Dracula rises from the dead - to appear on DVD
Allow me to play that horror movie staple of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the eastern European villager (just imagine me in lederhosen and mile-wide mustache), and exclaim in a loud, terror-tinged whisper, “Dracula has risen from the dead!”
And indeed he has, at least in his original 1931 form, after being dormant for some four years, the last time he came to DVD shelves, under the auspices of “The Legacy Collection.”
This Halloween, he roams the earth – or at least its video stores – as “The 75th Anniversary Edition,” another of Universal’s endless attempts at squeezing blood out of the creation that has imbibed so much of it.
This first talking adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic was conceived as a vehicle for Lon Chaney Sr., the silent film star with whom directed Todd Browning had enjoyed a fruitful relationship. With Chaney’s unforeseen demise in 1930, the part went, logically, to the man who had made a success of it on Broadway and was still playing it on the road: Bela Lugosi.
The film then – and I suppose it’s no surprise – is a mix of silent film sequences and select scenes from the stage adaptation; part Chaney, part Lugosi. It’s a crude, uneven mix; half the time, Lugosi is Browning’s statuette, posing for arcane lighting schemes and ill-fitting close-ups. The rest of the time, he’s recreating the courtly drawing room dramatics he practiced on the floorboards.
One laments that the film was not made a few years earlier. By the time the cameras rolled, American cinema was in serious transition: not yet ready to part with the purely visual, not able to deal with sound other than to simply record the theatrical. As a silent film, it would have been much better, and Lugosi been just as effective – maybe even more so (he had appeared, after all, in a number of Hungarian silent films.)
It should be noted, however, that this would have put hundreds of nightclub impressionists out of work, for the world would have been deprived of Lugosi’s distinctive voice, with its hound dog’s vowels and its knife-like consonants.
Despite Lugosi’s impact in the role (he would be forced to return to it again and again), the acting honors here belong to Dwight Fry. Fry, as the human insect repellent Renfield, almost immediately replaces his introductory stiffness with a memorable combination of craziness and remorse reminiscent of Peter Lorre.
Surprisingly better in almost all respects is the Spanish version of the film – shot at night on the same sets for the Latino market, a common practice in the Studio Era - thrown in by the Universal marketing department just for laughs. The inherently flamboyant Latin touch makes for smoother camera moves, sexier heroines, and better acting. One small problem, though: their Dracula isn’t scary.
That, in both silent film and stage modes, Mr. Lugosi certainly was.
