Film: DRACULA

Producer: Tod Browning

Date: 1931

Language: English/Hungarian

Music: Franz Schubert, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Richard Wagner

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‘’Bela Lugosi creates one of the most unique and powerful roles of the screen.’’ The Film Daily, 1931

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‘’Although Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 vampire novel had been filmed by F.W. Murnau in 1922 as Nosferatu and director Tod Browning had cast Lon Chaney as a bogus vampire in the silent London After Midnight, this early talkie was the true beginning of the horror film as a distinct genre and the vampire movie as its most popular subgenre.

Cinematographer Karl Freund had a solid grounding in German Expressionist shadowmaking, whereas Browning was the carnival barker king of American grotesquerie, so the film represents a synthesis of the two major strains of silent chills. Like such major American horror properties as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat, this Dracula cones to the screen not from the pages of classic gothic literature but directly from the stage: the primary sources of the screenplay are a pair of theatrical takes on Stoker’s novel, from Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The brake-out star of the new genre was Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula on Broadway and was finally cast in the film after the early death of Browning’s favoured star, Chaney. It may be that the loss of Chaney took some of the spark out of Browning’s direction, which is actually less inspired than George Melford’s work on the simultaneously shot (on the same sets, no less) Spanish version — though the latter suffers from the lack of an iconic Dracula and the fact that it represents exactly the shooting script, whereas the English-language Dracula was considerably tightened by an edit that took out twenty minutes of flab.

Prehistoric in technique and stuck with a drawing-room-centred script Browning’s film nevertheless retrains much of its creaky, sinister power, spotlighting (literally, via tiny pinlights aimed at his evil eyes) Lugosi’s star-making turn as the vampire, squeezing Hungarian menace out of every syllable of phrases such as ‘’Cheeldren of the night, leesten to thaim’’ or ‘In nevair dreenk vine!’’ The film opens magnificently, with a snatch of Swan Lake and a rickety stagecoach taking us and estate agent Renfield (Dwight Frye) to Lugosi’s cobwebbed and vermin-haunted castle. Dracula strides through a curtain of cobwebs, the vampire twitching with bloodlust as his guest cuts his finger while carving bread, and three soulless vampire brides descend upon the unwary visitor.

Once the story hops disappointingly over a dangerous sea voyage and the Count relocates to London, Lugosi calms down. But Edward Van Sloan is staunch as the vampire-killing Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the forgotten Helen Chandler is frailly charming as the bled-dry and semivampurized heroine Mina, and Frye steals every scene that isn’t nailed down when Renfield transforms into a fly-eating, giggling maniac. Castle Dracula, with its five-story Gothic windows, is the art direction highlight, but the London scenes offer an impressive staircase and catacombs for Dracula’s English lair. Browning falters at the last, however with a weak climax in which a weak climax in in which the Count is defeated far too easily, his death conveyed by an offscreen groan as he is impaled.’’ (KN)

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