Dracula (1931)

Writing an objective review of Tod Browning's Dracula nowadays is a thankless task. While acknowledging the fact that it's of great historical importance - the first of the Golden Age Universal horrors, Bela Lugosi's breakthrough role - only the most die-hard of Lugosi fans would fail to concede that time hasn't been kind to the film. Though allowances need to be made for the primitive filming conditions under which the film was made - sound had only been around for two years and both cameras and sound equipment were bulky and often unreliable - there are still considerable problems with the film that need to be addressed.

The key problem lies in the simple fact that Dracula is almost defiantly uncinematic. Because Universal wanted to side-step the potentially expensive matter of buying the rights to Bran Stoker's novel, they instead chose to buy the rights to the popular stage play written by British producer-actor Hamilton Deane and subsequently re-written by American playwright John L. Balderston. The adherence to the structure of the original production (the film restores only the opening Transylvanian sequences to Deane and Balderston's text) cripples the film and stifles any serious attempts to make the film anything but a sluggish filmed record of the play itself.

The best moments are by far and away the scenes that scriptwriter Garret Fort added - the scenes in which Renfield - and not Harker as in the novel - travels to Transylvania for his first meeting with the Count. These scenes have a genuine eerieness that persist to this day - the vast interior sets, Lugosi's strange, otherworldly demeanour and the almost surreal lack of sound (forced on the production by the aforementioned primitiveness of the equipment to hand) add up to a creepy ambience that gets the film off to a fine start.

The opening moments have passed into cinema legend, with virtually all subsequent attempts to film Dracula relying to some degree on the 1931 version's blueprint. The worrying journey to Castle Dracula aboard a coach full of superstitious locals and the arrival at the apparently deserted castle itself are iconic sequences that have been restaged with concious and deliberate reference to Browning's version for decades since. Charles D. Hall's sets add immeasurably to the effect, tall, cavernous things dressed with cobwebs and crawling with a strange menagerie of animals, among them the infamously out-of-place and therefore weirdly disturbing armadillo.

Had the rest of the film maintained the chilling atmosphere of the opening reel, then Dracula really would be the classic that it's many adherents claim it to be. Sadly, Browning seems to lose his nerve in the latter two thirds of the film which are tedious, talkative and wholly unimaginative. Indeed the difference between the opening passages and the dull bulk of the film are so marked that they lend some credence to actor David Manners' subsequent - and still unsubstantiated - claim that most of the London scenes had been directed by the film's director of photography Karl Freund after Browning had been 'removed' from the production.

The sluggishness of much of Dracula is often blamed on the fact that Browning, like all directors at work in Hollywood at the time, was only just getting used to the arrival of sound and the huge changes in the methods of production that it brought with it. While this is undeniably true, compare Dracula to James Whale's altogether more impressive Frankenstein released the same year to see that the excuse only goes so far.

Technical restrictions can certainly account for the absence of many of the more dramatic moments from the novel - the terrifying journey of the Demeter (renamed the Vesta here) and its doomed crew, the plague of rats that accompanies Dracula's temptation of Renfield, the depredations of the vampirized Lucy are all missing, due in part to the inability to film such complex scenes on the budget allowed and with the equipment available, and also in part to the strictures of Hollywood censorship that demanded such key scenes as Dracula's demise be presented off-screen. Even contemporary audiences must have been disappointed with such scenes as John Harker describing the huge wolf running through the grounds to Van Helsing instead of actually showing it.

And yet to dismiss Dracula out of hand - as is done all too often these days - would be an act of revisionist vandalism that simply isn't warranted. It isn't a great film by any means, but it is a hugely important one, a landmark in the development of horror on the big screen that deserves much respect despite all its faults. In its time, Dracula was as terrifying to its audiences as Hammer's 1958 remake, Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and Ringu (1998) were to theirs. What made the film all the more shocking to its original viewers was that until Dracula came along, most Hollywood horrors had tended to dismiss the supernatural in a last reel rational explanation (see London After Midnight (1927), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Bat (1926) for three particularly notorious examples), a trend that would continue even post-Dracula in British horror cinema. In Dracula, audiences had to deal for the first time in a long time with a genuine supernatural menace and it added to the film's initial considerable impact.

And one certainly can't dismiss what was then a potent undercurrent of eroticism that Browning invests in the film. Although Lugosi makes for a strangely unemotional and defiantly unsexy vampire, there are still moments that would have alarmed more sensitive early 30s audiences, particularly the moment when Dracula skulks into Mina's bedroom and leans leering over her her sleeping body, or when he later lures her into his cape on a lonely country lane.

And so we come to Lugosi, the star of the show, whose career was both made and, in many ways, irrepairably damaged by Dracula. Much has been written over the decades both in praise and in comdemnation of his performance in Dracula and in truth his turn has been so widely parodied and copied since 1931 that's it's almost impossible to make a definitive assessment of his work now. Though it's certainly an iconic performance, it has to be said that it's also a stilted one, one which switches uneasily from vaguely embarrassing melodramatic flourishes, to an almost lethargic flatness. As befits an actor who had already played the role on stage, there's a theatricality to his performance, full of broad gestures, over-emphatic facial mannerisms and some terrible make up.

It's a strange performance, one that has probably been elevated to its current status by the undeniable power of nostalgia. His stillness and apparent lack of emotion - a liability in the latter half of the film - give his early scenes in the castle a genuine chilliness, and there's absolutely no denying just how important a performance it was, for all its faults. Even now, the image of Dracula that sits in the minds of many people will be that of Lugosi rather than Lee, Oldman or the many others who have tackled the role since and when he delivers his first volley of eminently quotable lines to Renfield in the castle, it's difficult not to hail him as the definitive screen Dracula, though this is far from his best work in the genre.

The rest of the cast - with the notable exceptions of the excellent Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing and a demented Dwight Frye as Renfield - are a largely forgettable lot, given little to do by the script which seems to have no interest in them whatsoever. David Manners later admitted to positively hating his role as John Harker who is cast here as a dull and totally useless character only there to act stupid questions to keep the audience up to speed. The rest of the supporting cast fare equally poorly.

So is Dracula the classic that so many make it out to be? No. It's an important film with all-too-brief flashes of brilliance, but it never escapes its roots as a stage play and it's a very long way now from the "strangest passion the world has ever known" that the original advertising would have had us believe. But it's a film whose place in the history of horror cinema is assured and which should be required viewing for anyone with an interest in the history of the genre. A landmark then, but certainly no classic.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 15 October, 2008