The Vampire Bat (1933)

 “You give me apple. Herman give you nice soft bat."

These '30s horror films, by no means all of them Universal, are certainly something to be enjoyed. Not all  of them, alas, can be directed by James Whale. Yet this one is, as the amusingly hypochondriac maid in the film keeps saying, rubbish.

On paper it should at least be fun, if not necessarily good. Fay Wray is the leading lady, albeit in an underwritten role. Yet Dwight Frye, such a cult favourite that Alice Cooper wrote a rather good ballad about him, gets a nice and juicy part which shows how stereoyped he has become as the Renfield figure, but he's bloody good at it. He's the best thing in the film.

And yet... Lionel Attwill and Melvyn Douglas give passable performances, but the burgomeister is shocking. And, while there is some good visual stuff, the film is sloooow and dull, with appallingly functional dialogue. I suppose it's a plus to focus on vampire bats from South Ameirca somehw biting people here in central Europe and turning them into vampire-like people, but the resolution at the end is silly.

And so is the film as a whole, worth seeing only for the sake of the lovely Fay Wray and the splendid Dwight Frye. Not all of these '30s horror films, alas, are any good.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

"He's a very queer looking gentleman, Sir."

This isn't the first time I’ve seen this film, of course, but it’s been a bit of a while. It’s as good as ever this time round, of course, one of cinema’s great sequels, but a different experience after so many years. It’s a lot more noticeable this time, for one thing, how the delightfully camp Dr. Pretorius, making Henry Frankenstein look even more neurotic by comparison, strives to separate Henry from his heterosexual relationship so the two of them can do things together of which society disapproves, for which Pretorius has been banned from academia, and which are generally considered (it being a vague Romantic period or 1935, depending on how diabetic we wish to be) to be going against God. Hmm. What are we saying here, Mr Whale? Incidentally, I love the little people with their silly costumes.

The other thing that surprised me this time round is just how late in the film the “Bride” appears; just for the last four minutes. Elsa Lanchester looks and is superb, however. And it is of course the real tragedy that the monster, having known a little friendship from a blind man rather keen to push smoking on to him (“No, no, this is good. Smoke- you try.”), is hated by all and the fact that his intended mate is terrified of him too is simply the final straw. He can have no connection with others, thus no happiness, and so he wants to die- bringing Pretorius and the Bride with him. There’s a hint of violent male attitudes towards rejection by women there, I think. It’s also hard to keep my inner Alan Partridge in check as both the title “Bride of Frankenstein” and the fact that Pretorius says the line for no diegetic reason at his moment of triumph seems to call the monster “Frankenstein”. But it’s hard to deny what an absolute work of genius this film is.

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.

Frankenstein (1931)

“It’s alive!”

Hooray! The real life stuff has finished and I can start blogging again as normal. Time for a film, methinks. I’ve done a lot of Hammer; it’s time to do a Universal.

I love the bloke in the tux at the start with his wonderfully camp introduction. It sets the tone for the whole film, which is essentially a great big knowing wink. The credits are interesting, too: Mary Shelley is credited as “Mrs Percy B. Shelley” (it’s feminism gone mad!), and Boris Karloff is referred to as “?”, only being named in the closing credits.

The look of the film is just as stylised and atmospheric, paying no heed to realism and with no tree left ungnarled, as per the Hammers we’ve covered so far, but the whole thing seems to be shot so as to be a lot more claustrophobic. It’s also striking that everyone is in (for 1931) modern dress, and the setting seems to be firmly Bavarian (see the peasants’ costumes) rather than the mittel-European vagueness of Hammer.

For all that he starts off with grave robbing and stealing brains from dissection labs, Henry Frankenstein (why the name change?) is nothing like as nasty as the later Cushing version. Colin Clive does a great job of portraying his monomania, but as soon as his family performs an intervention halfway through the film he comes to his senses, and even leads a mob of baying peasants after the monster at the end. He seems to get away with rather a lot really. I was left mouth agape at the sight of Igor, whose name is Fritz, climbing up a not-very-solid gallows, in defiance of all health-and safety standards.

The early scene with the lecture is hilarious, with the lecturer telling his students with a straight face that he can physically tell the difference between a “criminal” brain and a “normal” brain! We’re also reminded that it’s 1931 by the fact that he goes on to say “Thank you, gentlemen- the class is dismissed,” in spite of the fact that at least a good third of the students seem to be women.

Elizabeth (token love interest and token woman) and Moritz are characters who exist only to advance the plot and be a bit wet, and are given dialogue so trite that it has to be deliberate; this is clearly James Whale having a laugh with the tropes. Even the performances of both actors seem to be deliberately wooden. And Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s grumpy, bibulous yet loveable old dad, is the funniest character in the film, who quite rightly gets the last word.

Funny though this film is, though, it’s full of iconic moments, and the moment where the monster is raised to the skylight to be infused with life as his creator raves that “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” is justly iconic. It’s is justly iconic. It’s easy to take for granted, too, how fantastic the monster’s make-up is, so familiar has it become. And our first glimpse of the monster’s face is simple but powerful. Even so, this doesn’t really feel like a horror film; there’s plenty of room for some archly ridiculous line about Frankenstein having found the “great ray”, beyond ultraviolet, which brought life into the world. Er, how scientifically rigorous.

The monster kills Igor, whose name is Fritz, but he was asking for it, frankly. It’s only when Dr. Waldman is killed that we realise the monster has become truly dangerous. The scene between the monster and the girl is the heart of the film, driving home the monster’s childlike innocence at the same time as we see it do the deed that puts it beyond redemption. Even here, though, the monster shows no malice. It is horrified and upset to see the little girl sink into the lake.

The scene of the girl’s father, numbed with grief, carrying his dead daughter towards the burgomeister is sad and effective, but I’m not sure how he realises she’s been murdered, or that there’s some unseen murderer hiding bin the woods. And I don’t think much of this society’s sense of justice, with the authorities happy to organise lynch mobs with not the slightest shred of evidence! Still, there’s no denying that the ending, with the mill quickly catching fire and Karloff brilliantly portraying the monster’s fear, is superb. There’s no way it can get out of that, right?