NFR Project: 'Dracula' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dracula’

Dir: Tod Browning

Scr: Garrett Fort

Pho: Karl Freund

Ed: Milton Carruth, Maurice Pivar

Premiere: February 14, 1931

75 min.

Tod Browning was not a great director. Nor was he a particularly nice person. He ended his life as a terminal, dysfunctional alcoholic.

However, he had macabre inclinations, obsessions that colored his life and made him a master of horror on film. Dracula represents his commercial apogee, before his subsequent film ruined his career forever.

He was a runaway at age 16, and worked in circuses, carnivals, and in vaudeville in all manner of capacities for 13 years. This exposure to the underside of the entertainment world gave him a twist for the bizarre.

He fell into the film industry, and moved to Hollywood in 1913. He was known primarily for his comedic performances. However, on June 16, 1915, he drove himself and two other men into the path of a train while driving drunk. One man was killed; Browning and the other were severely injured.

After the accident, Browning slowly recovered and began to work as a screenwriter and director. He specialized in melodramas. In 1919, he first worked with an up-and-coming actor who was a master of makeup and disguise. He was Lon Chaney, the fabled “Man of a Thousand Faces.”

Browning and Chaney made 10 more films together, with Chaney usually in the lead. These were tales of crime, vengeance, and intense suffering. Haunted, grotesque characters filled his foregrounds. From Outside the Law (1920) through West of Zanzibar (1928), their successful collaborations set the stage for the coming horror boom.

Chaney was, in fact, an early choice to play Dracula. However, Chaney’s premature death in 1930 due to cancer scuppered Browning’s plan, and he was forced to look elsewhere for his leading actor.

Universal Studio’s interest in Dracula was piqued by a successful 1924 Broadway adaptation written by Harold Deane and John L. Balderston. It turned to an obscure Hungarian actor who had played the title role in 1927 on Broadway, and was now touring with the play in Los Angeles – Bela Lugosi. Lugosi lobbied for the role and accepted a criminally small salary to appear in the film.

The script follows a 1927 rewriter of the stage adaptation, veering far at times from the original 1897 novel. Surprisingly, large chunks of the film are stiff and static, reading more like a filmed stage performance than as a film per se.

The film takes off cinematically, however, during its dialogue-less sequences. Here is where Browning deferred to his cinematographer, the brilliant Karl Freund. Freund was familiar with the convoluted, shadowy style of German Expressionism that flourished in Germany; here, in Hollywood, he would apply its aesthetic to American horror, a choice that would be imitated faithfully for decades.

For example, the camers sweeps in to Dracula’s castle along with the innocent young lawyer Renfield (Dwight Frye), who has come to complete a real estate transaction with the Count. The silent advance of Dracula’s wives is pulse-pounding. Soon Dracula had bitten him and made a mad slave of him. The two then travel to England, supposedly to feed all the better off of humanity.

Fortunately, Professor Van Helsing is there. An expert in the occult and the strange, he recognizes Dracula for what he is – a vampire who cannot even cast a reflection in a mirror. They battle for the soul of Mina Harker, a battle that ends only when Van Helsing discovers Dracula’s coffin hiding place and stakes him through the heart.

Look for the silent sequences to see where Freund’s camera comes into play, evocative and compelling. The film is also anchored by two stellar performances. Dwight Frye as the madman Renfield sets the bar for obsessive maniacs on film, going over the top in a delightfully creepy way.

Then there is Lugosi. Dracula was a far cry from the Shakespeare he performed on his native stages. Still, his magnetic aura and compelling stare proved hypnotic, resulting in fan fervor that hadn’t existed since Valentino’s death. Lugosi, an urbane and mild-mannered man in real life, became typed with the vampire role, and was condemned to smaller and smaller roles in cheap and cheaper horror films.

The movie takes place almost entirely at night, and the fog and Charles D. Hall’s careful art direction further propel the audience into a notional space where vampires could exist . . . and might be after you.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dracula (Spanish language version).