Dune (2021)

There’s a moment in Denis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated Dune that will take your breath away. However, I can’t tell you what that moment is – not because it’d be a spoiler to do so, but because there are so many of these moments in Dune that it’s impossible to predict which one will do it for you. It isn’t likely to be the next Star Wars as its marketing declares, but Dune is majestic in its enormity, and even with its simultaneous release on HBO Max it demands to be seen in the largest, loudest auditorium available. 

Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) reckons with his destiny as an ersatz “chosen one” when his father, Duke Leto of House Atreides (Oscar Isaac), is assigned custody of the unforgiving desert world Arrakis – a planet populated by colossal sandworms, the native Fremen people, and the hallucinogenic drug known as spice. While Paul and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) study his prophetic dreams, the corpulent Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) schemes against House Atreides in his quest to retake Arrakis. 

 

These are only some of the things that happen in Dune, and there are so many more characters who don’t fit into a brief plot synopsis. The scope of the film is compounded by the fact that Villeneuve is consciously adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s dense 600-page novel, with a fairly logical if abrupt breaking point midway through the story. I say “abrupt” only because by that point Dune is so resolutely in its groove and the audience is well and truly vibing with the film that any stopping point would feel jarring; put another way, I would have been just as content to see another two hours and thirty-six minutes. It’s not that the movie is unsatisfying, but rather that it’s too satisfying to stop, like a theme park dark ride you don’t want to get off.

 

Perhaps appropriate for a movie set largely on a desert planet, Denis Villeneuve is on a real hot streak. I haven’t seen his 2013 Enemy yet, but every other film since that year – Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 – has been a winner. Particularly in the latter two, both science fiction films, Villeneuve is finding his niche: speculative futures of overwhelmingly immense scale, where humanity is both dwarfed and magnified in the shadow of the profound. Amy Adams had to reckon with an expanding sense of the cosmos in Arrival, while Blade Runner 2049 was Ryan Gosling’s confrontation with his own ebbing humanity in a foreboding neon cityscape. Here, in the year 10191, everything is enormous – the worms, the spacecraft, the political maneuvering, and the veritable heft of destiny (manufactured or genuine) – and no filmmaker is better equipped than Villeneuve to carry those weights.

 

An IMAX screen so perfectly befits the size of Dune, but its speaker system is perhaps even better suited for the task. Throughout the film your bones will rattle, thanks to Hans Zimmer, who turns in the Hans Zimmer-iest score imaginable. (Equally Zimmer is the sprawling release of the score, which spans three albums and nearly five hours of orchestration.) It’s atonal, lingering, and eclectic, perhaps the only film score in recent memory to include both an electric guitar, bagpipes, and a didgeridoo. The bass shakes to the point where it’s unclear whether you’re hearing a spaceship in flight or Hans Zimmer in action; either way, the sound design is so meticulous and acute that it becomes a character in and of itself. See also the moments when Paul and his mother use “the voice,” a kind of Jedi mind trick that erases free will; the first time we heard “the voice,” its bass shattering eardrums before the words make it to our auditory canals, everyone in my theater sat up a little straighter.

 

I think diehard fans of the novel will enjoy what Villeneuve has built, and it seems that more casual filmgoers are digging it, too. I came to Dune from the unique position of having just read the book – or, at least, half of it; I had wanted to finish the novel entire before seeing the movie, but as it stood I got within twenty pages of the film’s chosen ending. (I promise I’ll finish before Dune Part II, the sequel which seems inevitable now.) In the process of translation, some of the characters got flattened, particularly and disappointingly the Duke himself. Duke Leto is a terrific character in the novel, torn between his duty, political machinations beyond his control, and his personal loyalty to his bloodline; he’s heroic, chivalric, and gracious, but the film seems content to let Oscar Isaac’s natural charisma do most of the character work. Conversely, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is more human and accessible than the novel’s distant and aloof protagonist, perhaps because of his increased self-consciousness of his place as the manufactured messiah of Arrakis. 

 

Instead of diving deep into the characters, it seems that Villeneuve has gone the more unconventional route of letting his visual design do the character work. There are some lines about backstory, and there’s a clever narrative device in the form of Paul’s talking schoolbooks, but largely Villeneuve lets the images do the talking. It’s a mode of storytelling that seems to have fallen out of favor of late, trusting your set designers and cinematographer to do their job well. The Harkonnens are the villains because of their unfathomable ugliness, their unlit home and grotesque bodies belying the depravity of their souls; save for his distinctive voice, it’s almost impossible to recognize Stellan Skarsgård beneath the mass of flesh that is Baron Vladimir. Likewise, the Atreides are the heroes because of how gosh-darn pretty they are, warm and human. They’re also the only ones who seem to be having any fun, especially Jason Momoa as the swashbuckling (and brilliantly named) Duncan Idaho, about whom I would surely watch a miniseries or two. 

 

Dune is a movie into which you can easily sink, like a hot bath or a deep hill of shifting sand (both of which figure prominently in striking images within the film). It’s as much an atmosphere as a narrative, like the moodier bits of Blade Runner 2049 dialed up to eleven. Most importantly, Dune is like a dream, as in the best cinema can be, from which one does not want to awaken. Maybe it’s a little obtuse, maybe it’s bigger and more ambitious than it ought to be, but Denis Villeneuve has earned the right to make idiosyncratic science fiction. Dune is an event, a kind of heraldic “welcome back” moment for moviegoers who may have forgotten (as indeed I did) what kind of narrative spectacle best belongs in the cinema. 

 

Dune is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images, and suggestive material.” Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth. Based on the novel by Frank Herbert. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.

Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

Greenstreet/Lorre: The Verdict (1946)

We’ve come to the end of June, with five films starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and if we’ve learned anything, it’s this – the whole of the Greenstreet/Lorre partnership is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Aside from The Maltese Falcon (and excepting Casablanca, in which they share no scenes), it’s safe to say that Lorre and Greenstreet cement their reputations in spite of, not because of, the films they headlined together. When you think of these two, you’ll sooner think of the net effect of their personae than of any one film of theirs. Case in point: The Verdict, which is neither very engaging nor is it generous toward its stars, who more often than not seem bored with the whole affair.

Sydney Greenstreet stars as George Edward Grodman, late of Scotland Yard but dismissed when an innocent man is hanged after his alibi arrives too late for the courts. Grodman slinks into ignominious retirement across the street from his best friend, the artist Victor Emmric (Peter Lorre). But when a locked-door murder mystery confounds Grodman’s replacement (George Coulouris), Grodman and Emmric find the opportunity to clear the former superintendent’s name while putting the new inspector in his place.

 

Locked-door mysteries are always a treat, and I will say that the solution in The Verdict is ingenious – inherently unsolvable, yes, but a clever trick. It’s a bit of a cheat on the audience (who may or may not predict the ending simply by random supposition among the suspects), but without spoiling I’ll say that The Verdict did keep me guessing until the mystery was solved, as Aristotle would want it, in a manner that was both surprising and inevitable. But it’s that surprise element that nags at me, leading me to believe that the film’s relative disinterest in follow-along sleuthing might better position The Verdict as Victorian noir rather than as a Victorian detective story. Poirot, this ain’t.

 

Greenstreet’s Grodman is the quintessential down-on-his-luck gumshoe, aiming to clear his name by solving One Last Case. The Verdict is very nearly worth the price of admission for Greenstreet’s sideburns, which are almost as large as he is. But something in Greenstreet’s performance seems lackadaisical, not quite sleepwalking but certainly drowsy and a bit disinterested. There’s something of that attitude intrinsic to the character, who is worn out and loathing retirement; like some aspiring writers, he dreads the prospect of composing and of finishing his book. However, that ennui doesn’t quite connect with the audience in the way of, say, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. More often than not, Greensteet seems only to need a nap.

 

Lorre, too, plays a bit more droopy-eyed than usual. Compared to his more dynamic writer in The Mask of Dimitrios, this artist seems disaffected, animated only by the prospect of helping his friend get revenge of a sort on the man who edged him out of Scotland Yard. Though he is an artist by trade, he too spends little time on his craft, apparently welcoming the distraction. Lorre’s best scene is one of the last in the film, in which it appears he’s about to confess to the film’s central murder. He doesn’t, alas, one of the film’s many red herrings, but Lorre sells the very intimation of a confession with his guilty behavior and stooped posture. When he tells Grodman how tired he is, you don’t just believe him – you feel it. 

 

What I didn’t feel during the film, however, was captivated. I found myself wishing I were watching The Maltese Falcon instead, reminding myself of just how fully good Lorre and Greenstreet could be. Often the still images of the pair are fodder for my wild imagination, while the films themselves never quite live up to the productions in my own head. I suppose that’s partially my fault, especially since Peter Lorre is my all-time favorite actor; having seen how good he can be, I tend to imagine that his vehicles are always as engaging as, say, Arsenic and Old Lace or Mad Love. Similarly, Greenstreet can make a meal of a monologue, but it seems that the five films this month were content simply to rest on his reputation without giving him much opportunity to spread his ample wings and do something astonishing.

 

Theirs was an archetypal camaraderie, a Laurel & Hardy for the graveyard crowd. It’s sublimely grotesque when Greenstreet supervises the exhumation of a corpse in The Verdict, with Lorre peering over his shoulder to declare, “I have always had a suppressed desire to see a grave opened... especially at night.” It’s a line so creepy that you might expect it to have come from a Lorre impersonator, but to their credit Lorre and Greenstreet always knew their lanes, never afraid to play to their strengths and embrace the risk of caricature. Indeed, their cameo in Hollywood Canteen, a brief sequence in which they play themselves, is unmissable for its laser-focused blend of menace and mischief. Sometimes, just the idea of them is enough.

 

It’s certainly been enough to get me through this month. Even though the films themselves may not be classics, it’s impossible to imagine any fan of either actor not seeking these flicks out at one point or another. At an impressionable age, I pored over The Films of Peter Lorre with obsessive devotion, repeatedly renting it from the library to the point that I’m surprised the librarians didn’t just give me the book. I knew these two actors were capable of greatness, and we’ve proven as much over the past five weeks. But I also imagined what it would be like to see more great films with Lorre and Greenstreet. After this month, I suppose I’m still imagining.

 

The Verdict is not rated. Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Peter Milne. Based on the novel The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring, George Coulouris, and Rosalind Ivan.

Greenstreet/Lorre: The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)

The Mask of Dimitrios is proof of one indisputable fact about the Golden Age of Hollywood – there’s never too much of a good thing when it comes to Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. After a few movies this month where the two didn’t have nearly enough screen time together, The Mask of Dimitrios brings us much more of the Greenstreet and Lorre goodness. When they’re on the screen, the film crackles, but its unusual frame narrative structure ends up being more of a tease than a treat.

Mystery writer Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre) becomes fascinated with the strange case of master criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott), who appears to have washed up dead in Turkey. Looking for inspiration for his next book, Leyden follows the clues into the past, egged on by the shadowy Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet). Leyden begins to learn more about the crimes that shaped Dimitrios even as he begins his own investigation into Mr. Peters, who is following his every move across Europe. 

 

The structure of The Mask of Dimitrios is best described as “John Le Carré’s Citizen Kane,” with a central protagonist digging ever deeper into the world of espionage through the focal lens of one man’s biography. As this protagonist, Lorre is riveting, wrestling between his curiosity and his own innate timidity. In an early scene, a Turkish police colonel tells Leyden that he is not quite what one imagines when picturing a writer, and that’s because of the graceful ease Lorre brings to humanizing this (and every) character. He stoops and mumbles, but he lights up when the pieces start fitting together in his mind. Leyden’s arc throughout the film becomes a kind of bildungsroman in which the artist becomes a hero, and it’s a triumph to see Lorre enact that character, instead of being relegated to playing heavies, goons, and creeps.

 

Throughout the film, Lorre is matched, finally, with Greenstreet. After each extended flashback into the life of Dimitrios, there is inevitably a sequence in which Leyden returns to his hotel for an impromptu reunion with Mr. Peters. Where Lorre is unnerved and guarded, Greenstreet is his usual boisterous self, glad of confidence and disarmingly open-armed. Greenstreet proves himself among Lorre’s best co-stars (if not the outright best), and one senses that the two are enabling each other to reach greater heights than they would individually. Their chemistry is so unique, best summed up in the moment when Leyden says of Mr. Peters, “He’s my friend! Well, no, he’s not my friend, but he’s a nice man!” 

 

As for Dimitrios, though, I have to say I found this character uninspiring. It’s Zachary Scott’s film debut, but Dimitrios is a classic example of “show, don’t tell.” The other characters consistently tell Leyden what an amazing, devious, magnetic personality Dimitrios was, and they overhype the character to the point where no living actor could match that introduction. Moreover, unlike in Citizen Kane, the flashbacks here are often a bit dry, the performances stiff and unengaging. It’s a shame because the interstitial scenes that introduce the flashbacks, with Lorre and Greenstreet or particularly Lorre and Victor Francen, are effervescent, bubbling over with enough personality to fill a one-act play.

 

I will give The Mask of Dimitrios credit for its third-act turn, which I genuinely did not see coming. I should have, certainly, especially having read a few Le Carré novels in my day. Best of all, the developments of the film’s third act force Leyden and Peters even closer, to the point where they’ve almost become co-conspirators in a plot that seems inevitable only in hindsight. One wonders very much what hijinks Leyden and Peters might have found in a sequel, whether the two men might have been bound by friendship rather than circumstance. But, as Mr. Peters says throughout the film, “How little kindness there is in the world today!” The Mask of Dimitrios leaves you wanting more, but if one were to rewatch the film, it would only be to rewatch Peter Lorre in all his squirrelly greatness, emboldened by the magnificent Sydney Greenstreet.

 

The Mask of Dimitrios is not rated. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Written by Frank Gruber. Based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Peter Lorre, and Victor Francen.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Passage to Marseille (1944)

If last week’s Background to Danger was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille is an even more transparent effort to reunite the stars, the director, and the atmosphere of its iconic predecessor. Passage gets nearer to the mark, thanks especially to returning star Humphrey Bogart, though its labyrinthine structure plays a weird and distancing game with its audience.

Passage to Marseille begins with the journalist Manning (John Loder) interviewing Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) about a Free French outpost in England. Freycinet tells Manning the incredible story of the naval voyage aboard the Ville de Nancy, where he was introduced to the garrison’s infamous gunner, Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart). There Matrac relays the strange way and his band (including Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Philip Dorn) made their way from the Devil’s Island into the service of the French air force. 

 

Passage to Marseille has become notable for its Inception-like plotting, which features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It’s evident that the film is an adaptation of a novel, where such narrative devices are commonplace, but in a film it’s a bit disorienting to be continually reminded that what we are seeing is actually just a story being told to one of the characters. Freycinet tells Manning about his first meeting with Matrac, at which time Matrac told him a story about being imprisoned on Devil’s Island, at which time the prisoners told each other the story of Matrac’s arrest. The film spirals ever backwards into history, with four separate timelines; none of it is too confusing, and as narrators go one could do a lot worse than Claude Rains, but it is peculiar to have to wait for nearly half the film to understand why we should care about most of the characters.

 

Fortunately, Bogart’s star power does much of the heavy lifting. The minute we see him, we too are eager to learn more about Matrac, this haunted and driven gunner. Bogart’s performance is clearly meant to emulate Rick Blaine of Casablanca, with his specific brand of morality driving him away from, then into, the Second World War. But there is something too of Fred C. Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Jean Matrac, particularly in the Devil’s Island sequence where we see Matrac wrestle with his captors, false imprisonment and his own budding madness. As ever, Bogart is electrifying, though the film neuters itself by reminding us that we have already seen that Matrac will escape.

 

While sporting an eyepatch, Claude Rains does his usual Claude Rains thing, all elegance and precision. I was a little surprised to see the film not flash back to the loss of Freycinet’s eye, though Rains weaves it into the understated backstory of the character, treating it not as a handicap but as a welcome challenge to how he can continue to serve France. Among the rest of the cast, Lorre is a stand-out, though perhaps I’m biased. His Marius seems to be Matrac’s deputy, helping first to recruit Matrac in the escape attempt and then aiding him as he leads the other men to freedom. In the Ville de Nancy timeline, Marius is eager to speak for himself and his brothers, while simultaneously deferring to Matrac when he deigns to lift his voice. 

 

Relative to our purposes this month, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are once again kept apart for nearly all of the film, though the rampant chemistry between Bogart and Lorre is on full delightful display. Where he stumbled as a Nazi in Background to Danger, Greenstreet is better cast as the martinet Major Duval, who relies solely on his own intuition and who wields respect like a bullwhip. Greenstreet and Lorre only have the one significant scene together, in which Duval’s interrogation precedes Freycinet’s more sympathetic dialogue, and it’s a fine centerpiece for Greenstreet to tell us plenty about Duval. As usual, in this sequence Lorre tells us more about Marius in the moments when he’s not speaking, but one cannot help – especially this month – wanting more, more, more.

 

Director Michael Curtiz, himself of Casablanca, went to great pains to reassemble as much of the magic from that film in Passage to Marseille. So much of the cast returns for this one, right down to a cameo from singer Corinna Mura. (Even Michèle Morgan, in her thankless role as Matrac’s wife, has a Casablanca connection – she screen-tested for the role that inevitably went to Ingrid Bergman after Warner Bros lowballed RKO for a release from her contract.) Between Curtiz’s directorial eye and the musical ear of Max Steiner, who bombards the film with refrains from the French national anthem La Marseillaise, the film’s every impulse seems to invite comparisons with Casablanca – short of thinly remaking the film, as was the wont of the Golden Age of cinema, it seems there was little more that anyone could have done to make this film more like Casablanca. 

 

You don’t need me to tell you, however, that Casablanca needs no remake. It’s cute to watch them try, and a film starring Bogart in his prime is never a misuse of one’s time, but Passage to Marseille is neither quite what it aims to be nor precisely what its audience expects of it. As the old saying goes, though, here’s looking at you – even a vanilla Golden Age war film is still worth a look.

 

Passage to Marseille is not rated. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt. Based on the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Michèle Morgan, Claude Rains, Philip Dorn, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, George Tobias, and Helmut Dantine.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Background to Danger (1943)

For the month of June, we’ll be celebrating the 117th birthday of Peter Lorre – one of my all-time favorite actors – by looking at five of his lesser-known collaborations with fellow character actor Sydney Greenstreet. The two met during Greenstreet’s film debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and starred in eight films together (nine, if you count their fun cameo in Hollywood Canteen). Despite being two very different performers, their chemistry was electric, their mannerisms impeccable. When you see their names on a bill together, you know you’re in for a treat.

After The Maltese Falcon, Lorre and Greenstreet were not quite reunited in Casablanca (1942); both give unforgettable performances as the squirrely Ugarte and the voluminous Ferrari, respectively, but the only misstep in an otherwise perfect film is that they never share the screen. (Their presences are so indelible, however, that you’d be forgiven for not noticing until now.) It would not be until Background to Danger in 1943 that the pair inhabited the cinematic frame together, albeit only for one tense sequence. The film is one of a host of Casablanca imitators, unmemorable but not unwatchable.

 

George Raft stars as traveling salesman Joe Barton, secretly a spy for the United States. After meeting the beautiful but doomed Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) on a train to Turkey, Barton comes into possession of secret documents that indicate the Nazis are about to implicate the Soviet Union in a fictitious invasion of Turkey, the better for Germany to take control. Barton is pursued by the plan’s architect, the Nazi Colonel Robinson (Greenstreet), but he’s also caught the attention of two Soviet spies, Nikolai Zaleshoff (Lorre) and his sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall).

 

Background to Danger is surprisingly complex in its plotting, taking its cue perhaps from the similarly suspicious Maltese Falcon, in which no one can be trusted and everyone is lying about something. Here, the MacGuffin is likewise an artifact of deception; there is to be no invasion, but the Germans want Turkey to think there will be. With Greenstreet as provocateur, authoring fiction after fiction to cover his own failings, there is something prescient about the film’s emphasis on “fake news” and its value as a weapon of war. As his Gutman was in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet’s Robinson is the only character with all the answers, and his mere presence alone gives you a satisfactory antagonist.

 

One cannot help but feel, however, that Greenstreet is only slightly miscast as the German spymaster. There is nothing German about his performance, neither his accent nor his wardrobe; nor is his very name – Robinson – anything less than stiff upper-lip British. Greenstreet is delightfully villainous, but something in his performance feels held back, as though he’s careful not to have too much fun as a Nazi. Likewise, George Raft seems out of his element as Barton, a role that hinges on the reveal that he’s an American spy. When Barton plays the part of a salesman, there’s never a sense that he’s not in total control of the situation; it’s worth noting that the original novel saw Barton as a forerunner to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, bewildered after an accidental plunge into the world of espionage. (The change was made at Raft’s insistence.) Here, though, it’s hard to see why anyone buys Barton’s “babe in the woods” routine, and when he shifts into spy mode, it’s hard to see Raft as anything but the hardboiled gangsters he played.

 

Perhaps the only casting that really works – at least, of the cast with anything of note to do in the script – is Peter Lorre as the Russian spy Nikolai. There is something stagey about Lorre’s performance here, and I mean that in a good way; Lorre imbues the character with a broad physicality, all stooping hunches and balled fists, such that you can imagine his parts of the film being stage plays. Even when he’s not the focus of attention, Lorre is constantly doing something, clutching his fists to his head or bemoaning his lack of vodka. Of all the times that the film asks you to doubt what you suspect about a character, Lorre is the best at walking that line of uncertainty, and I can’t help but wish Nikolai had been a recurring character in other WWII films.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best scene of the film is the moment when all the spies are in the same room together – Raft, Greenstreet, Lorre, and Marshall. At the top of the film’s third act, all the cards get put on the table, and all the actors get to play off each other like some of the more claustrophobic scenes from The Maltese Falcon. To add to the tension, everyone’s got a gun pointed at each other, but more importantly, it’s one of the most successful moments of shifting alliances and casual deception. Everything clicks in this scene, and the audience ought to be genuinely surprised at where the moment goes. It’s not quite the climax of the film, but everything that follows feels like denouement compared to the energy level of this dynamite sequence.

 

Between the restrictions of the Hays Code and the rah-rah patriotism of the era, there are not many surprises in how the film turns out, and it leads to an ending that is perhaps too overtly cheery to fit with the rest of the film, which tries to be a shadowy tale out of John le Carré’s playbook. Background to Danger is fairly emblematic of the Warner Brothers brand of 1940s war films, with most of its familiar faces flitting in and out. It’s not as good as Casablanca – but, then again, few films are.

 

Background to Danger is not rated. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by W.R. Burnett. Based on the novel Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler. Starring George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Osa Massen, and Turhan Bey.

April of the Apes: Planet of the Apes (1968)

I can’t believe it took me five years and a Blu-Ray box set to remember that Planet of the Apes is one of my all-time favorite movies. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spending more time of late with my Cinema King crown atop my regal head, but when I assembled The Personal Canon in 2016, I left Apes off the list. A year later, I reviewed War for the Planet of the Apes, the third/final in the Andy Serkis trilogy, but still the original Apes skipped my mind. Well, no more – one of the reasons we’re doing “April of the Apes” is to remind me how much I love Planet of the Apes.

George Taylor (Charlton Heston) leads a deep-space exploration that loses its way during two thousand years of cryosleep, stranding Taylor and his comrades (Robert Gunner, Jeff Burton) on a distant world with no way to communicate with their home. To their horror, the astronauts discover that they have landed on a planet where evolution seems to have run in reverse – humans are little better than mute domesticated animals, while apes have mastered civilization. Betrothed chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius (Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall) are fascinated by Taylor, but the orangutan Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) fears that the astronaut’s arrival will be the undoing of ape society.

 

For a movie that is more than 50 years old (I know, right?), Planet of the Apes has a surprisingly modern pace that keeps the movie clipping along briskly. At just shy of two hours, it’s also delightfully well-balanced, with the first ape appearing 30 minutes in; at sixty minutes, the plot turns when the apes discover that Taylor can talk. The final quarter of the film takes an even stranger turn as ape allies with human to investigate the Forbidden Zone – it’s a very methodical and deliberate construction, deploying the underrated four-act structure to craft a narrative that hums like an engine.

 

Though his script was largely rewritten, one senses the steady hand of Rod Serling in the tight plotting, punchy rhythm, and (naturally) the shocking final frames of the film. That ending, which has probably saturated into cultural osmosis by this point, is the sort of tragic allegory that made Serling’s Twilight Zone a television masterpiece. Little of Serling’s dialogue persisted into the finished film, though the bits that remain smack of his brand of cautionary cynicism – as when Taylor opines to his fellow space voyagers, “I’m a seeker, too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.” Indeed, one almost expects, as the film zooms out from its final tableau, to see Rod Serling standing just out of sight, fingers perched around a smoldering cigarette as he delivers an equally incendiary soliloquy about what man (to borrow a phrase from Serling’s best teleplay, “Time Enough at Last”) has deeded to himself.

 

No one does outrage on the edge of madness like Charlton Heston, and so he’s a perfect audience surrogate for a film that turns the world topsy-turvy as Planet of the Apes does. I’d forgotten how fallible, how cynical Taylor is in this film, even before he falls headlong into the monkey madhouse, but Taylor is that late 60s archetype of the disillusioned older generation, suspicious of the future but guardedly optimistic about his own ability to thrive. His colonial impulses and self-aggrandizement are slowly stripped away throughout the film, and he becomes the hero not because of any traits he possesses – but because he’s the best we have, and he refuses to acquiesce, the reluctant hero whose hesitation is only overridden by his own self-preservation. He comes not as a savior but as a seeker of truth, which is perhaps the higher calling. (Twelve years earlier, Heston had played Moses in the Easter classic The Ten Commandments, though Taylor is a far cry from the divine inspiration of a leader of men.)

 

Of course, no Planet would be complete without its apes, and even though the make-up lacks the technical precision of the 2001 remake or the photorealism of the Serkis trilogy’s CGI effects, there is something very charming about the ape prosthetics as designed by John Chambers. Having just spent a month going through the Universal Classic Monsters franchise and all those lurid make-up effects, jumping into Planet of the Apes almost feels natural. Chambers creates an illusion that never looks phony – hokey, perhaps, compared to its successors, but the film proceeds with such level-headed sincerity that there’s scarcely a chance to question the simian verisimilitude.

Inside of the film’s larger allegory, there’s a sub-allegory about ape society, with the gorillas serving as the ape army, chimpanzees as their workers and scientists, and orangutans as the theocratic governing body. The slippery blur between religion, science, and government feels like another Twilight Zone parable, and nowhere is that tension more acutely rendered than in the character of Dr. Zaius, played brilliantly by Maurice Evans. One of the all-time great screen villains, Dr. Zaius is the venal and desperate orangutan deputy who knows better than any other ape how precariously their society sits atop a mountain of lies, and so his increasing anxiety motivates his every action as he strives to keep Taylor from dismantling his house of cards – not just out of some philosophical drive for truth but also, one senses, out of the escalating spite that exists between the two enemies. Dr. Zaius is so beautifully characterized, his motivations so deftly clear, that he makes a fitting rival for both Taylor and for the very idea of the good; his final scene and his fateful decision therein remind us that there is nothing more dangerous than an authoritarian afraid of losing his power. Put another way, when one man – or ape – controls multiple institutions, those selfsame institutions lose their epistemological power.

 

Let’s not forget Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira, on whom the unlikely franchise would eventually be built. McDowall especially does a fine job emoting behind his heavy prosthetics, his snout twitching whenever he’s irritated – which is, to be fair, quite often in this film. McDowall would go on to appear in four of the five Apes films (Cornelius was briefly recast while McDowall was away directing his own film), but I was struck by how human Kim Hunter manages to be as Zira, arguably the deuteragonist of the film. Though her fiancé has been beaten down by Dr. Zaius and his refusal to endorse true science, Zira remains open-minded in her pursuit of the truth, captive only to her fascination with Taylor, whom she dubs “Bright Eyes” when she realizes there’s something special about this human. That instinctive and irrepressible curiosity – even more than Taylor’s brutish cynicism – is as compelling a portrait of humanity as anything the film offers.

 

The film’s final statement on humanity is, however, something I can’t spoil here. On the off chance that someone in fifty-three years hasn’t seen the ending or one of its myriad riffs in pop culture, I’ll simply say that it fulfills Aristotle’s definition of an ending – it is both surprising and inevitable, and it is to the film’s great strength that it’s not a mere “twist.” It is the natural conclusion to a dynamite story, and the film only becomes more watchable with each viewing. It’s the sort of film that I’d happily rewatch with anyone who hasn’t seen it before. But it’s also not a film that would demand a sequel, let alone four – unless you’re looking at box office receipts. In its initial release, Planet of the Apes grossed nearly $21 million on a $6 million budget; even in 1968, studio heads went bananas for numbers like that.

 

Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling. Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle. Starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison.

Monster March: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

From 1935, Bride of Frankenstein is the first Universal Monsters film to be produced after the so-called “Hays Code” was placed in effect, operating as a mandatory code of conduct for film production. One might then expect, especially with the old maxim that sequels rarely live up to the original, that Bride of Frankenstein would be a watered-down shadow of its predecessor, a moralizing cash grab to capitalize on Universal’s newfound monster mania. The truth is, however, Bride of Frankenstein is a mesmerizing and unmissable continuation of Frankenstein.

Moments after the original film (and following a handy recap segment), Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is rescued from the burning windmill, where his monstrous creation is presumed to have died. But while Henry recovers from his experience, the Monster (Boris Karloff) too has escaped certain death and is lurking near the village in search of companionship. Meanwhile, Henry’s old mentor Dr. Septimus Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) has come to Castle Frankenstein to demand that his former pupil resume his aberrant experiments in order to create a Bride (Elsa Lanchester) for the Monster.

 

Bride of Frankenstein is another in the Universal Monsters canon that I couldn’t be sure whether I’d seen before. There were bits that I recognized, certainly, but what was surprising was that those were sequences I had previously assumed were in the original Frankenstein, like the fact that the creature speaks in this film. I was equally amazed to discover that The Monster’s interaction with a blind man – which was present in the Shelley novel – was reserved for Bride of Frankenstein. (Of course, anyone who can get through that sequence without a hearty guffaw at the memory of Gene Hackman hasn’t, I venture, seen Young Frankenstein.)

 

In fact, watching Frankenstein and Bride practically back to back made me wonder if this was less an early case of Hollywood sequel-itis and more a case of a genuine two-part story that (with the benefit of hindsight) ought to be run sequentially. The analogue that kept running through my mind was a comparison with The Godfather Saga, the seamless editing of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II into one extended epic film. Surely someone out there has stitched Frankenstein and his Bride together, moving the Mary Shelley prologue to the very beginning and eliminating the recap reel that opens Bride. If not – psst, Universal, that’s money on the table.

 

I teased in last week’s review of The Invisible Man that Bride of Frankenstein is the first Universal Monsters film made after the Hays Code was in effect, and the central change here seems to be that Henry Frankenstein’s God complex is excised – or perhaps, more accurately, relocated onto the villainous character of Dr. Pretorius. In the process, however, the net result is that Henry becomes a character practically addicted to his scientific experiments; his aberrations pull him away from his wedding night and drive him into a recursive spiral of abomination. Having created misshapen life already, a sweaty, frantic Henry is now impelled to create a bride. It’s a deranged turn, made all the more manic by Colin Clive’s own struggles with alcohol addiction. 

 

I was surprised to see what little screen time the eponymous Bride is given in this film – only minutes at best (and with no dialogue, to boot). It’s frankly astonishing, then, to think of how iconic she’s become, and that’s almost entirely due to that striking image she presents, with her lightning-frazzled beehive and ghoulish shrieks and hisses. Perhaps the Universal Monsters linger best in our memories as still images, shocking intrusions into reality beyond any horror that a full-length film could impart. One can’t help but wonder what the Bride might have done had the Monster not decided for the both of them, “We belong dead.”

 

Of course, the Monster is speaking also for Dr. Pretorius, who joins the cast as its all-too-willing villain. Ernest Thesiger plays him delightfully arch, with a gleeful dose of camp, which makes him the perfect foil for the repressed mania of Henry. Pretorius is then the other half of the mad scientist coin; where Henry is prone to fits of hysteria (as when he reprises his most famous line to shriek, “She’s alive!”), Pretorius is in full control of his faculties and pursues his own eccentric experiments all the same. The sequence in which he demonstrates the results of his homunculi project is quaint for its 1935 special effects, but there is a sadistic streak in Pretorius, particularly when he encourages Henry to think of him as the devil.

 

Where the first film was very careful to caution us in advance that monstrosity is innate, particularly in the case of the Monster’s abnormal brain, Bride of Frankenstein is more reserved, positing instead that the Monster can and does learn kindness – a double-edged sword, as it were, since the Monster learns in tandem the lesson that humanity will always fear and revile him. This redemptive plot, in which an abnormal brain in an executed criminal’s body can rediscover his own humanity, is both surprisingly progressive and welcomely transgressive, forcing us to ask who the true monsters have really been. Mary Shelley herself (portrayed by Lanchester here) has her own opinion, suggesting that her story has been one of a man who plays God, but it seems the narrative gets away from Henry by the film’s end. The franchise too would get away from him (and, alas, director James Whale, for whom Bride is his last Franken-film), leaving this film a bit like the ending of The Godfather: Part II, in which Michael Corleone sits on a park bench and regrets all the ways his best-laid plans went awry. Whether the Coda to the Frankenstein duology would be Son of Frankenstein or (as I might prefer) Young Frankenstein is a question for next week’s Franken-Friday.

 

Bride of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston. Based on the novel by Mary Shelley. Starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Ernest Thesiger, and Elsa Lanchester. 

Tune in tomorrow for Deep Sea Saturday, with Revenge of the Creature (1955) starring John Agar, Lori Nelson, Tom Hennesy, and Ricou Browning.

Next week for Franken-Friday, madness skips a generation for the Son of Frankenstein (1939), starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi. Next week is a triple-header for the Monster, though. On Sunday, it's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange; then stop by on Wolf Man Wednesday to see what happens when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Monster March: Drácula (1931)

Today’s monster movie, to borrow a phrase from Rod Serling, is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of review. As prolific as international films have become and as sophisticated as modern dubbing might be, we may find the genesis of Drácula somewhat mystifying. Shot in Spanish, using the same screenplay as Tod Browning’s Dracula, Drácula was filmed strictly at night while Browning’s crew used the same sets during the daytime. We don’t quite have anything like this for the other installments of Monster March, so Drácula is a bit exceptional. It’s also very nearly a better film than Browning’s Dracula, aside from one essential omission – it doesn’t have Lugosi. 

Carlos Villarías stars as El Conde Drácula, a more genial and more sensuous vampire than Lugosi. After arranging a real estate deal with the mad solicitor Renfield (Pablo Alvarez Rubio), Drácula travels from Transylvania to England, where he preys upon socialite Eva Seward (Lupita Tovar), her fiancé Juan Harker (Barry Norton), and her physician father (José Soriano Viosca), who has already enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing (Eduardo Arozamena) in understanding the unscientific maladies plaguing London since the Count’s arrival.

 

Drácula uses the same script as Browning’s film, but it’s more than twenty minutes longer because its script wasn’t “censored” in the way that Browning’s was. We spend more time with Eva and Juan, establishing their relationship and their reactions to the grim circumstances befalling them; consequently, they’re much more interesting here than Mina and John were in Dracula. There’s a much longer sequence where Eva begs Juan to leave her to her fate, and the moment when she very nearly bites him is much more intense and erotically charged.

 

Indeed, at the risk of indulging a caricature, emotions are running much hotter overall in Drácula. Eva is lustier than Mina, El Conde is more overtly passionate than Lugosi’s slow-burn charisma, and we actually see the physical evidence of Drácula’s bite – his kiss, if you will – multiple times. In fact, Drácula is entirely less coy about the erotic dimension of El Conde’s kiss, perhaps because Villarías is ten years younger than Lugosi. Surprisingly, though, Drácula is missing the brief sequence where Dracula menaces a flower girl outside a London theater, almost as though this Drácula is much too sophisticated to indulge in a quickie with an anonymous victim. Yet there’s an additional death in Drácula; where Dracula left the fate of Lucy Weston largely unresolved, Drácula makes sure to let us know that the vampiric Lucía has been staked by Juan and Van Helsing.

 

In a bit of performance review, Lupita Tovar is very nearly better than Helen Chandler as Eva/Mina, though in part because she’s given so much more to do (or at least, so much more of her work made it past the editor’s desk). Eduardo Arozamena plays Van Helsing as more avuncular than Edward Van Sloan, who you’ll recall made that movie for me. Yet in a real surprise for me, Pablo Alvarez Rubio steals the show as Renfield, whose descent into madness is more drastic than Dwight Frye’s. Renfield comes off much more sympathetic in Drácula, as we see him wrestle with his vampiric possession amid genuine concern for Eva’s wellbeing (only glimpsed in Frye’s performance). Yet when he’s mad, he’s mad; the sequence aboard the boat is all the more chilling in Drácula because it’s scored by Renfield’s unbreaking and genuinely alarming shrieking cackle.

 

With so much about Drácula emerging as more engaging than its better-known English version, it’s almost a shame to say that Carlos Villarías just doesn’t live up to Bela Lugosi. In fact, like poor George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Villarías ends up being the one actor you can’t help but wish had been cast with the original. To be fair, Villarías is perfectly serviceable as Conde Drácula, his bug eyes and vamping posture suitable for any creature of the night. Instead of the pinprick spotlights that gave Lugosi his haunting stare, Villarías is granted extreme close-ups on his eyes, the sort of editing trick that Dziga Vertov must have loved. But having just seen Lugosi do the same performance, and make such weirdness out of it, permits this vampire to fall a bit flat.

 

Director George Melford (who, incidentally, didn’t speak a word of Spanish) apparently had access to Tod Browning’s dailies, and it does show. Melford’s direction is more cinematic than Browning’s, and he has better command of the film’s soundscape, most notably in the creaking doors and coffins that are silent in Browning’s version. Melford also interposes a musical refrain every time Drácula rises, a Wagnerian game with the audience to let us know that this motif means danger.

 

Drácula is not without its supporters, and there are many who feel it’s infinitely superior to the Tod Browning version. I’ll say it’s certainly more watchable and by far more cinematic, but without Lugosi it’s not the hit it could have been. If anyone with technical savvy can “deepfake” Bela Lugosi into Drácula, then I’d say we’re really onto something. Without him, though, it’s an engaging enough sidebar for Monster March to indulge.

 

Drácula is not rated. Directed by George Melford. Written by Baltasar Fernández Cué and Garrett Fort. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Starring Carlos Villarías, Lupita Tovar, Barry Norton, Pablo Álvarez Rubio, Eduardo Arozamena, and José Soriano Viosca. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Werewolf of London (1935) starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, it’s all in the family with Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden. For bonus Dracula shenanigans, Silly Sunday has Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.

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.