Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Theoretically beginning about five minutes after the ending to Browning’s Dracula, this low budget sequel still suddenly seems to take place when it was shot instead of about the turn of the century as the first movie. It’s a Universal movie alright. Some change has also come over poor old Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, the only returning cast member from the first film, and certainly not one you’d want to return) – he is now Professor von Helsing. Arrested by two comic relief bobbies who will go on to annoy throughout the film’s first act, he finds out that Scotland Yard in form of one Sir Basil Humphrey (Gilbert Emery) does not put much stock into his chances of not being convicted for murder when his main defence is that his victim was a vampire. It certainly doesn’t help that Von (ugh) Helsing never mentions all those other characters from the first film who just might be helpful witnesses there. In any case, our man is convinced that the only one who can help him is an old student of his, the lawyer, no wait, the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger). Not surprisingly, Garth will turn out to be rather sceptical at first.

While this is happening, a woman with hypnotic powers and a striking dress sense we will soon learn to be Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden, who is the only element of the film that’s utterly, completely, right), whose actual relationship to Dracula the film never bothers to go into (of course), steals Dracula’s body, burning it to ensure his destruction. The Countess hopes that this will have cured her of her own vampiric desires, but a bit of nudging from her man-servant/enabler Sandor (Irving Pichel) on the next night gets her teeth right into someone’s jugular again. Eventually, she tries to get help from modern psychiatry, and yes, of course in the form of Jeffrey Garth.

Like many of Universal’s horror movies that are not the obvious classics, Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter is a deeply frustrating experience. As usual, it’s neither the actors (who mostly do as much as they can with what they are given), nor Hillyer’s direction, nor the technical aspects of the movie that are the problem, but the script by diverse hands. Oh, there are bits and pieces and hints and suggestions of great interest and attraction here (I’ll go into those a bit further on), but nobody involved with the final version of the script actually seemed to have understood those, leading to a film that doesn’t seem to know what it’s actually supposed to be about. It certainly isn’t making matters any better that much of what goes for a plot here is full of holes so big, even I couldn’t very well ignore them. Certainly, sometimes these holes could be taken as clever ambiguities, yet the shoddiness of their surroundings suggests otherwise.

Which is rather a shame, too, for there are several elements here that can make Dracula’s Daughter fascinating despite of itself. Take the aforementioned vague relationship between the Countess and Dracula in combination with her never showing any actual supernatural powers (apart from hypnotism, but the decidedly non-supernatural Garth can do that just as well as she, for in the pop culture of the 30s, hypnotism was scientific fact), suggesting the Countess may very well not be an actual, supernatural creature of the night but a woman only believing she is a vampire. Of course, the film does undercut this reading eventually via some dumb line by “von” Helsing, because it’s that kind of film.

Also interesting, and probably the film’s main claim to fame in circles interested in not terribly successful movies from the mid-30s of the last century, is the Countess’s status as something of the first movie lesbian vampire; though, really, given that only one of her victims is a woman, she’s probably more a bisexual vampire, and not the first one either, for Lugosi’s Dracula did some off-screen nibbling on Renfield. On the other hand, her same sex bloodsucking happens as nearly on-screen as the at the time particularly pesky Hayes code allowed (after several cuts made for the censors), so the film’s certainly pioneering in that. Plus, that scene is one of the most effectively shot of the film, suggesting the kind of deeply atmospheric film Hillyer could have made.

Then there’s the possibility to read at least parts of the film as being metaphorical about drug addiction, the Countess a junkie who already knows that her fix is destroying her, and doesn’t want to be destroyed, but of course still can’t resist. Even the dialectic between relapse and total acceptance of her role as a blood junkie is there later on. And of course, most of the film simply ignores this possible reading, as it does the lesbianism, Sandor’s role as enabler, and the ambiguity of the Countess’s mental state, because firstly, nobody involved in the final product cared about any of this, and secondly, there were scenes of bumbling bobbies and Edward Van Sloan talking with a Scotland Yard guy to shoot.

As I said, it’s an intensely frustrating film, because so much of great interest and weight is dangling just out of reach of the audience because the filmmakers didn’t seem to bother. Which is very much the problem of most of the lesser Universal horror films.

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On Rewatching Dracula (1931)

I'm changing up my usual format a bit today because nobody needs to hear a plot synopsis of the first classic Universal horror movie.

If you're just joining us, young grasshopper, be advised that Tod Browning's Dracula isn't based directly on Bram Stoker's novel but on a stage play by Hamilton Deane that was later rewritten by John L. Balderston and makes some sensible and some very curious changes to the novel. Some of the latter may make more sense on the stage than on screen, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Browning would have preferred Dracula to be played by his old partner in crime Lon Chaney (senior) but Universal insisted on very successful stage Dracula Bela Lugosi. Consequently, Browning had one or more hissy fits and did not bring his full creative power to the proceedings because he found his ego more important than his movie. As far as can be said today, parts of the film were really directed by supreme cinematographer Karl Freund. This part of the film's backstory has made an easy in for a lot of critics to take the film down a peg. It's difficult to completely disagree with the brunt of their arguments, for the film is often rather more stagy than necessary with too many scenes of characters telling us important plot developments instead of the film showing them (though I don't think it's all the play's fault - some of the scenes that are only told, especially Dracula feeding his blood to Mina, would just have not gone over on screen in 1931, pre-code era or not), and Browning is visually far less imaginative than in those of his films he deigned to care about. Having said this, to me there's so much about Dracula that is a remarkable achievement I can't help but have the impression these critics are so in love with mourning a film that never was they don't look at the film that actually exists with an open mind.

It's true, Browning is not at all at the top of his game here, and especially the dialogue scenes that make up most of the film's middle are filmed with little élan or interest, but all of the film's big horror set pieces are moody and brilliant and staged with a care many filmmakers don't bring to the table when they are at their best. Then there's Freund's beautiful cinematography, Charles D. Hall's impressive art direction that sets up rules of the visual treatment of gothic horror by way of German expressionism generations would go on to follow. Freund's and Hall's contributions to the film really give the joyful impression - in a fog-shrouded doom and dread kind of way - of something happening on screen for the first time.

And then there's Bela, of course. One could make fun of the curious stiffness and theatricality of the great man's performance, but then one would rather miss out on the fact how nuanced what he's doing here actually is. Lugosi doesn't play the Count as a romantic, several hundred years old noble with a lust for blood, but as a creature that may once have been human and vaguely remembers some of the surface aspects of acting like a human being. There's a reason that Lugosi's accent is thicker whenever Dracula lets his mask drop completely, and it's the same reason why he's moving less corpse-stiff in those scenes where he's trying to fit into society, even though each of his gestures then is still slightly off. This Dracula is not a dead man walking, but something deeply inhuman pretending to be a man, and for my taste, Lugosi realizes that aspect of the role brilliantly.

I also think most of the rest of the cast does their job rather well. Helen Chandler's Mina is quite a bit more convincing than one would expect going by the generally pale performances of female romantic leads of the era. Dwight Frye does an important step to be forever type-cast as the bug-eyed madman, and while this interpretation of mental illness is of course as dubious as that of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, his performance has a strong, melodramatic (in all the best senses of the word) power that perfectly fits Lugosi's performance as well as Edward van Sloan's Dutch accent by way of Hollywood-Hindustan and Hollywood-China. No, we're not in method acting land here, but in a film where intelligently melodramatic and artificial acting come together with ideas and methods of German cinematic expressionism and Hollywood commercialism to create more than just the first horror house style in cinematic history but a foggy, shadowy, weirdly accented world of its own.

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