Prehistoric in cinema technique and stuck with a drawing-room-centered script, Brownings film nevertheless retains much of its creaky, sinister power, spotlighting (literally, via tiny pinlights aimed at his evil eyes) Lugosis star-making turn as the vampire, squeezing Hungarian menace out of every syllable of phrases such as Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to thaim or I nevair dreenk vine! The film opens magnificently, with a snatch of Swan Lake and a rickety stagecoach taking us and estate agent Renfield (Dwight Frye) to Lugosis cobwebbed and vermin-haunted castle (an armadillo nestles in a Transylvanian crypt). Dracula strides through a curtain of cobwebs, the vampire twitching with bloodlust as his guest cuts his finger while carving bread, and three soulless vampire brides descend upon the unwary visitor.
Once the story hops disappointingly over a dangerous sea voyage (snippets of stock footage) and the Count relocates to London, Lugosi calms down. But Edward Van Sloan is staunch as the vampire-killing Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the forgotten Helen Chandler is frailly charming as the bled-dry and semivampirized heroine Mina, and Frye steals every scene that isnt nailed down when Renfield transforms into a fly-eating, giggling maniac. Castle Dracula, with its five-story Gothic windows, is the art direction highlight, but the London scenes offer an impressive staircase and catacombs for Draculas English lair. Browning falters at the last, however, with a weak climax in which the Count is defeated far too easily, his death conveyed by an offscreen groan as he is impaled. KN
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1930s
FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
U.S. (Universal) 71m BW
Director: James Whale
Producer: E.M. Asher, Carl Laemmle Jr.
Screenplay: John L. Balderston, Francis Edward Faragoh, Garrett Fort, from play by Peggy Webling and novel by Mary Shelley
Photography: Arthur Edeson, Paul Ivano
Music: Bernhard Kaun
Cast: Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Boris Karloff, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr, Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Marilyn Harris
Frankenstein is the single most important horror film ever made. James Whale hacked out of Mary Shelleys unwieldy novel a fable of an overreaching scientist and his abused, childlike outcast of a monster. Though Colin Clives neurotic Frankenstein and Dwight Fryes hunchbacked dwarf assistant are definitive, the career breakout of the film is William Henry Pratt, a forty-two-year-old Englishman who turned his back on a privileged upbringing and emigrated to become a truck driver in Canada and a small-time actor in the United States.
Universals makeup genius Jack Pierce devised the flattop, the neck terminals, the heavy eyelids, and the elongated, scarred hands, while Whale outfitted the creature with a shabby suit like those worn by the ex-soldier hoboes then riding the rails and added the clumping asphalt-spreaders boots. But it was Pratt who turned the Monster from a snarling bogeyman into a yearning, sympathetic, classic character whose misdeeds are accidental (drowning a little girl) or justified (hanging the dwarf who has tortured him with fire). In the opening credits, the Monster is billed as being played by ?; only at the end of the film were audiences told it was a fellow by the name of Boris KarloffPratts stage handlewho had terrified, moved, and inspired them.
Frankenstein claims a number of wondrous theatrical set pieces: the creation, with lightning crackling around the tower and the Monster raised to the angry heavens on an operating table; the Monsters first
appearance (seen from behind, he turns to show us his face and the camera stutters toward him); the heartbreaking sequence with the little girl who doesnt float; the primal attack on the heroine in her boudoir on her wedding day (a rare bit taken from the book); and the pursuit of the Monster by a mob of peasants with flaming torches, winding up in the old mill where creator and creation confront each other in one of the earliest horror movie inferno finales. The Universal horror cycle runs the gamut from perfection through pastiche and pulp to parody, but Frankenstein remains chilly and invigorating, the cornerstone of its entire genre. KN
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1930s
CITY LIGHTS (1931)
U.S. (Charles Chaplin) 87m Silent BW
Director: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Charles Chaplin
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Gordon Pollock, Roland Totheroh, Mark Marklatt
Music: Charles Chaplin, José Padilla
Cast: Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia, Hank Mann, Charles Chaplin
Convinced that speech would mar the beauty of cinema, its greatest mime exponent, Charlie Chaplin, agonized over the introduction of sound technology and determined to ignore it, against all advice. Presented as a comedy romance in pantomime, his defiantly silent 1931 film City Lights was in every way a triumph, its heartrending melodrama and hilarity withstanding audiences craving for talkies. Nevertheless, after shooting the film, Chaplin incorporated sound effects and composed and conducted his own score, as he would continue to do in his later pictures.