“The blood is the life, Mr Renfield…”
When writing about Dracula the big question is: “Where do you start?”. The story’s been adapted so many times, the character so iconic that everyone knows about them. With that in mind I’m going to assume a certain familiarity with the basic story, focus instead on this particular film and it’s influence on every version since.
What’s the image that comes to mind when you think of “Dracula”? Cape? Aristocratic manner? Thick Eastern European accent? That all starts right here.
While the book had all ready been unofficially filmed in F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” a decade earlier, this was the first English-language version. It’s not a direct adaptation of the book, but of a play which been through two separate versions, one of which was on Broadway. This is mostly due to a much lower contemporary budget than the lavish “Phantom of the Opera” due to the stock market crash in 1929. While there are large impressive crumbling staircases at both the Count’s castle and Fairfax Abbey, there’s no building an entire castle here!
It’s the first film in this series to have synchronised sound (a silent version was also produced), while there is spoken dialogue there isn’t any incidental music. This gives rise to a lot of occasions where there is no sound at all, giving the film an eerie quality that most subsequent versions lack.
The studio had been planning to make “Dracula” for quite some time, with Lon Chaney as the lead. Unfortunately Chaney died the year before the film got underway and the part eventually went to the actor who had played on Broadway, one Bela Lugosi.
His performance is undoubtedly the strongest part of this film, the standard which all others since are measured against. While Cheney would most likely have played the part with extensive prosthetic makeup as he had in “Phantom of the Opera”, Lugosi had no need of it. There are frequent close-ups of his face, highlighting his piercing stare. Born in Hungaria, his accent gives him an exotic quality to match this version of the Count’s more aristocratic air. Sadly Lugosi was so indelibly linked to this role he became typecast. He fell into relative obscurity before finding brief notoriety late in life through his films with Ed Wood. His family had him buried wearing the Count’s cape.
As a likely result of the film’s stage origins and the brief running time (just over 70 minutes) the story has been pretty badly mangled. Besides the Count, only Van Helsing and Renfield see any great amount of screen-time, with Jonathan Harker reduced to a bit-part. The movie fizzles to a close with a total anti-climax under Fairfax Abbey. Dracula is dispatched off-screen, asleep in his coffin. For some bizarre and unknown reason there is added comic relief in the form of a warden at Dr Seward’s asylum with a gratingly false Cockney accent. To call the film “uneven” would be kind.
While better “Dracula” movies been made (my personal favourite being Francis Ford Coppola’s), to my mind no actor has ever matched Bela Lugosi.
Next on the slab: Boris Karloff gives life to Frankenstein’s monster!
