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Tchaikovsky is briefly heard, followed by the musique concrète of creaking doors and distant howling. A dash of "Boule de Suif" gets it going, Doré for the Carpathian ride guided by a bat, virtually a silent film. "Crumbling castles of a bygone era," the solicitor (Dwight Frye) is welcomed at one by Dracula (Bela Lugosi) amid vermin and cobwebs. "The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield." The journey to London is succinctly stated (and recalled by Hitchcock in Jamaica Inn), a pan from the dead captain in shadow to a hatchway finds the deranged servant, staring and giggling. The Count is an arch boulevardier at home in the English mist, an object of fascination for Lucy (Frances Dade) even if Mina (Helen Chandler) prefers "somebody more normal." Asylum and drawing room accommodate the nightmare, characters wander from one to the other while the shapeshifter in the garden bids his time. "There are far worse things awaiting man than death." A definition of cinema as trance strikingly understood by Tod Browning, who controls the tempo as severely as Sternberg. (Edward Van Sloan's deliberations as Van Helsing are integral to the uncanny style.) Karl Freund's cinematography practically earns him co-directing credit, mysterious movement applied to somber tableaux for a hint of delirium—a maneuver twice repeated has the camera looking away as fingers creep from inside a coffin, then looking back to behold the vampire. Even as off-screen action accentuates the proscenium, there's Frye reveling in the imagistic language of a sea of rats ("Thousands! Millions of them! All red blood!") while David Manners as Harker looks on, stupefied. And there's Lugosi, caped and rouged, forging Grand Guignol iconography and living inside it, turning the word "evening" into a three-bar organ piece. The mythos overhaul of Dreyer's Vampyr is just around the corner. With Herbert Bunston, Charles K. Gerrard, and Joan Standing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |