With Van Helsing, Dracula finds a worthy opponent in the form of Edward Van Sloan. Physically and grammatically correct, with a great first line in dialogue, his Professor is doggedly set on finding and destroying the vampire. So intense is he in his work, that he bullies victims into revealing their stories, losing the bedside charm of his literary counterpart and subsequent movie Van Helsings. He confides in people that will listen, constantly explaining his theories to a gullible Dr Seward, who follows him around lapdog fashion as he drones incessantly on.
He uses wolfbane instead of the usual garlic flowers. He talks of the puncture wounds on the victim's necks, but we never see them. His will is strong when tested by the hypnotic powers of the Count - interestingly, Dracula doesn't hypnotise Renfield, but drugs him with a bottle of wine; the hypnotism seems to only work on the women.
Van Helsing is thoughtful, as he never opens the second box at Carfax until Harker is out of the way, so that he won't see his beloved Mina laid out in the casket. Unfortunately, he is also forgetful. Throughout the film, Van Helsing has curiously carried crosses and large amounts of wolfbane to repel his vampires. When he finds Dracula's resting place however there isn't a stake or hammer in sight. He has to send Harker hunting for a stone while he breaks up another wooden casket!
Once he has his makeshift stake, he spares the audience any further horrors by staking the Count off screen. His final appearance at the film’s climax was a device that would be used again as he introduced the horrors of Frankenstein in a similar manner for James Whale.
A story has circulated over the years - and I hope that it is true - that when casting around for the part of Dracula's nemesis in the stage play, producer Horace Liveright had chanced upon Van Sloan in a New York production of Schweiger by Hans Werfel and, standing up in the theatre, pointed at the nervous actor proclaiming:
"That's him! That's the man to play Van Helsing!"
Edward Van Sloan would continue playing learned Professors for the remainder of his career. He died, typecast by the role of Van Helsing, in 1964.
David Manners plays the intense John Harker. Earning three times more money than Lugosi, he doesn't have much to do, except walk around looking decidedly cheesed off - maybe because the writer has already given his scenes to Renfield? He is described as “normal”, by Mina and watches on the sidelines as Van Helsing constantly pushes him to one side while trying to bully his fiancée into explaining everything she can recall concerning the Count's activities.
No one asks Harker's opinions on anything. When he does get to talk to Mina, he is interrupted by a flapping bat; Mina telling him that their life together is over; and finally, her expression changing considerably, attacking him off screen. The sounds he makes - a low, wailing, "No, Mina, nooo!" - seem to imply all kinds of unimaginable horror off screen, but is undercut by Browning's heavy-handed direction yet again.
Van Helsing saves the day with his trusted crucifix and has the gall to recruit Harker over Seward, to track Dracula to his lair at Carfax. Once there, Van Helsing takes charge again, leaving Harker little to do except run around the cellar, ineffectually calling out the name of his fiancée. However, as with all Hollywood romances, he does walk away with the girl at the end. He co-starred with Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the strange satanic thriller, The Black Cat (1934) - as another useless love interest, his career destined to become obsolete.
Mina Seward is the only role that Helen Chandler would be remembered for; which is unfortunate as, apart from a scene where she eyes David Manner's throat malevolently, she also has very little to do except talk and cry. Her dialogue explains scenes that we never see. For example, she states that:
"he opened a vein in his arm and forced me to drink!" describing Dracula's advances.
She confesses meeting an undead Lucy:
"I started to speak to her, and then I remembered she was dead!"- even though, she never seems to leave Dr Seward's sanitarium.
Only Van Helsing is able to understand her fear of the crucifix, which she cowers from at every opportunity, and punctuates her abhorrence with a scream.
Ms Chandler's life was more eventful off-screen as she destroyed her chances of fame through dependencies on pills and alcohol with many overnight stays in mental institutions. She was married several times and one of her husbands, Bramwell Fletcher, had appeared as the Renfield character in Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932). While hospitalised, she was constantly dogged by letters and telephone calls from someone who claimed to be Bramwell Fletcher. She died in 1965 and was cremated; her ashes were never claimed.
Frances Dade plays Lucy, a character who has a strange temperament and loses herself in morbid fantasies. Quoting poems about death to captive audiences sets her up as the Count's first victim and I found myself wishing that she'd had more screen time. The still showing Lugosi creeping towards a slumbering Lucy would become one of the most iconic images in pop culture. Like co-star Helen Chandler, this is the only film that the 19 year old would be remembered for.
Herbert Bunston has a great sounding name, but, as Dr Seward, he is the first actor to play the ineffectual, doddery old man. He discovers the marks on Lucy's throat and is happy when dotty, old Van Helsing ventures his diagnosis, no matter how outlandish it sounds. He owns the asylum, but none of the inmates take notice of his carefully lowered voice used to calm down mischief-makers.
When Van Helsing tracks Dracula to Carfax, he doesn't even bother to ask Seward if he wants to come along for the big stake-o! At the asylum, Seward is the only one who has been listening to the Professor's psychobabble claptrap, but he's dropped like a hot potato as the Professor delivers the final coup de grace, preferring the company of sceptic wimp, John! Unlike his female colleagues, Mr Bunston wouldn't be remembered at all.
One final thought: was the opera a double date? Mina and John - and Seward and Lucy? It really doesn't bear thinking about. I have to say that even if I had seen this film on its first run, I would have been incredibly disappointed. I just can't believe the claims that nurses waited in attendance in case audience members took a nasty turn - although there is the thought of that double date.
After cuts ordered by the censor it runs for 76 minutes, but it seems double that because of its very funereal pace and lack of any kind of musical score. Why have Lugosi climbing out of his coffin at all, if the camera was going to constantly avoid it? Attacks on the two sleeping girls are exact composites of the selfsame scene:
Girl in bed; bat at window; girl asleep; Dracula in bedroom getting into famous predatory crouch; moves towards bed; fade.
Then we have a drawing room scene. Renfield. A scene on the terrace. Renfield. A drawing room scene. Renfield. I'm asleep.
I can only say that Tod Browning's crew, particularly Karl Freund - who cheekily remade the film a year later as The Mummy (check it out, it's worth it) - must have been very patient indeed. It is this film script that Mel Brooks chose to parody for his dismal, Dracula: Dead and Loving it (1995), starring Leslie Nielsen.
Unable to bracket Dracula, Universal waited five years before filming a sequel, Lambert Hillyer's more atmospheric Dracula's Daughter (1936), which dropped the Count completely in aid of a wax dummy after giving Lugosi a pay-off. Only Edward Van Sloan returned from the original cast as Professor Van Helsing.
Accounts have been given that Bela Lugosi wished to repeat his most famous role of Dracula in colour, using the interesting cinematic concept 3D in the 1950s. After living with a curse far worse than vampirism, he became a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, he died on August 16th 1956, effectively closing the book on the first chapter of the Count's story on film by being buried in his Dracula cape.
CHAPTER THREE
Charles Villar
DRACULA (1931: Universal Pictures, USA/Spanish language version)
Director: George Melford
Universal made foreign language versions of their products back-to-back on a regular basis to keep interest fresh in their markets overseas.
I have only seen George Melford’s Drácula, with Carlos Vallarius (Count Dracula), Eduardo Arozamena (Van Helsing) and Lupita Tovar (Eva), as recent segmented downloads on the Internet YouTube service. Before this revelatory experience, I had to exist solely on tantalizing stills, and piece together a cinematic wonder through reviews of varying degrees.
Carlos Vallarius is billed as Charles Villar. In the photographs, smiling inanely with giant candelabra, he looks to be enjoying himself immensely as the Spanish Count. In another shot, ascending stone steps with said candelabra, he looks a little shocked at the idea of being a photogenic vampire. Bending over the sleeping form of Carmen Guerrero, we see an edge of sensuousness that was missing from Lugosi’s portrayal.
Villar loses the stiff baroque poses in favour of high camp melodrama it seems and has three brides dressed in varying degrees of fashion to suit the historical period in which they were fanged. The movie segments show a film that is indeed displaying an energy that is missing from its American-speaking cousin. Gone are the dead spots of interminable silences and the weird inclusion of armadillos and possums that scurry around in Bela‘s castle. In their place are convincing bats, fluid camera movements and vigorous verbal exchanges from a cast that seem to be having real fun with the material.
Pablo Alvarez Rubio switches from his mousy and stuffy, but efficient, store room clerk into a gleefully maniacal familiar as Renfield. Lupita Tovar and Carmen Guerrero deliver strikingly animated performances that totally contradict the dour, maudlin and, frankly, wooden turn of Helen Chandler as Mina.
Dracula’s brides hungrily emerge from the shadows in the wake of Yorga’s croned hags almost forty years later. Fangs are absent, but one can easily imagine these caged tigresses ripping and tearing their prey, gnawing on flesh and bone as we would strip a turkey drumstick of every last vestige of meat.
Tod browning himself had confessed in interviews that he constantly had to ‘hold down’ Bela Lugosi as the Count. It seems that the Hungarian actor’s two years on stage had thrown him into the habits of over gesticulating his every nuance, and emphasising every spoken syllable with broad, dramatic gestures. This, coupled with the aspect of Karl Freund’s immovable camera, leaves me wondering as to how much interaction between the two sets of cast was allowed. I say this, because it is now common knowledge on the internet that Vallarius had been told to be “as much Lugosi-like as possible”.
When we see the Spaniard perform, we witness, first hand, these animated gestures and devious changes of gleeful expression that were so cruelly bereft of use in the ‘classic’ Lugosi performance. While watching these few, but very tantalising segments, my mind began to ask all sorts of questions concerning this ‘lost’ treasure.
George Melford, a prolific director of westerns had helmed Rudolph Valentino’s successful 1921 production The Sheik. Not understanding a word of Spanish, he directed his commands through an interpreter. All the cuts that had been ordered by the censor in Lugosi’s film, that Tod Browning was still grumbling about almost thirty years later, remain intact in this version: the staking of Lucy, Dracula preparing to disembark for England with his boxes of earth and some comedy interludes between Renfield and a maid.
Also apparent are the first ideas of sex being brought into the proceedings as Guerrero and Tovar wear sensationally low cut gowns. Tovar (who would become Mrs Paul Kohner two years later) confessed in a rare interview that the Spanish cast were not as intimidated by the idea of showing off their bodies as their American counterparts. She also conveyed the fact that they were living like vampires themselves, working through the night from 8pm until 6am the following day.
Discovering these incredible pieces of film opened my mind to all sorts of questions and speculation that may or may not be too far from the truth. I list my ideas below
When Lon Chaney died in August 1930, it was no secret that Universal were trying to lure him back to the studio to repeat his success as the master of horror – albeit , before the term ‘horror’ had entered into usage amongst film goers. Dracula would be the perfect vehicle for the ’man of a thousand faces’. As noted above, it is a possibility that Chaney would have taken both the lead roles of Count Dracula and Professor Abraham Van Helsing. It is broadly evident that Chaney directed the films himself and brought life to the grotesqueries of Tod Browning’s imagination in their many collaborations together.
The bulk of all the characterisations tended to deal with life-changing deformities such as could be found under the tents of a travelling circus. Browning himself had been a circus performer in his youth and would have met the people that he wrote about in his screenplays that culminated in his best, and probably most heartfelt film, Freaks (1932).
Even his sole stab at an original vampire story had the element of sensational showmanship attached to it and waylaid public perceptions by being titled, The hypnotist (1927). known around the world today as London after Midnight, the most intriguingly famous lost film ever. The vampire himself would be explained away at the end as being an elaborate ploy to catch a murderer, explaining all the spook shenanigans away in a neatly tied knot at the climax. Again, Chaney portrayed the anonymous Inspector Burke who takes on the identity of the Dr Caligari-like vampire.
Without warning, Chaney succumbed to the throat cancer that had plagued him for a number of years – possibly irritated more by the intense vocal mannerisms that he had used in his last film, The Unholy Three (1930). The actor publicly signed an affidavit to assure audiences that all the voices used in the picture (an old woman, a midget pretending to be a baby etc..) were his own. It was an impressive, yet tragic transition into the new medium of talking pictures and cemented Chaney’s reputation – by this author at least – as one of the greatest actors who ever lived. Browning would continue with a take on this character in the horrific revenge thriller, The Devil doll (1935) with Lionel Barrymore substituting for the absent Lon Chaney.
But what did Tod browning know about vampires? Or for that matter, directing a movie? His heavy-handed approach to Dracula ruins many scenes, because he seems to hold no concept of the evils of these supernatural beings. He happily allows the screenplay to relay the novels highlights/horrors through idle chat and throwaway remarks from a cast that, quite frankly, seem lost and bewildered. Again the insertions of ridiculous animals in the Count’s castle tend to rely on the feeling of wonderment as opposed to outright horror.
The Spanish cast would watch these rushes before filming and threw down the gauntlet that they would make the
better film. And they did.
Universal’s publicity machine had touted Bela Lugosi as the Count Dracula. Carlos Vallarius, I believe, was to be nothing more than a doppleganger to sell the Lugosi image overseas. George Melford, a better director than Browning, who had seen better days in Hollywood, was given the project, attacking it with a verve of a man embarking on his first feature for a major studio. The finished film outclassing Browning’s original in almost every respect.
I believe that measures had to be taken by the studio and they buried the film – literally – for over sixty years, to instil the image of an underpaid and relatively unknown actor into the public consciousness as the one and only Count Dracula.
The Spanish language feature appeared on video in 1992 after an intense restoration project. Today it shares billing on a double-sided DVD with Lugosi’s own film – but there are no pictures on the casing of Carlos Vallarius. Finally, it has taken its place in a standard Universal DVD box set alongside five classic Universal horror films. I confess that I still have to see the film in its entirety and keenly look forward to a night in with possibly one of the best horror movies of the 1930s.
CHAPTER FOUR
Atif Kaptan
DRAKULA ISTANBUL’DA (1953: Demurrage Studios, Turkey)
Director: Mehmet Muhtar
Never released in the West, Atif Kaptan dons the black cloak in this Turkish re-telling of the story, directed by Mehmet Muhtar, and borrowing its s
creenplay from Stoker and Ali Riza Seyfi's novel The Impaling Voivode. This would be the first film to fuse Stoker’s creation with the 15th century tyrant Vlad the Impaler, the original novel Kazikli Voyvoda (1928), being little more than a translation of Stoker’s fable.
Again, the film has a legacy of providing just a series of tantalising stills. The most often printed one shows Kaptan with bald head and vicious looking fangs - the first screen fangs since Nosferatu (1922) - glaring hungrily at some unfortunate midnight traveller out of camera shot.
Atif Kaptan was born in Izmit, Turkey in 1908 and was, apparently, as big a horror star as Peter Cushing in his own land! Billed second on the impressive movie poster, he lusts after the films major star, Annie Ball, who plays the character Guniz - Mina - as a performance artist who enjoys dancing in the flimsiest of attire. Filmed on a shoestring budget with a generous nod towards cameraman Ozin Sermet for his atmospheric cinematography, the film retells the Dracula story from a modern Turkish perspective and, for those unfortunates who haven’t seen it, the reviews really get one licking ones lips in anticipation of a worldwide DVD release!
The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid Page 6
