Dracula (1931)

The Bloodsuckers Binge: a series of reviews on vampire movies in all incarnations as I look for, and find, any vampire movie I can get my grubby little hands on. The classics, the culty, the really good, the really old and inevitably: movies that suck!

The cover of this DVD said: this is a restored version of the 1931 classic, starring Bela Lugosi as Dracula. It is directed by Todd Browning, it is based on the Bram Stoker book and has a new score by Philip Glass. Needless to say I made a nice big batch of salty popcorn and settled in for an evening of cult heaven…..
However the experience was appalling and boring. For all my expectations, what this movie represents to me is 75 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Let me start by saying what I liked about this movie. It is very beautifully lit, particularly considering the limited technical means of the time. And yes, that is in fact about the only thing I did like.

The story starts with Count Dracula being visited not by Jonathan Harker, but by Renfield who is subsequently enslaved by the Count and accompanies him to London. To the average vampire purist this is heresy, particularly since this movie claims to follow the Bram Stoker book. In fact the entire story, as well as its characters are bungled for what appears to be no apparent reason except perhaps the moviemakers fear of a legal battle, like Murnau faced when in the process of making Nosferatu.

To be honest, a change in story and characters would have been acceptable if the script had not been such an infantile, irritation-invoking mess. There is way too much explanation in the script, as if Browning and/or the writers did not trust the imagery and the action to speak for itself. The result is patronising and belittling and does not take the audience’s intelligence very seriously. The film just adds one cliché upon another and that is in fact interesting, for this was one of the first times these images were used. Logic dictates that they should not feel as tired and used-up as they do.

Also the time setting is wrong. The costumes do not match the atmosphere that Browning is trying to achieve. The story has been relocated forward in time from the time period of the book, however instead of this giving the film a jolt of freshness, it dates the material as well as the story being told. The music by Philip Glass, although very beautiful in its own right, is wrong for the film, because it dates the images even further and sounds like a square musical peg in a round cinematic hole.
With the exception of the beautiful lighting that I mentioned earlier, the rest of this movie fails miserably in standing the test of time, where an older film such as Nosferatu succeeds. Everything that still seems fresh about Nosferatu, even when viewed today, here comes of as contrived and out-dated.

Now Browning was too talented to completely mess up, and he doesn’t. Some of the images are melancholically beautiful, like the one of the bug crawling out of a little box, as Dracula and his brides get out of their coffins. The image of the hand coming out of the coffin is a well-deserved classic, but a lot of shots of bugs and strange animals and using large amounts of smoke, are not the same as creating a scary atmosphere.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula does not help here. He is way too groomed and does not do enough acting. In his tuxedo and cape he looks about as scary as a 12-year old in a little Dracula costume and plastic fangs, going trick-or-treating at Halloween. No doubt the soave outfit was intended to make Dracula into one cool dude, but it’s not working. He is not scary at all, partly because of the fact that Lugosi has no expression in his face and is blank and bland-looking throughout the film.

The acting is flawed in general, for there seems to be no communication between the actors. In the beginning of the movie Dracula and Renfield act as if they are not even in the same shot. Only after Renfield is enslaved their chemistry gets better and interestingly, then the actors truly are not in the same shot anymore. The actor playing Renfield seems to be only one doing any acting in the film, but he completely overdoes it. Plus the accents are all wrong (Lugosi being the exception). Some accents are English, some American; some are an attempt at Cockney, which in this case means the actors have stricken the use of the letter H from their language. Most appalling example is a character called Martin, who is introduced as the amusing sidekick and guardian of Renfield in the mental institution. It is just blister-raising, toe-curling bad, in both performance and writing.

And so, while some of the images are pretty, there is not nearly enough there to hold the viewers attention for 75 minutes. In fact, there is only about enough for about 15 minutes.

So don’t waste your time. No, really. Don’t waste your time.

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