Monster March: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

On the surface, there is much that should be intriguing about Dracula’s Daughter. It represents the last Universal Monsters film before a hiatus and renewal, it follows closely on the narrative heels of Dracula, and it expands the Dracula mythos by introducing a daughter to the world of the vampire’s curse. Even better, Edward Van Sloan is back as Van Helsing (here, inexplicably, Von Helsing). Yet for a good amount of Dracula’s Daughter’s brief runtime, I found myself bored amid what sounding like a promising premise.

Immediately after driving a stake through Count Dracula’s heart, Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is arrested for murder. Scotland Yard scoffs at his tale of vampires, so his only hope for exoneration lies in proving his sanity. He calls on his friend Jeffrey Garth, a psychiatrist, to join his legal team, but Dr. Garth is slowly falling under the quite-literal spell of Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), the secret daughter of Count Dracula himself.

 

Typing that synopsis out, Dracula’s Daughter sounds like a real winner. I was perhaps unreasonably excited to see Edward Van Sloan return, as he was my second favorite from Dracula (behind Bela Lugosi, naturally). Thanks to Van Sloan, the first reel of Dracula’s Daughter is dynamite, though I concede that I was half-expecting a courtroom drama in which Von Helsing defends his innocence by proving the existence of vampires – though I grant you, that probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was therefore disappointed that Von Helsing’s significance to the plot dwindles as the film goes on, to the point where his arrest for murder is never actually resolved (though we hope and presume that Scotland Yard believes him after settling the strange case of Countess Zaleska). Sadly, the film reduces Von Helsing to an exposition machine, down to repeating a great deal of dialogue from the 1931 film. (What’s more, Dracula’s Daughter actually reuses a shot from 1931, the operating room when Lucy Weston passes, here subbed for one of the Countess’s victims.)

 

Unfortunately, then, Von Helsing is not the focus or even a primary concern of Dracula’s Daughter. In a classic case of wasted potential, Von Helsing never even meets Countess Zaleska. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; where Edward Van Sloan had crackling chemistry opposite Bela Lugosi, it’s hard to imagine him getting blood from the stony performance of Gloria Holden, who is, I’m sorry to say, a bit of a bore. At first, she seems promising, scheming to free herself of her father’s dreadful curse, yet as the film elapses and the poor Countess surrenders to the selfsame curse, Holden’s performance dries up, and she spends most of the rest of the runtime – pardon the pun – vamping. There’s very provocative subtext (especially for 1936), if terrifically clichéd, about the female vampire being coded as lesbian, which makes her budding relationship with Dr. Garth a real mystery. Is she planning to bite him, or does she hope he’ll hypnotize her out of her vampirism? The film leans more toward the second possibility, though I’m not sure that’s how vampires or hypnosis work.

 

Surprisingly, some of the best parts of the film have nothing to do with Countess Zaleska or with vampires in general. Equally if not more compelling are the sequences between Dr. Garth and his secretary Janet, played by Marguerite Churchill. The pair have a wonderful sense of interplay, reminiscent a bit of a discount William Powell and Myrna Loy. (Indeed, I’m certain I would have loved Dracula’s Daughter if Powell and Loy had played in it.) These scenes are light and breezy, and Churchill plays what could have been a thankless role with spunk and good humor.

 

Dracula’s Daughter does represent something of the end of an era. It’s the last Universal Monsters film for three years – the cinematic universe would be, appropriately enough, resurrected in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein – and it’s the last to bear the influence of studio bigwig Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. It certainly feels of a piece with its predecessors, stodgy and stagey for better and for worse. Its pace is deliberate, often slow, and the monstrosity of the story is largely restricted to the imagination. In a sense, the key is again Edward Van Sloan; though Dracula’s Daughter takes place moments after Dracula, Van Sloan certainly appears to have aged at least five years, with his hairline receding and his presence more sedate than before. So too perhaps did the studio feel the monster movies had run their course; Universal certainly felt that way about ousting the Laemmles.

 

But if we’ve learned one thing over the course of this Monster March, it’s that you can’t keep a good creature down for long. In the case of the vampire, it would only take seven years for the Son of Dracula to rear his head; fortunately for you creatures of the night, it’ll be a scant seven days.

 

Dracula’s Daughter is not rated. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Written by Garrett Fort and Oliver Jeffries. Starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Irving Pichel, and Edward Van Sloan. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, if Dracula’s Daughter can’t git-r-dun, this looks like a job for the Son of Dracula (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Monster March: Frankenstein (1931)

Frankenstein is, like Dracula, another classic monster story we know through osmosis. In this case – perhaps even more than in Dracula – it’s through imagery that isn’t in the Mary Shelley novel but has become intrinsically connected to the Frankenstein story through repetition, particularly in satires like Mel Brooks’s brilliant Young Frankenstein. Going back to the original, however, isn’t a case of seeing untapped potential. Frankenstein is that very potential realized.

Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) has gotten so involved with his scientific experiments that he’s about to miss his wedding. Fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) is concerned, so she enlists the help of their friend Victor (John Boles) and Henry’s mentor Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan). What they find at Henry’s lighthouse laboratory is that Henry and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) have been experimenting at making life. “It’s alive!” Henry shrieks upon observing his creation, but he has no idea that The Monster (Boris Karloff) has an abnormal brain inside that flat skull of his. Soon, however, the whole Bavarian village will know...

 

I’ll try not to spend too much time comparing Frankenstein to Dracula, though watching them both practically back-to-back doesn’t make that easy. It’s worth exploring, however, the ways that these two movies operate in dialogue with each other, essentially forming the backbone of the very first cinematic universe. (It’s also interesting to note that Bela Lugosi was originally cast as The Monster, leaving the project after make-up tests proved disastrous. Lugosi had, however, initially wanted to play the doctor.) Critics at the time noted the similarities between the two films, and I do have to agree with them that – no slight to Dracula – Frankenstein is the more successful feature.

 

Though the image of Karloff looms large over the film (and subsequently the very idea of Frankenstein’s monster), Frankenstein’s success owes in large part to director James Whale. Where Dracula’s director Tod Browning kept things mostly stagey aside from the impressive sequences with Lugosi, Whale’s direction is dynamic and, to encapsulate the burgeoning medium in a word, cinematic. The camera moves nimbly, the edits are impressive, and the pacing of the film is enviable; despite the rigor mortis of the subject matter, there are no dead spots in Frankenstein. Whale is especially adept at using shadows and light, particularly firelight, to which The Monster has a notable aversion. 

 

Frankenstein was, like Dracula, adapted in equal parts from the Mary Shelley novel and from a stage play by Peggy Webling. As with any adaptation, there are many interesting changes, a good number of which have become practically canonical. Where the novel takes pains to show that The Monster learns inhumanity from its creator and others, the film sets the creature up to fail by giving him an abnormal brain; in a bit of a reversal, the creature learns compassion from playing with little Maria, but we know how famously that playtime goes south. Similarly, Henry Frankenstein (not Victor, as in the novel) is always already a little deranged by the time we meet him, played to arch perfection by a manic Colin Clive. Perhaps this is a consequence of the novel being told in epistolary fashion through Victor’s eyes; when we view Henry from the outside, we can’t help but notice he seems a little mad in his pride at his aberrant experiments.

 

Among the additions Whale and company bring to the story are the use of electricity and the hunchbacked assistant (Fritz, not Igor). Anyone turning to the novel might be surprised to find these aspects missing, so inextricable have they become to the Frankenstein legend. In the case of the latter, Fritz is played by Dwight Frye, late of Dracula, where he played a similar role as the vampire’s assistant Renfield. It’s the sort of thankless role that Peter Lorre might have played a few years later; surprisingly, Lorre never played any version of Igor, and I’ve never been able to discern how his voice became identified with the part. Also back from Dracula is Edward Van Sloan, playing another skeptical man of science. Here, Van Sloan is less compelling than he was as Van Helsing, largely because his role here is less than central, but his presence forms an odd kind of stabilizing backbone in the emerging monster franchise, where the forces of the supernatural are pitted against the keen and cool intellect of science. There’s even an interesting prelude to the film where Van Sloan comes out of a curtain, breaks the fourth wall, and warns the audience about the film they’ll be seeing. (A similar sequence with Van Sloan was crafted for Dracula, though it is evidently lost to history).

 

Of course, no review of Frankenstein would be complete without a heap of praise for Boris Karloff, whose extensive turns in disfiguring makeup made him a legend. He’s practically synonymous with the Universal Monsters, and we’ll be seeing much more of him throughout Monster March; where Lugosi reprised his role as Count Dracula only once, Karloff gladly donned the makeup again and again, even getting a turn (sort of) as the not-so-good doctor. Karloff manages to emote from behind the thick layers of prosthetics, vacillating between childlike wonder and murderous rage as his fancy suits him. That flat dome and the bolts on his neck continually remind us of the creature’s monstrosity, but so too does Karloff’s shambolic limp and subvocal groans. (His distinctive walk, however, with arms thrown out before himself, would be a Lugosi creation for 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.)

 

For monster movies, it’s hard to imagine a better double feature than Dracula and Frankenstein. They’re two sides of the same coin, two creature features whose very unnaturality can be summed up in the mere names of their stars – Lugosi and Karloff. (Can you imagine if they’d been played by a Smith or a Jones?) By the end of Frankenstein, the natural order appears to be restored, but we all know that the truest undead in Hollywood is the spectre of the sequel, and Frankenstein would certainly have his – as well, we know, as a bride.

 

Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh. Based on the novel by Mary Shelley, and on the play by Peggy Webling. Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerry, Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Marilyn Harris, and Boris Karloff. 

Tune in tomorrow for Deep Sea Saturday, with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Ben Chapman, and Ricou Browning.

Next week for Franken-Friday, behind every successful Monster is a Bride of Frankenstein (1935), starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, and Elsa Lanchester.

Monster March: Dracula (1931)

Viewing Dracula is a bit like remembering a dream you might have had. I can’t recall if this was my first time sitting down to watch the film front to back, but there were moments that stood out vividly in my memory. Other parts, though, seemed strange and foreign, diversions from the Bram Stoker novel I know so well. It is, then, like the old line from Inception, a half-remembered dream – and the half you remember is very, very good.

Bela Lugosi stars as Count Dracula, the role that made him infamous and the role that he made famous. After arranging a real estate deal with the mad solicitor Renfield (Dwight Frye), Dracula travels from Transylvania to England, where he preys upon socialite Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), her fiancé John Harker (David Manners), and her physician father (Herbert Bunston), who has already enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) in understanding the unscientific maladies plaguing London since the Count’s arrival.

 

It is not quite the first vampire film – that honor most likely belongs to 1922’s Nosferatu, itself the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit brought by the Stoker estate – but Dracula is certainly the archetype. I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that just about every visual impression you have of the Dracula myth starts with this Tod Browning adaptation. He’s cribbing liberally from the Stoker novel (by way of the Deane/Balderston stage adaptation, about which more in a bit), but the definitive visual stamp of Dracula gives one the acute sense of déjà vu. If you haven’t seen the Browning film, shame – but also, in a sense you always already have, because it’s become a kind of cultural shared memory. This deep primordial memory is never clearer than in the film’s riveting first act, set in Transylvania; though the film places Renfield in Castle Dracula (rather than the novel depicting Jonathan Harker’s descent therein into madness), everything else about this opening sequence is uncannily familiar – the demented carriage ride, the castle itself, Dracula’s three brides and his own hypnotic stare.

 

Indeed, if the film can be said to succeed at all, it’s because of the inspired (or perhaps cursed) casting of Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire. Lugosi would only play Dracula once more, in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but it was a role that haunted him and typecast him. But typecasting only really happens when one is exceptionally good at a particular role, and Lugosi is Dracula. This performance works on every level – the look, the posture, the voice, the mannerisms. Even the line “I never drink... wine” (which originates here) has become a central precept in the Dracula gospel, right down to Lugosi’s distinctive intonation. When he’s on screen, the movie is solidly arresting, almost as though Lugosi is himself hypnotizing the audience.

 

When Lugosi’s not on screen, though, unfortunately Dracula becomes a bit boring. None of the other performers is as charismatic as Lugosi, so when the script turns its attention to Dr. Seward and the London social scene, the film slows into a snooze. Similarly, where Browning’s direction is electric and moody during the Dracula scenes, the sequences without the vampire are stagy and dull, doubtless a consequence of the film’s shared DNA with the stage adaptation. The momentum of the film winds down considerably, as though the very projection reels grind to a crawl. Just about the only saving grace in this middle act is Edward Van Sloan’s turn as Van Helsing, which he plays a bit like a cross between the screen presences of Anthony Hopkins and Max Von Sydow – fiery and wise. The immediate adversarial nature established between Dracula and Van Helsing is never more riveting than when Van Helsing quickly realizes that Dracula casts no reflection, followed swiftly by Van Helsing’s modest ability to resist the Count’s hypnosis.

 

However, the push and pull between Lugosi and Van Sloan never quite takes over the third act of the film the way one might hope. Instead, the film becomes an unquestionable product of its time when it focuses on John Harker’s quest to free his beloved Mina from Dracula’s thrall. Here, Helen Chandler is suitably convincing as the possessed Mina, though David Manners is forgettably milquetoast, even for a pre-Hays Code film. Yet despite the film predating the Hays Code by more than three years, its climax is straight out of the playbook, with its focus on ensuring a happy ending for a soon-to-be-married couple, while the nefarious foreigner is dispensed with off-screen. Browning (or perhaps cinematographer Karl Freund, who is largely assumed to have taken control of the picture) stages the final shot as an ascent from Dracula’s dungeon – unfortunately, he leaves the two most interesting characters in the catacombs.

 

For what is essentially the first monster movie, Dracula is a real trailblazer, and it’s not hard to draw a straight line to nearly any other creature feature. Browning was working without a map here, but he ended up playing cartographer to an entire genre. And at the edge of the map he drew, we can faintly read the inscription, “Here be monsters...” Whether any of them could live up to Lugosi’s mantle is, perhaps, a question for the rest of Monster March.

 

Dracula is not rated. Directed by Tod Browning and Karl Freund. Written by Garrett Fort. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, and Edward Van Sloan.

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with The Wolf Man (1941) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, let’s do it again but in Spanish this time, with Drácula (1931) starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.

Monster March: The Mummy (1932)

We’re kicking off Monster March with Mummy Monday, and who better to usher in a month of monster movie reviews than Boris Karloff himself? The Mummy is a real doozy, a whopper of a horror film that goes for Golden Age restraint with equal maximums of pathos and terror, and at the center of it all is a delightful performance by Karloff.

Ten years ago, the mummified remains of the high priest Imhotep disappeared from an archaeological expedition, and the explorer Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) renounced his work after his assistant Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) went mad. A decade later, Sir Joseph’s son Frank (David Manners) is on a dig of his own, and with the help of Ardeth Bay (Boris Karloff) he locates the unbroken tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. But when the princess’s remains are transported to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, Ardeth Bay reveals that he is the resurrected Imhotep, and his plans to revive his beloved revolve around Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who may be the princess reincarnated.

 

I don’t think it’s much of a secret around these parts that I’m an inordinate fan of Stephen Sommers’s 1999 film The Mummy, which is just about one of my favorite movies of all time. (I’ll say it just about every Monday this month, for those who aren’t paying attention.) Watching the 1999 Mummy directly before this Mummy might have been a mistake if 1932’s Mummy weren’t so engaging – I was struck by how captivating the movie was, despite having next to no resemblance to the Brendan Fraser vehicle I love so much (other than a few names in common). There’s none of the action/adventure swagger or sense of humor that hooked me in 1999; instead, what we get is a kind of mystical Romeo & Juliet, draped in Egyptian finery and laden with magical menace.

 

We’ll never be able to review a monster movie without turning to the creature at its center, and Karloff is divine as The Mummy. He’s only in rags for the first act of the film, where makeup artist Jack Pierce is the undisputed star of the film. This prologue, in which Imhotep is resurrected by Ralph Norton (no Honeymooners jokes, please), is the perfect tee-up for the film, loading it with dread right at the top as The Mummy lumbers away into the night. The next time we see Karloff, his skin looks like wizened parchment, and his hulking shuffle tells us straightaway that Ardeth Bay is barely among the living. Karloff’s voice, too, gives us the sense of the long-dead, a low roar coming from an expressionless visage. But there is a fire in his eyes (only occasionally literally), and we get the distinct impression just from his presence that he’s not to be taken lightly.

 

As with any monster movie, the supporting cast in a film like The Mummy is largely negligible. A mere year after his star-making turn in Frankenstein, Karloff was surely the box-office draw. Yet the cast of The Mummy is pleasantly up to the task of supporting Karloff, particularly Zita Johann, who’s given the generally-thankless role of “damsel in distress.” In the moments when she contemplates her own mortality, though, Johann is triumphantly terrified, and her reaction to being reincarnated is pretty compelling stuff (doubtless helped by Johann’s own belief in past lives). Elsewhere, Bramwell Fletcher practically steals the show in his one scene, in which he’s driven mad by witnessing The Mummy’s resurrection; it’s a classic example of “This isn’t going to go well” as the scene unfolds, the audience waiting on tenterhooks for the inevitable, and Fletcher’s manic giggle is the perfect punchline. And Edward Van Sloan, who’s fast becoming one of my favorite faces in the Universal Monsters canon, turns up to do another variation on his “man of science” routine from Dracula – this time, however, he’s the only character to admit that a resurrected mummy isn’t such a ridiculous proposition, and his particular brand of gravitas renders the absurd eminently plausible.

 

One thing to appreciate about these early monster movies is that they’re extremely lean, economical not just in terms of budget but in their approach to storytelling, as well. At 73 minutes, The Mummy doesn’t waste any time. It doesn’t try to fool you into thinking Ardeth Bay might not be The Mummy, nor does it bother to explain the magic behind his scrying pool or the resurrection ritual he’s plotting. In this way, The Mummy is deliciously refreshing – “just go with it,” the movie requests, and the result is that you see a language being built, establishing the iconography for every mummy film to follow.

 

It helps that this Mummy is fun in a different way; where my beloved 1999 Mummy is self-reflexive and gleefully camp, this Mummy is deadly serious about its own hokum. The result is that the film washes over you like a tidal wave of superstition and becomes very nearly scary in its intimation that there is a whole cosmology – not just a singular creature – beyond our understanding, so when the ending comes quite literally as a deus ex machina, it doesn’t feel like a storytelling cheat. Rather, it’s a fulfillment of Van Sloan’s warning at the top of the film to take curses seriously – in effect, it’s Chekhov’s Curse. Or in storytelling terms, don’t put a sarcophagus in your film unless it’s going to be opened, and don’t mention a curse if it won’t be levied against some unwitting fool.

 

The Mummy is not rated. Directed by Karl Freund. Written by John L. Balderston. Based on a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer. Starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward Van Sloan, Arthur Byron, and Bramwell Fletcher.

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Mummy Monday, behold the horror of The Mummy’s Hand (1940), starring Tom Tyler and Dick Foran.