To die, to be really dead. That must be glorious.

Dracula

(1931)

(SPOILERS) The movie that kicked off the Universal horror cycle and thus, pretty much, horror as a (Hollywood) movie genre. Not that you’d know it to look at it now, as the last thing it is is remotely terrifying. Indeed, Garrett Fort’s adaptation – he’d next tackle Frankenstein – of Hamilton Deane’s stage play of Bram Stoker’s novel often plays like unadulterated parody, so ingrained are the tropes and clichés that have accumulated in its wake. Director Tod Browning would make Freaks a year later, a picture that retains the power to disturb, but in the case of Dracula, you’d best not look for Bela Lugosi’s count to give you shivers.

Perhaps what’s most surprising about the picture – or perhaps not, given Freaks – is how little interest it has in the better-known Stoker characters; John Harker (David Manners) barely registers, while the plights of Mina (Helen Chandler) and Lucy (Frances Dade) fail to elicit concern. Instead, Browning seems entirely preoccupied with Dwight Frye’s Renfield and his escalating madness (the line from Frye to Andy Serkis Gollum is surprisingly distinct).

It’s Renfield we follow to Transylvania for a first meeting with the count, much to the consternation of the usual bunch of yokel locals; Frye’s the picture of the vapid silent era lead in these scenes – to send it up, imagine Charles Hawtrey in his stead – making his subsequent derangement all the more effective. Not so effective are the effects themselves, however; you’ll be hard-pressed to keep a straight face when Renfield looks out his carriage to see a bat on a string leading the horses.

Dracula: The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly. The blood is the life, Mr Renfield.

Lugosi’s now better known for being played by Martin Landau in the tired dogend of his career, when only Ed Wood would give him regular employment, but even here, he’s essentially playing a stiff, an effect – and an affect – underscored by the chiaroscuro lighting on his eyes and eccentric accent; there’s an assumption of his impact that, since it’s underwhelming, immediately invites amusement. He’s closer to a slumming it Bond villain than a fearsome individual, even if he initiated the more popular subsequent portrayals of the count as a debonair gentleman.

Renfield: Isn’t this a strange conversation, for men who aren’t crazy?
Van Helsing: Renfield, you’re compelling me to put you in a straightjacket!

Nevertheless, Dracula is engrossing during the early stages, and only begins to drag when the Count embarks for Blighty. The rather ambivalent tone is subsequently alleviated by the scenes with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and in the sanatorium. Van Sloan makes for a very modern, open-minded nemesis for Dracula (“The superstitions of yesterday become the scientific reality of today”), and his interactions with the now locked up Renfield are some of the best in the picture. The scene of Renfield crawling across the floor towards a maid, meanwhile, is one of the few that retains potency.

Elsewhere though, lines like “Dracula is in the house. In the house!” and John, oblivious to the implications of Mina announcing “I love the night” while cursing “There’s that bat again!” do nothing to dispel an impulse towards the derisory. It’s been suggested that cinematographer Karl Freund was left to take charge of much of the shoot by Browning, which would explain a lot. If one’s seeking out an early vampire film that evidences what could be done, cast your eyes back nearly a decade earlier and check out FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, a truly uncanny vision (and one that fell duly foul of copyright infringement).

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

The Party (1968) (SPOILERS) Blake Edwards’ semi-improvisational reunion with Peter Sellers is now probably best known for – I was going to use an elephant-in-the-room gag, but at least one person already went there – Sellers’ “brown face”. And it isn’t a decision one can really defend, even by citing The Party ’s influence on Bollywood. Satyajit Ray had also reportedly been considering working with Sellers… and then he saw the film. One can only assume he’d missed similar performances in The Millionairess and The Road to Hong Kong ; in the latter case, entirely understandable, if not advisable. Nevertheless, for all the flagrant stereotyping, Sellers’ bungling Hrundi V Bakshi is a very likeable character, and indeed, it’s the piece’s good-natured, soft centre – his fledgling romance with Claudine Longet’s Michele – that sees The Party through in spite of its patchy, hit-and-miss quality.

They'll think I've lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

Time Bandits (1981) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam had co-directed previously, and his solo debut had visual flourish on its side, but it was with Time Bandits that Gilliam the auteur was born. The first part of his Trilogy of Imagination, it remains a dazzling work – as well as being one of his most successful – rich in theme and overflowing with ideas while resolutely aimed at a wide (family, if you like) audience. Indeed, most impressive about Time Bandits is that there’s no evidence of self-censoring here, of attempting to make it fit a certain formula, format or palatable template.

I never strangled a chicken in my life!

Rope (1948) (SPOILERS) Rope doesn’t initially appear to have been one of the most venerated of Hitchcocks, but it has gone through something of a rehabilitation over the years, certainly since it came back into circulation during the 80s. I’ve always rated it highly; yes, the seams of it being, essentially, a formal experiment on the director’s part, are evident, but it’s also an expert piece of writing that uses our immediate knowledge of the crime to create tension throughout; what we/the killers know is juxtaposed with the polite dinner party they’ve thrown in order to wallow in their superiority.

I'm an old ruin, but she certainly brings my pulse up a beat or two.

The Paradine Case (1947) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock wasn’t very positive about The Paradine Case , his second collaboration with Gregory Peck, but I think he’s a little harsh on a picture that, if it doesn’t quite come together dramatically, nevertheless maintains interest on the basis of its skewed take on the courtroom drama. Peck’s defence counsel falls for his client, Alida Valli’s accused (of murder), while wife Ann Todd wilts dependably and masochistically on the side-lines.

Miss Livingstone, I presume.

Stage Fright (1950) (SPOILERS) This one has traditionally taken a bit of a bruising, for committing a cardinal crime – lying to the audience. More specifically, lying via a flashback, through which it is implicitly assumed the truth is always relayed. As Richard Schickel commented, though, the egregiousness of the action depends largely on whether you see it as a flaw or a brilliant act of daring: an innovation. I don’t think it’s quite that – not in Stage Fright ’s case anyway; the plot is too ordinary – but I do think it’s a picture that rewards revisiting knowing the twist, since there’s much else to enjoy it for besides.

You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.

Brazil (1985) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam didn’t consider Brazil the embodiment of a totalitarian nightmare it is often labelled as. His 1984½ (one of the film’s Fellini-riffing working titles) was “ the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 ”, in contrast to Michael Anderson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1948. This despite Gilliam famously boasting never to have read the Orwell’s novel: “ The thing that intrigues me about certain books is that you know them even though you’ve never read them. I guess the images are archetypal ”. Or as Pauline Kael observed, Brazil is to Nineteen Eighty-Four as “ if you’d just heard about it over the years and it had seeped into your visual imagination ”. Gilliam’s suffocating system isn’t unflinchingly cruel and malevolently intolerant of individuality; it is, in his vision of a nightmare “future”, one of evils spawned by the mechanisms of an out-of-control behemoth: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. And yet, that is not really, despite how indulgently and glee

A herbal enema should fix you up.

Never Say Never Again (1983) (SPOILERS) There are plenty of sub-par Bond s in the official (Eon) franchise, several of them even weaker than this opportunistic remake of Thunderball , but they do still feel like Bond movies. Never Say Never Again , despite – or possibly because he’s part of it – featuring the much-vaunted, title-referencing return of the Sean Connery to the lead role, only ever feels like a cheap imitation. And yet, reputedly, it cost more than the same year’s Rog outing Octopussy .

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (SPOILERS) I’m not sure you could really classify Shadow of a Doubt as underrated, as some have. Not when it’s widely reported as Hitchcock’s favourite of his films. Underseen might be a more apt sobriquet, since it rarely trips off the lips in the manner of his best-known pictures. Regardless of the best way to categorise it, it’s very easy to see why the director should have been so quick to recognise Shadow of a Doubt 's qualities, even if some of those qualities are somewhat atypical.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019) (SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) (SPOILERS) Kubrick’s masterpiece satire of mutually-assured destruction. Or is it? Not the masterpiece bit, because that’s a given. Rather, is all it’s really about the threat of nuclear holocaust? While that’s obviously quite sufficient, all the director’s films are suggested to have, in popular alt-readings, something else going on under the hood, be it exposing the ways of Elite paedophilia ( Lolita , Eyes Wide Shut ), MKUltra programming ( A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket ), transhumanism and the threat of imminent AI overlords ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), and most of the aforementioned and more besides (the all-purpose smorgasbord that is The Shining ). Even Barry Lyndon has been posited to exist in a post-reset-history world. Could Kubrick be talking about something else as well in Dr. Strangelove ?

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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