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The burden of family, the addiction of desire, "a case for Scotland Yard." It begins where Browning ended, the Count has been staked and Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) faces the gallows for the crime. While he's questioned by officers, Countess Zaleska (Gloria Holden) sweeps in to claim daddy's corpse and incinerate it in a mist-suffused exorcism, her gaze shielded by a cape as a cross is raised over the pyre. She hopes to enter normalcy by breaking the undead curse, but her manservant (Irving Pichel, in makeup a à Muni for the Scarface link) knows better: "What do you see in my eyes?" "Death." James Whale was replaced by Lambert Hillyer, yet the shift from Bram Stoker to Sheridan Le Fanu remains unmistakable—the memorable centerpiece brings a delicate lass (Nan Grey) from the edge of the Thames into the Chelsea atelier, her bare shoulders foil the Countess' efforts to keep her "mind over the forces of darkness," the sequence ends as the camera tilts upward from screaming victim to glowering mask. Carnal transgression as occult anguish, the vampiric heroine's omnisexual urges a threat to the order she yearns to join ("Remember: England expects every man to do his duty"). Holden's patrician beauty turns to psychiatry to help neutralize her hunger, only for the doctor (Otto Kruger) to attribute the absence of mirrors in her lair to a suspicious lack of feminine vanity. (As the assistant fond of prank calls and crooked ties, Marguerite Churchill adds a screwball note to the melancholy horror.) Hitchcock's The Lodger figures in the police search before the flight to Transylvania, "between the superstition of yesterday and the scientific fact of tomorrow" is the arrow in the castle recalled in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. With Gilbert Emery, Hedda Hopper, Halliwell Hobbes, Billy Bevan, and E.E. Clive. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |