where action, character and dialogue were snipped. Curiously, the character of Sarah, the bookish girl with round spectacles played in the opening scene of Browning’s film by Carla Laemmle, the niece of the studio head, has noticeably more to do in the Spanish one. While Browning’s DRACULA revels in silence for spook effect, Medford’s embraces music and sound effects, underscoring the silence of the other by exposing it as an artistic choice. Here, Dracula’s castle doors groan as they magically open (a touch, no—two touches disdained by Browning) and Medford keeps the music playing during the op- era box dialogue, suggesting that the characters are so captivated by meeting Count Dracula as to ig- nore an ongoing performance. Though Drácula gains a good deal from its more indulgent length and the more fluid camera wizardry of George Robinson, it goes without saying that it loses some- thing by not having Lugosi aboard—but not only because Carlos Villarías is not his equal (he could actually pass for Lugosi from face-averted angles). Villarías’ inadequacy is compounded by the fact that the entire cast (apart from Barry Norman as “Juan Harker”) is Mexican, which means that, when Renfield meets Dracula, or when Dracula meets the London- ers, there is no sense that the Count is in any way foreign or different to them. Deprived of Lugosi’s exoticism and natural otherness, Villarías is forced into unsubtle, even comic extremes as he strains to appear strange. That said, Villarías manages to steal from Lugosi the scene of Dracula smashing the mir- ror in the cigarette case proffered by the wise Van Helsing because he offers a more complex set of emotions within the scene. Lugosi lashes out but quickly regains his authority and composure; Villarías, however, appears to struggle with em- barrassment as the eruption of his animal side eclipses his comportment as a gentleman. Medford’s film is alone in paying obvious hom- age to Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922) during the Vesta sequence, showing Renfield in the cargo hold with rats crawling up his back and atop Dracula’s box, with Dracula later emerging from below to feast on deck, his pinky brandishing an altogether differ- ent ring than Lugosi wears. His film is so unique in so many of its creative decisions, it’s interesting to note how closely it copies certain things from Browning’s original, specifically its depictions of Count Dracula and Van Helsing. In both films, Renfield gives expression to the horror; if Dwight Frye more definitively looks the part and is the more blood- curdling madman, Pablo Alvarez Rubío is somehow more persuasive as a sane man, which makes his trauma more measurable and his outcome all the more unsettling and tragic. The character of Dr.


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Seward similarly gains in depth because actor José Soariano Vioscia has a marvelous scene with Lupita Tovar in which Mina ashamedly submits to her father’s insistence on examining her throat wounds; it is a marvelous scene for both actors, sold entirely through the art of pantomime. Similarly, Eduardo Arozamena’s Van Helsing is as humorless and strange as Edward van Sloan’s, but he appears less stead- fastly righteous and more easily shaken in the pres- ence of Dracula’s evil, which makes that evil seem all the more powerful and consequential. The Spanish Drácula looks splendid for the most part, the exception being a watchable but imperfect 10m stretch when the film’s third reel (19:25-29:27) kicks in. This reel was found missing from the archi- val print kept in Universal’s vaults at the time of its original VHS release and had to be obtained as a copy from the only other known print, held in re- serve at the Cinematéca de Cuba. Because the reel in Universal’s possession is a copy of the Cuban print, it is a photographic record of that unrestored print’s flaws as well as its content; therefore, though unblemished on the surface, scratch-filling mea- sures like wetgate scanning would be ineffectual. Additional digital cosmetic work might have been applied to erase the scratches, but was not. James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN on Blu-ray is not quite so easily assessed, nor so complexly re- assessed, as a result of new disclosures. There is no accompanying documentary or written notifi- cation to tell us from which archival elements the restoration was sourced and, regardless of Whale’s reputation as a decorative, fanciful filmmaker, the film itself is not the elegant work of horror that DRACULA is, or that THE BRIDE OF FRANKEN- STEIN would be. It’s a film of stonework and torches, darkened rooms and bright backlot German town exteriors, and fabulous, zapping laboratory equip- ment, none of which is given much in the way of noticeable new life in 1080p, though the puckers of the outdoor sky cyclorama are much more notice- able, as are some newly evident dribbles of paint. There are occasional frissons of extended depth, as in the lakeside scene with little Maria, and the boosted detail exposes, more clearly than ever before, the true nature of the windmill in the climax as a life-size set base matched to a matted-in scale model of the upper portion, whose blades turn to precisely graze the matte line. Viewers may also notice, for the first time, that the actors in the background of the final shot are not Colin Clive and Mae Clarke but rather their stand-ins. As with DRACULA, significant work has been done to improve the film sonically, elimi- nating hiss and extending its sonic range, and the presentation ends with 17s of exit music.


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