Dracula (1931)

“Listen to them: children of the night! What music they make!”

I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It’s slow, stilted, and awkward- a far cry from the style and humour of Universal’s own Frankenstein from the same year. Still, there’s a significant redeeming feature in Bela Lugosi, who is simply fantastic.

The opening scenes are well done, building up the suspense and giving us the context before we meet Dracula. The first line is spoken by Carl Laemmle’s daughter Carla, who is still alive and will be 102 this month, but we then move to a lot of ominous mutterings by local peasants towards Renfield. Interestingly, the setting seems to be firmly established as Transylvania, with all the signs in Hungarian, rather than the vague Mittel-European setting of the later Hammers.

There’s a certain style to the lighting of Lugosi’s face at some points, I suppose, but the direction is strangely lacklustre. Lugosi aside, the performances are not too good, either. The initial scenes with Renfield (conflated here with Jonathan Harker) at Castle Dracula only work to the extent they do because of Lugosi’s performance, although I like the presence of the various animals. I’m not sure there are too many armadillos in Transylvania, though.

The scene soon shifts to England, and becomes oddly and claustrophobically studio-bound for the rest of the film. Dracula is seen to carry out a few murders, but there are rather too many scenes of him politely conversing to Mina, “John” Harker and Van Helsing to be plausible, in spite of the fact that Van Helsing has his measure from the start. All the working-class characters speak a kind of absurd Dick Van Dyke cockney, too, and keep pronouncing the word “crazy” in a most peculiar fashion.

The plot proceeds in a way which owes rather more to the novel than the later Hammer film would. Lucy doesn’t have much screen time before abruptly dying, though, and the plot thread of her killing lots of people as a “woman in white” seems to just trail off. The rest of the film consists of Dracula gradually drinking Mina’s blood at night while she spends her days being patronised by the men who surround her. The sexual subtext is barely there at all, except for Mina’s scenes with John towards the end of the film.

Interestingly, the tropes of vampirism are rather different from those we know. Wolfsbane is used instead of garlic, and Dracula is able to turn, off-screen, into (unseen) wolves as well as ridiculously unconvincing bats. He presents very little sense of threat, though, for all his charisma, giving no indication of violence or strength in his interaction with the characters.

The film just ends with no real dramatic tension; Van Helsing simply stakes Dracula, with no confrontation of any kind beforehand. The whole thing simply falls flat, with no flair, dramatic tension, narrative clarity or humour. My overall impression was disappointment, although my expectations had not been high. Still, at least I can now say I’ve seen it.