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Dracula [1931] The 1931 horror classic with a new score by Philip Glass. The practice of slapping new music on old movies has a bad rep, thanks mostly to that horrid Giorgio Moroder Metropolis. Philip Glass here has the unusual task of scoring not a silent picture but a talkie from that brief period just after the introduction of sound when Hollywood rethought the tradition that all films should be accompanied by non-stop music. Back when people came to talking pictures to hear people talk, it was believed audiences wouldn't accept music that didn't come from an obvious source on the screen: in 1931, Dracula had only a snatch of Tchaikowsky's Swan Lake over the credits and a sample of Wagner in a concert hall scene. The soundtrack does boast the stage-trained enunciations of the cast: you remember the distinctive cadences of Bela Lugosi's serpentine Dracula, but equally on-the-money are the hideous cackle of Dwight Frye's looney Renfield, the authoritarian bark of Edward Van Sloan's curt Van Helsing and the pseudo-English vowels of Helen Chandler's waxy Mina. Some of the best sequences might as well have come from a silent picture, as Dracula or his pale vampire wives lurk in castles or the fog, or odd vermin - including the famously unlikely Transylvanian armadillo - scuttle among the coffins. Glass, whose distinctive style has graced Koyaanisqatsi
and Kundun, evokes the 1930s without abandoning his
own personality, matching Lugosi's mesmeric stares with hypnotic music
[performed by his regular interpreters, the Kronos Quartet] that suggests
the vampire's influence even when he is off-screen. Oddly, the only
lapse comes in the concert scene: with the Wagner obviously removed,
it seems that the film's theatre-goers are intently listening to the
same Glass tracks that play unnoticed for the rest of the film. Besides
the music, it's a pleasure to meet this old friend of a film again:
often criticised for talkiness, a cleaned-up print like shows off the
remarkable sets [there are two major staircases] and highlights director
Tod Browning's underrated [if undeniably theatrical] skill with melodrama. First Published In: Empire Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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