Review: Dracula (1931)

It's become quite fashionable to bash Universal's Dracula, American cinema's first foray into supernatural horror. (All previous American horror films featured monsters that could be explained away with mad scientists, lunatics, greedy schemers or all of the above.) And there's plenty to criticize here. The screenplay is based not on Bram Stoker's novel, but on a Broadway play based on the novel. Consequently, many scenes seem stage-bound and lack energy, and Tod Browning's direction does little to enliven the proceedings. His actors all stand on their marks, throwing lines of dialogue at one another that endlessly describe off-screen action without giving us much on-screen juice to care about, while his camera rarely moves (A crime, considering that his cinematographer was the gifted Karl Freund, who would provide glimpses of what could have been with his own directorial efforts, The Mummy and Mad Love), taking little advantage of the often enormous, expensive, highly detailed sets.

There are problems amongst the actors as well: Helen Chandler makes for an oddly listless Mina (being drained of blood is no excuse for being boring, dear girl), while David Manners plays the first of his many Useless Boyfriend roles. (In later years, Manners would admit that he thought the film was "a stinker.") And the lack of any kind of musical score makes Dracula seem at least twice as long as it really is.

With all of that said, there is still much to praise in Dracula as well. The opening scenes in Transylvania remain as moody and evocative as they were when Dracula was first released, mainly due to the efforts of Freund. (Why he was unable to work this magic on the rest of the film remains a mystery.) Bela Lugosi became a superstar based on his rich, energetic, sensual performance as the immortal vampire who comes to England in search of new blood. His exotic accent and measured delivery (which issued forth because he spoke little English and memorized his dialogue phonetically) only enhance the otherworldly quality of his performance. Edward Van Sloan is Lugosi's equal as Van Helsing, the man of science who nonetheless believes in the corrupting power of the supernatural. The scenes between Lugosi and Van Sloan stand well above much of the rest of the movie, and the two actors play well off of one another. (They should: each played his respective part from Dracula on Broadway as well.) And Dwight Frye gives a bug-eyed, toothy-grinned, thoroughly demented performance as the insane realtor Renfield.

Credit must also be given to studio head Carl Laemmle Sr., who, despite his misgivings, gave the go-ahead for this project to be produced by his son, Carl, Jr. It was a substantial risk for Universal to make a movie in which you couldn't come up with a reasonable, rational explanation for the goings-on. There had, in fact, only been one American vampire movie before: the long-lost London After Midnight, also directed by Browning and starring Lon Chaney as a razor-toothed nightmare who turned out to just be a police inspector in disguise. (Chaney has long been rumored to have been Universal's first choice to play Dracula--even though he was under contract to MGM at the time.) To offer a supernatural answer to what was happening simply hadn't been done in American films before, and the consequences could have been catastrophic for the studio or, at the very least, for the careers of the elder and junior Laemmles. Instead, Dracula was a smash hit, Lugosi a certified matinee idol, monster movies a proven commodity.

Dracula may not have aged as well as the horror films Universal would subsequently produce, such as Frankenstein, The Mummy or The Invisible Man, but it served its purpose: it opened the coffin lid and let all the crawling and shambling and howling things come out to play with our minds and hearts. And for that, at the very least, Universal's Dracula must be given its due.

NOTE: Universal recently re-released Dracula with a musical score written by noted composer Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet. While such retrofitting would ordinarily be frowned upon, this move seemed like a natural. After all, the film had been criticized for decades because of its lack of a score, and adding one well after the fact seemed not only logical, but kind. The music does, indeed, help Dracula, for the most part, heightening mood in scenes that had otherwise seemed merely dull while enhancing scenes that were already intense.

Occasionally, though, Glass falters, adding music to scenes that would have been better off silent or, at the very least, subdued; his notes sometimes step on dialogue that would have been better left to stand on its own. Still, overall, the experiment was a success, and purists who find such a concept repulsive can, should they choose, ignore it altogether: the DVD edition of Dracula includes both the newly scored version and the original scoreless one.