The Classics File: The one that made Bela Lugosi

 

 

Title: Dracula

What Year?: 1931

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

As I write this, I’m closing on fifty reviews for my No Good Very Bad Movies feature, and not far from 300 reviews total. It crossed my mind that the one thing I haven’t dealt with is perhaps the one kind of movie I hate most, the “overrated” movie, and this interested me enough to consider why. The most obvious consideration is that the most obvious suspects are the kinds of films I don’t usually deal with, say, romantic comedies and historical dramas. What really stands out to me is that there really is a measure of justice here. Genre critics and fans like me will dig up horrible movies from long before we were alive, but “mainstream” pop culture memory has the depth and longevity of astroturf. I personally have seen many blockbuster films that I was subjected to seemingly disappear from public consciousness in 10 years or even 5. The remnant that remains are the overrated classics, and these vex me enough for one last tilt at the windmill. To kick things off, I present Dracula, the cornerstone of a whole genre that has never satisfied me.

Our story begins with an outsider approaching the castle of an aristocrat named Dracula, a crumbling ruin that for some reason has a possum infestation. The count is ready to look for a new place in the big city, and he has brought our nominal protagonist on board as a real estate agent. The count soon arrives in merry England, bringing a mysterious plague with him. The cast of noblemen soon realize that Dracula is a vampire, an undead fiend that must drain the blood and health of the living to survive. To save British morals and possibly civilization, they must destroy the revenant- but a gentleman’s beloved is already in his thrall!

Dracula was a 1931 horror/ drama film from Universal, based on the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker. The film was directed by Tod Browning, known for horror/ surrealist silent films such as London After Midnight, and starred Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi in his breakthrough role. The film was an immediate success, and together with Frankenstein became the foundation of the “Universal Monsters” franchise. It also launched Lugosi into other high-profile films such as 1932’s White Zombie. Browning followed the film with Freaks, his most well-regarded and controversial work. The director subsequently declined due to conflicts with studio management and several box office failures, while Lugosi suffered increasingly from typecasting in low-budget horror and parodies of his earlier work. Lugosi died in 1956, due in part to substance abuse. Browning died in 1962.

For my experiences, a central reality I have already commented on is that I grew up with the Universal Monsters films without really experiencing them first-hand. (Ironically, the one I definitely remember seeing in my youth is Abbott And Costello Meets Frankenstein.) That left me in an especially odd position with Dracula. Of course, I knew of the film and character. I can remember reading an apparently faithful comic-and-cassette adaptation of the novel. I also became familiar with the tragic biography of Lugosi, and eventually found my way to Nosferatu. Most significantly, I became very familiar with “real” folklore about the undead. But until the viewing for this review, I had literally never seen the actual film, in no small part because I already knew that it had very little to do with anything people had actually believed in. I finally fit in a viewing one morning before work, and came out even more underwhelmed than I expected.

Moving forward, the literal elephant in the room here is the reason I usually don’t review “high profile” movies: This is a definitive example of a film that is almost inseparable from its own influence. It’s all the more unfortunate that it has been parodied often enough for a substantial number of people to know the parodies far better than the original. (The “bleh bleh bleh” running gag in the Hotel Transylvania franchise is actually a pretty good “meta” illustration of the problem.) For 1980s kids like me, it’s like growing up with a Weird Al Yankovic song and then finding the original he was making fun of. Things get even trickier with Lugosi, who has long since been reduced to a Rorschach test for critics; some will see a demigod before his tragic fall where others just see a ham who was always overrated. On that particular point, I feel I can be a voice of reason. I will be the first to say, Lugosi was a gifted and versatile actor. This, however. is absolutely not his best work (though certainly not his worst either…). Given that he got in at least a decade of “respectable” work between this film and his actual slide into low-budget typecasting in the early to mid-1940s, the whole idea that this was some irreproducible peak was always a backhanded slight to his actual talent. The actors who really can’t improve on their first major role are the ones who end up washed up long, long before he did.

After all that, I still haven’t really talked about the movie, and I freely admit that I’m not sure if I can. This is a film that truly feels like a prototype. All the elements of great gothic horror are here, surely by Browning’s hand: The spooky castle, the shadowy crypts, the inexplicably unsafe staircase (wait, was Death Becomes Her making fun of this?), the ethereal zoned-out vampiresses. They just don’t quite come together. Then sometimes they don’t work at all, egregiously the bats, which look at least as cheap and silly as the alleged effects in an actual Ed Wood movie. (Hell, Abbott And Costello looked like it had real bats.) What I find inexplicably lacking is any sense of tension, which in turn comes down to the lack of an engaging hero. For most of the movie, Harker and Van Helsing (I honestly never tried to sort out which is which) do little more than narrate Dracula’s misdeeds. When they do finally do something, their plan amounts to hitting Dracula when he can’t fight back. Only once does Dracula pit his full hypnotic powers against a would-be slayer, in a truly great scene that might justify the movie’s reputation if it wasn’t inconsequential to the plot. My final beef is that all of these issues were already present in the book, yet Stoker’s tale made it interesting and dramatic even in the Radio Shack adaptation.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and I can honestly point to the moment this movie lost me. Very early on, we are given a view of the interior of Dracula’s castle, and it’s all well and good. We soon get to the crypt, and this is where things get wonky. First up, a rodent-like creature emerges from a coffin which is in fact clearly a possum, something a number of commentators confirmed. So sure, this could just be a stand-in for a very big rat; I discussed the surprising difficulties of filming live rodents myself when I reviewed the Willard remake (see also Of Unknown Origin). But then we see what are very obviously armadillos, a creature which is like the possum found only in the Americas and also is so unthreatening that is literally toothless. The strange thing is that I had seen these harmless creatures hyped as somehow dangerous before in Ingagi, so I decided to see if I could figure something out. Apparently, armadillos are something of a pest in the areas where they live, with a further disconcerting habit of digging up carrion and fresh graves either for meat or just in pursuit of insects already attracted by such things. So why did Browning see fit to put them on-screen here, as he apparently did in a number of his films? Did he expect audiences to accept them as dangerous based on dim rumors and simple unfamiliarity? Or are they simply here as a strange animal that few people at the time would recognize? I just don’t get it, and that is my refrain for much of what follows.

In closing, what I come back to is what “overrated” really means. It’s easy to joke about films that deserve to be forgotten or entirely lost, but after seeing how many good films have suffered that very fate, I cannot wish it even on the most terrible movies I’ve ever seen. On a philosophical level, it’s in the normal course of things that some films receive more praise and profit than they deserve. The “overrated” films that are a real problem are the ones that distract from ones that are as good if not better, and this is definitely a case in point. I haven’t been doing this review to tell anyone that this movie is “bad” or good. That is a judgment only the individual viewer can make, especially for a film this far removed from its own time. What I have said and will continue to say is that there are films that are better, like Nosferatu, White Zombie, even From Dusk Till Dawn in its own way. (Why have I still reviewed only one of those movies???) By all means, give it a look, and be glad we all have that privilege. But don’t let it stop you from looking at other movies. With that, I for one have said my piece.