Conde Drácula (Carlos Villarias) is startled to find himself disadvantaged by the wily Van Helsing (Eduardo Arozamena) in George Medford’s Spanish version of DRACULA.
DRACULA unfolds as an indifferently adapted stage play bolstered by skillful spookiness, which is ex- actly what it is—complete with significant story gaps (like what became of Dracula’s three brides) and replete with grand dramatic gestures (like sweeping cape movements) meant to reach the people in the cheap seats. Whatever DRACULA may be, it is not a film of Bram Stoker’s novel, which is perhaps the most common misconception about it. The story is sim- plified to the point of having no point, save but to entertain with a perverse passion play; Dracula has no apparent plan, and he is given nothing to lose but his un-death. He leaves his castle in Transylvania for a similarly dilapidated abbey near London, and he bites a few local women. Edward van Sloan’s queerly peering Dr. Van Helsing, whose stiff manner doesn’t make the embracing of Good seem a very happy choice, is on to Dracula even before he does this, discovering a vampiric strain in the bloodstream of Renfield, an inmate at Dr. Seward’s asylum.
It now seems much more obvious that Brown- ing used DRACULA as a means of attacking the
42
prevailing trend of sound, demonstrating the importance of silence and the power of grand vi- sual gesture to audiences newly infatuated with a lot of talk. Firstly and foremostly, DRACULA comes into focus on Blu-ray as a defense of the dying silent film, which speaks only when words are ca- pable of adding to an unsettling effect. Further- more, given its precise straddling of the best of silent and sound filmmaking, it becomes all the more evident that DRACULA can only be fairly criti- cized in light of the films that came before it. In its own way, it was as revolutionary a film as DR. NO and, like that 1962 James Bond adventure, it doesn’t stand up as a whole to the more accom- plished later films it helped inspire. If DRACULA represented something new in horror cinema, it didn’t take full advantage; George Medford’s Span- ish version not only goes further in terms of eroti- cism but in terms of the fantastic, with the doors of Dracula’s castle opening noisily of their own accord and Dracula’s emergence from his coffin accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke. Browning’s personal disbelief in the supernatural— inculcated in him by his years spent working in
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
