do with death... presumably so that in one of the following sequences, when he drops the jar containing the ‘normal brain’, we believe he really is startled and jumping at his own shadow as a bumping sound causes him to lose grip on the jar.

So we come to that scene and here we meet, for the second time, Edward Van Sloan teaching students in his medical college about human biology and specifically about the difference between a ‘normal’ and ‘criminal’ brain and, this is exactly how his jars containing the two brains are, hilariously, labelled up... ‘Normal Brain’ and ‘Criminal Brain’. After the class has finished, Fritz goes down to take the ‘Normal Brain’ but is startled, smashes it and instead absconds with the ‘Criminal Brain’ as a replacement... thus robbing the obvious innocence of the resulting creature and rendering his actions somewhat more fateful in the final analysis. It should perhaps be pointed out that this scene was not in the original novel and neither was Fritz, who was a character invented for some of the many stage versions of the play, one of which this film, like Dracula before it, was based on as opposed to the first version of the source material. That being said, and again thanks to Behlmer for this piece of info, the distinction between the ‘normal’ and ‘criminal’ brain is not made in the stage plays and is therefore a completely new invention for the film. Which is kind of interesting, I think, given its implications.

Okay, so after this we meet Mae Clark as the future Mrs. Frankenstein and her bizarre love triangle person Victor, played by John Boles, a relationship which is almost completely forgotten about for most of the rest of the movie (there’s a reason for this, I suspect and I’ll get back to it later). They decide, along with Frankenstein’s father played by Frederick Kerr and Edward Van Sloan as young Frankenstein’s former teacher, to go out to Henry’s forbidden lab which Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s father, refers to as being in a windmill. This is kinda interesting because it’s not.. its a big watchtower but it was originally meant to have been a windmill and, when the monster ‘returns home’ with Henry at the end of the movie, it is actually to a windmill. So this was possibly overlooked and left in the script at this point in the filming. It’s also mentioned about Henry Frankenstein’s “insane desire to create life” and it says something, I think, about him and the long line of ‘creation mad’ scientists who came after him because, as I always say, they could have a lot more fun creating life in the old fashioned way.

So the various sets in the watchtower look, to me, like they were recycled from Dracula, including the big staircase that Dracula flung Renfield down at the end and, I think, must have been used and recycled from production to production a lot at Universal. As were the wonderful electric gizmos invented by electrician/hobbyist/tinkerer Kenneth Strickfaden, who would build these things as a hobby and, before he knew it, was doing a lucrative business hiring them out to organisations like Universal for their ‘crazy and sparkly lab equipment’ sets. Certainly they are reused, probably along with half the sets, in the Flash Gordon serials which I so love and cherish. The watchtower interiors also seem to have learned somewhat of a lesson from German Expressionism too, with distorted angles to windows and walls and twisted shadows drawn in with light. It doesn’t get to ‘the full Caligari’ as it were in terms of dominating the screen like it does, quite wonderfully, in Son Of Frankenstein in 1939 but... there’s more than a suggestion of it here and it surely works well to building the almost gothic atmosphere of some of the scenes.

During the creation scene we have lines like “Now I know what it feels like to be God” which were cut in some states and completely removed on later re-releases by the more organised censorship board due to being blasphemous. I'll get onto a consequence of one of the cuts made to this film a little later on.

Karloff’s cadaver, which reanimates at the end of the sequence, has a bandaged up head so the audience are unable to see what the creature looks like yet. When he does enter in another scene shortly after, it’s a really unusual entrance and, though it possibly looks a little clunky by today's standards, it must have been something in terms of an audience in 1931 watching it without having seen much in this newly created genre in the ‘talkies’ before. We hear the sound of Karloff’s footsteps and then cut to a shot of the door frame with Karloff pushing open the door as he walks in backwards. He then slowly turns to camera and we finally get a look at that iconic make-up. Then we have two closer shots of his face cut together in quick succession, getting closer and really putting that visage ‘in the face’ of the audience. And the film is full of interesting staging and editing like this. For example, in an earlier scene where Henry asks his three guests if they really want to go into his laboratory, instead of a long shot of them responding, we get three separate close ups of each one looking to the right of the camera and nodding. A very long and drawn out way of doing things which I don’t think you’d catch being done in the same way nowadays.

Okay so I’m not going through the whole movie blow by blow here and you probably almost certainly know the story but there are some nice shot set ups and ways of doing things like the above dotted throughout the movie. Whale’s fondness for dollying from one room to the next via a cutaway section is in evidence at certain points and there’s a wonderful 'two shot' where Karloff is chasing Frankenstein around the rotating inner mechanism of the windmill and you see both of the actors framed in the little rotating rectangles made by the path of said mechanism, one after the other... almost like the director was trying to remind us of the look of an old Zoetrope.

The chase scenes at the end, around mountains which are definitely shot in an interior set, are both magnificent looking but, alas, also unfortunate in that the cyclorama which depicts the clouds in the sky has a lot of wrinkles on it and these are very noticeable... as if the sky was just wallpaper stuck on and it had dried out and started to peel. Which it kinda was, I guess. Of course, various high definition DVDs and now this Blu Ray have made that more apparent to viewers as the years go on and as our technology gets, in some ways, more refined. Still, if you like the film enough I’m sure you can turn a blind eye to this kind of thing.

What the censors for the subsequent re-release versions a few years later couldn’t turn a blind eye too... in addition to the religious iconigraphy and the blasphemy mentioned earlier, was the shot of Frankenstein’s monster running out of daisies to throw in the lake... so he innocently picks up the young girl he’s playing with and throws her in, accidentally drowning her. And this is a nice thing to show just how stupid censorship is because, sometimes, what you cut out makes things worse. I’ve mentioned this before about when they used to slice out the protracted eye gouging scene in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (reviewed here) in this country. It’s such a rubbish effect that when you see the splinter of wood slowly poke the eye out, it really doesn’t look real but, when the actual special effect is cut out, what you imagine is much worse than the actual reality. Well the same thing happened with Frankenstein. When the little girl’s demise is cut after the daisy throwing scene and she turns up shown dead later, what the audience imagines could have happened to her is far worse and, of course, is something else which takes away from the childish naivete of the central creature. Did he rape her? Strangle her? What happened? Thankfully we now have a fully restored print of the movie we can enjoy at home.

And that’s about all I have to say about Frankenstein other than, perhaps, two more quick points...

One, that secondary love interest. It’s made even more apparent when Henry leaves his fiance in the ‘care’ of her friend Victor. Frankenstein was meant to die but the studio changed their mind later and an epilogue was shot with a stand in for Colin Clive who is glimpsed in the next room recovering from his wounds. So that’s this additional Victor character done with and he doesn’t turn up, as far as I remember, even once in the sequel.

The other thing I wanted to say was that, when I said Karloff’s make-up was iconic... I meant just that. There were three previous movie productions of the story before this but it’s this one with Karloff in Jack Pearce’s make-up that is the most imitated and best remembered... it’s influence is beyond measure but, think about what the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the name Frankenstein (who was, indeed, named after his creator in the stage version on which this was based). It’s something you don’t forget and also, although the creature was fully articulate in speech in the original novel, it wasn’t until the second movie that the creature got some, basic, speech and intellect shown. Something which was jettisoned again by the time of the next film.

Frankenstein, like the unforgettable monster with its exaggerated walk (half created by built up boots and boards incapacitating joints), is a classic of its kind and if you’ve never seen this movie and some of its sequels then you are missing out. Personally, I think the next two films in the series are even better than this one but it doesn’t diminish the sheer brilliance of this first film and if you’ve not imbibed you should maybe take a look. There’s a reason why we’re all still talking about these classic Universal monsters after all this time.

Dracula (1931)

Tod Browning’s Ghoul Days

Dracula
USA 1931
Directed by Tod Browning
Original and also rescored version.

Dracula (Spanish audience version)
USA 1931
Directed by George Melford & Enrique Tovar Ávalos
Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, it's about time I got around to writing about my beloved Universal Horror films for this site. The time seems about right what with Universal launching their shared universe movies which they have rechristened their Dark Universe franchise, albeit with a somewhat shaky start with their new version of The Mummy (reviewed here). Of course, their intended first film in this series was Dracula Untold (reviewed by me soon on this very blog) but the box office on that film meant that it was pretty much a false start for them, though it would be very easy to add the Dracula character from that production into the 'modern times' mix, given the last scenes in that film.

Of course, it's pretty obvious with these first, recent attempts at stand alone movies that the company is wanting to cash in on what I shall call the ‘Marvel Effect’ in terms of box office. The teaming up of established cinematic characters to grab a large, almost unhealthy dose of box office cash. They're certainly not the only company to be doing this (DC's Justice League will be with us in November) but of all the companies going for the gold in this manner at the moment... and this is something I've said before in an earlier review... it’s Universal who can perhaps be forgiven for jumping on the multiple monster bandwagon when you take into account that they already started doing this in the early 1940s (although not, interestingly, with their established Mummy character).

And, though this cross pollinating idea doesn't quite start with their 1931 production of Dracula (pretty much the first horror talkie and a big influence on the output of their competitors at the time)... it actually kinda does, in a way. The monster rallies to come just over a decade later were very much incorporating this character in their cinematic DNA. This marks pretty much the first 'official' version of Dracula on screen... not including the very famous, unauthorised German Expressionist classic Nosferatu, which Bram Stoker’s widow had won a legal case against and for which all the prints were supposed to have been destroyed as a consequence of this legal action (fortunately for us, a couple survived).

The film itself is not based on Stoker's novel as such... and neither are very many of the film versions of it either, it has to be said. Instead it is based on his somewhat simplified stage version which he wrote for his boss Henry Irving. I say “somewhat” because it was filtered through a couple of other writer's versions before it was adapted for Universal... the Hamilton Dean version and the John L. Balderstone version, which he subsequently revised for the screenplay here.

The casting was always supposed to be very different. Various actors had been bandied about for the role until the dream team of director Tod Browning and "man of a thousand faces" Lon Chaney as Dracula were signed. Unfortunately, Chaney died of cancer before the production was due to start shooting and, when there was no one left to cast, Universal snapped up Bela Lugosi... who was really lobbying for the part... for an insultingly small salary. We are fortunate that they chose him though (eventually), because he knew exactly what he was doing with the role since he'd been playing the Count to good reviews in the Balderstone play for an astonishingly large number of performances and, indeed, was instrumental to Universal in acquiring the film rights to the play from Mrs. Stoker in the first place.

Joining him from the phenomenally long run of the stage play were Herbert Bunston as Dr. Seward and the inimitable Edward Van Sloan as Dracula's famous nemesis Van Helsing (easily my favourite screen rendition of Van Helsing and I couldn't imagine this film without his amazing presence as much as I couldn't imagine it without Lugosi's Dracula). Like Lugosi, Van Sloane would play his character for a second outing but, whereas Lugosi had to wait until 1949's Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein before he had another crack at his most famous role, Van Sloan would reprise his role of Van Helsing in the first direct sequel to Dracula, the 1936 film Dracula's Daughter. That being said, Van Sloan also turns up in Frankenstein in the same year as this movie and also has a very similar, 'Van Helsingish' role in the 1932 production of The Mummy.

Rounding out the most important members of the cast were Helen Chandler as Mina, Frances Dade as Lucy, David Manners as Jonathan Harker and the absolutely fantastic Dwight Frye as everyone's favourite fly eater, Renfield. Frye's dialogue delivery in this, like that of Lugosi and Van Helsing's, seems almost deliberately slow and stilted, even considering talking pictures had only been going for two years (a silent, intertitled version of Dracula was also released for theatres that hadn't yet had audio equipment put in). This might put off some modern viewers to a certain extent but, if you can get used to the line delivery, it makes for a very rewarding viewing experience totally appropriate to the subject matter and it’s worth giving it a second look to if you couldn't get into it the first time around.

Considering it's the first talking vampire picture (with the lead vampire in question being a very different 'beast' from Stoker's disgusting old man of the novel who was closer, perhaps, to the Nosferatu version of the character) the film never shows the vampires possessing the fangs they are now known for and it never once, in this version shot for English speaking audiences where censorship restrictions were a little more rigid, shows the double puncture marks left in the vampire's victims... although it does, at least, describe them in the dialogue so the audience can get the idea.

There is, of course, no music in this save for the opening titles and the diegetic music (source music from on screen instruments) due to the belief in this period that it would distract from the dialogue. It wasn't until Max Steiner's score for King Kong in 1933 that producers realised the power of the film score in regards to talking pictures (please see my review of King Kong here for the 'strings attached' part of that statement). This, coupled with the unusually pronounced dialogue gives the film a certain eerie quality which it might not otherwise have (and I'll say a little more about 'underscore' in regards to this motion picture in a little while).

In terms of the richness of the visual design of the film, this version has always been viewed as second best when compared to the Spanish language edition shot with a different cast and crew on the same sets and with the same shooting script, through night time shoots when the first production had gone home for the day. I used to adhere to this opinion too but, looking at the two films side by side now, I think they are just very different and the Browning version, shot by cinematographer Karl Freund, is every bit as rich at a visual level, if not more so in some places. I'll get around to talking a bit more about the simultaneously shot Spanish version in a little while.

There's not as much moving camera as in the Spanish version here (as was typical for sound film at this period, the camera was still learning how to be free again and mask the equipment noise) but even where there is fluid camera movement, the Browning version will often cut to a more staged, not quite matching close up version of a character (often Lugosi himself) in much the same way that Sergei Eisenstein used to single out static shots of a character rather than zoom in on them in films such as his classic Battleship Potemkin.

There are many little visual gems in this movie and here are a few of them that I noticed on this viewing:

There's a wonderful scene in the early stages of the film where Dwight Frye's Renfield is standing framed in front of some full length windows in roughly the centre of the screen with his back to us as he looks out. This is intercut with a shot of 'the brides of Dracula' framed in a big open doorway directly opposite that position, echoing the shots both proceeding and succeeding it.

Later on, as Renfield is seen in the hold of the good ship Vesta (actually the Demeter in Stoker's original novel), there is a kind of slightly moving spotlight in the background to give dramatic lighting as he speaks to Dracula in his coffin/crate. This is clearly meant to be the light shining through from an unseen porthole magnified onto the background and utilised for stylistic effect.

There's a particularly beautiful composition in Lucy's bedroom where Lucy and Mina, who is some distance behind Lucy, are sitting in front of a large mirror. In the reverse shot we see Lucy sitting on the left with her back to us, her reflection facing us in the mirror as she talks, slightly taller because of the angle and distance captured in the mirror... and then Mina's relection a little higher still facing us, again due to distance and angle from the reflecting glass. The three bodies in space make an upward diagonal line from left to right, framed by two lamps on either side of the upward frames of the mirror. It’s a pretty amazing composition, as it goes.

In addition to some startling visual designs, there's also the odd moment or two when the editing is just as poetic. My favourite example would be a scene when the main characters are discussing what could have made the two puncture marks on Mina's neck. One of them says, "What could have caused them, Professor?" Suddenly the housekeeper exclaims "Count Dracula!" as if in response to the question but, in actual fact, she's announcing Dracula’s arrival at the house and Lugosi enters in the next shot. It's a nice little touch and it's just these little, electrically charged juxtapositions of interacting elements that make films worth watching in the first place.

The 1998 re-release of the film with a specifically commissioned score composed by Philip Glass is not my preferred choice of viewing, although I have long been an admirer of the music of Glass and, if nothing else, this version serves to illustrate the benefits that having a score can bring to a movie. For instance, the soundtrack detracts greatly from the stilted feel of the dialogue and makes it maybe a little more palatable for audiences not used to such a degree of aural stylisation. Also, the leitmotif quality of the orchestral textures (rather than the melodies, in this instance), clue the audience in to things which the non-scored film was arguably lacking.

As an example of this, there's the shadow of an unrevealed character on a wall intercut in one scene a little before he enters and it’s revealed to be Renfield when he walks on but I don't really think the intention of this shot was to surprise or wrong foot the audience in any way. I suspect it was literally just an insert shot to clue the viewer in to the fact that Renfield has been listening in for a while. The addition of Glass' score makes it a little more implicit that it's Renfield's silhouette because the 'plucking' style of the orchestration which the viewer will have subconsciously associated with the character is used when it appears. This is exactly the kind of thing music in film is good at and Glass demonstrates it very well here.

When I first saw the score performed live against the screen it was in the same orchestration used here, performed as then by the much celebrated Kronos Quartet. However, when I saw it performed a few years later it was reorchestrated for four different instruments (not just strings) and I remember thinking it was a far superior version of Glass' score than the original one issued for home video and on CD. Alas, I've never been able to track down a recording of that version of the Glass Dracula score.

Okay, so the Spanish version, although using the same sets as the English language version, is very differently shot and staged... in some places it's far superior and in others... not so much. It also includes a scene or two not present in the other but, by a similar token, has other key scenes missing. Of the cast of this version, which still uses footage of Lugosi for some long shots to save money, the only three actors really worth looking at are Carlos Villarías as the Count himself, Lupita Tova as Eva (aka Mina) and Pablo Álvarez Ribio as a Renfield who certainly gives Dwight Frye a run for his money but in a much different style (and really, nobody does it better than Frye). The Spanish version of Van Helsing, for example, doesn't possess the same electrical presence as Van Sloane's delivery of the same role, who's stern visual style with the harsh, blonde widow's peak and the thick, milk bottle glasses adds another level of weight to the role which makes his Spanish counterpart seem a much softer, less satisfying variation of the character.

There are a great many differences, far too numerous to mention in an article of this size, in the Spanish movie. Indeed, apart from the same sets and mostly similar dialogue, it's like watching a completely different movie which, in fairness, it is. However, I'll highlight a few of the more interesting comparisons I’ve noticed next.

In the US version you never really see Lugosi rising from his coffin. Instead, the camera moves away and it's implied that’s what’s happened before it either returns or cuts back to a shot of Lugosi standing next to said coffin. Presumably the sight of Dracula groping his way out of his coffin in shot and messing up his immaculate cape was not seen as a desirable element of the film. I can see that. However, all the 'coffin release' shots of the Spanish version are a lot more interestingly handled. Here you see the, usually already half risen, lid of the coffin opening with a mist floating up from within. Then, when the lid is fully raised, Carlos Villarías pops up from behind the coffin lid (which presumably puts no strain on his cloak) and there you have it. Job done and it's much more effective than the English language version in this respect.

There's also much more made of the supernatural manipulation of objects, such as the self opening and closing doors which gave Dwight Frye so much concern in Castle Dracula. In the Spanish version, even the doors on the second coach that carries Renfield to his Transylvanian rendezvous open and close at will with a disturbingly loud groaning. Similarly, there is more emphasis on the title character flying into people’s rooms as a bat before changing into human form. Although you still don’t see the actual transformation, it’s much more heavily reinforced as an idea whereas, in the other one, you may be forgiven for thinking this is not really covered all that well at all.

In the scene where, in the US version, the brides of Dracula go to attack the feinted Renfield but are waved back by Dracula so he can claim him for himself (in a strangely homoerotic subtext found within the trappings of the vampire genre quite often), the Spanish version shows the brides themselves going down to 'vamp Renfield up'.

The differences continue but, some of them are quite odd.

A little more is made of the implied violence as Dracula eats his way through the crew of the Vesta while he journeys to London. However, these sequences include a little less dialogue from Renfield but include a quite incredible, memorable shot of him laughing his head off maniacally as he is framed by the circle of a porthole. A quite menacingly disconcerting shot, as it happens.

That being said, the following scene of Dracula murdering/drinking the Covent Garden flower girl is completely absent from the Spanish version, which is kind of strange. It says a lot about the difference in pacing of more or less the same scenes in the two versions when you consider that the Spanish edition is a full half an hour longer than the US counterpart. However, although the implied violence of this scene has been left out entirely in this version, the twin puncture wounds in the necks of the victims in this are very much a visual presence whereas, as I stated earlier, they were absent in all but dialogue references in the US version. Of course, the costumes on the ladies in question are a lot more racier and low cut than in the US movie so their necks are pretty easily visible all the time (not to mention other bosomy details which their almost transparent attire reveals in certain scenes).

That being said, the scene in Lucy’s bedroom which still does technically take place in a mirror is, while less static, a much more mundane affair in this Spanish version and doesn’t match the visual poetry created in the counterpart scene in Tod Browning’s daytime shoot. Neither is the scene where Renfield crawling across the floor to the unconscious maid as interesting as the version performed by Dwight Frye, which is more dementedly focused as he comes from the back of the shot to the front, rather than what Renfield does in the Spanish version, which just has him crawling in from the right hand side of the frame.

There also seems to be an incredible amount of expository dialogue coming from Van Helsing’s character towards the end of the picture. Much more than the English language version. This is not really a good thing although the ‘hypnotic confrontation’ scene between Van Helsing and Dracula seems a little more elabourate and is intercut with the scene where 'vamped up Eva' is trying to bite Jonathan Harker (or Juan Harker as he is known in this one) and get him to take Van Helsing’s crucifix away from him. Both scenes play out as single scenes in the US daytime shoot version. Likewise, the scene where Van Helsing confronts Dracula with the reflecting box has a much more embellished reaction on the Spanish version of the Count. Bela Lugosi is content to knock the cigarette box out of Van Helsing’s hand but Carlos Villarías uses his cane to smash the box from Van Helsing’s hands here.

Another highlight of the different places the directors took their respective versions to includes the final death scene of Renfield. In the Browning version, he is silently strangled to death and then rolls down the big, circular staircase (which would be reused again in films like Frankenstein) to drop off the last bit out of sight behind a chest. In this version, Renfield is screaming as he is half choked to death before being tossed off the same stairs from the top. He’s also not forgotten by Van Helsing as the movie closes, either... his body is still very much visible and the focus of the Professor's attention in the last moments of the film.

A very important difference, to my mind, would be a scene in the Spanish version which follows the story in which we are treated to a conversation between Van Helsing and Juan that makes it quite clear that the former has driven a stake through the resurrected Lucy’s heart. In the US version, her menacing figure is left undealt with by our heroes. So that’s very interesting because one imagines that these scenes were in the script to be filmed by the other crew... they just chose to omit them, for some reason.

The ‘new’ Universal Legacy Dracula Blu Ray collection contains almost all of the extras from the similarly titled US DVD release of over a decade ago. The films look as spectacular as ever and, in the case of Dracula, have a lot of supporting material including film and Universal Horror historian David J. Skaal’s commentary track for the US version, the alternate Glass soundtrack and the Spanish version of the film... although this last item is as annoying as the previously mentioned set as, if your Blu Ray played doesn’t have a subtitle toggle, there are a lot of shenanigans to be performed to get the English subs up for this. It also doesn’t help that, if you pause it for five minutes and the disc’s screensaver kicks in, it resets the default to stop playing the subtitles when you resume. So that’s not good. However, it is a lovely set with these films looking pretty much better than they ever did before. If you’ve never seen the first authorised versions of Dracula before then this Blu Ray set is a great place to start. Not all the films in the interpenetrating sequence are there (you’ll need the Frankenstein and The Wolfman legacy sets for that) but these are relatively inexpensive sets for the amount of content on them and, unlike the previous Universal Legacy versions, also include Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy on the The Mummy legacy set). It’s a great release and it comes highly recommended from this particular audience member, I can tell you that... give them a go while they’re still out there. Besides, where else can you see a Dracula film where the title character actually has Armadillo’s running around his castle? Not that many, that’s for sure.