"... children of the night... what music they make... "
I think it only fitting to call an audible here and go a
little old-school with tonight’s edition of the Covid Quarantine Film Festival.
No, no, we’re not going to jump subjects; rather we are going to have our first
(drumroll, please!) DOUBLE FEATURE! Like every old drive-in worth it’s salt,
you have to have a good double feature now and then, and, like any drive-in
fan, you gotta do it on Saturday night, so, let’s all climb into the CQFF
station wagon and head out to the movies!!
Now, being the stickler I am for certain traditions, a
double feature on a Saturday night needs to be a certain kind of movie. No
rom-coms, no dramatic weepers, no. A classic double feature needs to be scary! And
tonight’s double bill is a nice little history lesson, to boot! We’re going
back to the basics with the Universal Monsters, folks!
Our first feature is Universal’s Dracula, made in
1931. The movie stars Bela Lugosi, who had played The Count in a successful Broadway
run of the story. Ironically, he was not the first choice to lay the role when
it came time to make a movie version of the play. Lon Chaney (who we will talk
about in depth next week, I promise) was originally chosen to play the role,
but Chaney’s untimely death from lung and throat cancer caused producer Carl Laemmle,
Jr and director Tod Browning to jump to Lugosi, who they had originally ignored
because of his halting grasp on English. Being from what is now known as
Romania, they didn’t think his speaking voice would translate well on film.
I cannot imagine anyone not knowing the basic plot of
Dracula, so I will spare you the rehash. Safe to say, Dracula is not just a
European nobleman who moves to London. He’s a vampire, and he sets his sights
on England as his new hunting grounds. The story, though, was completely new to
audiences in 1931, and Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, Sr. had major
doubts about letting his son put such “trash” on film. What nobody had counted
on, though, was director Tod Browning’s storytelling vision.
Browning was, shall we say, an odd bird. He had made his
bones in Hollywood by making films about characters who were… different. His
films with Lon Chaney all focus on characters who were deformed, misshapen, or
morally vacant. Browning loved circuses, he loved the macabre, and he had no
problems making VERY weird movies. Dracula was such a character, but without
Browning’s little touches here and there, this film could have easily gone
wrong and we would never have had the legacy of Dracula.
Most notably, Browning turned conventional wisdom upside
down and declared there would be no music in the film. Coming out of the silent
era, every film had music. Music set the tone of the film, almost signaling how
the audience was supposed to feel for every scene. Studios even employed
musicians to play on-set to put the actors “in the mood of the scene.” When
sound came to the screen, studios hired musicians and composers to score every
movie. Browning, however, played against that and simply said no. By doing so,
he set the audiences on edge, for reasons they didn’t quite understand. On the
surface, it’s not a detail you immediately notice. What it does is make you
feel like something is just… off. Something isn’t right. Something is missing.
Likewise, Browning doesn’t follow the standard most
directors had at the time of filling the screen in a balanced way. Your focus
when you watch a movie generally settles in the center of the screen. It’s human
nature to take a view in by focusing on one central point and having the rest
of the view surround that point. Browning shifts that focal point to different
sides of the screen, leaving huge open spaces on one side or the other. Again,
on the surface, it’s not something your mind quite registers, but, at the same
time, it is unsettling. You watch a scene with the actors all on one side of
the screen, and the other side of the screen is just background – a cobwebbed
castle staircase, a drawing room in a Victorian home, etc. While your attention
is on the actors, though, your brain clicks on the fact that something should
be happening on the side where nothing is actually happening. Your eyes begin
to glance over at that unused set, waiting for another actor to enter the
scene, or for some sort of action to occur over there. When it doesn’t, it
begins to draw even more focus. The audience has all this anticipation grow
stronger and stronger, waiting for the payoff, and when it doesn’t happen, the
confusion makes things all the more unsettling. 
I cannot give all the credit to Browning, though. If there
was ever a person born to play Count Dracula, it was Lugosi. Sadly, though, his
portrayal was so solid, it cursed his career for the rest of his life. He had a
few other prime roles, most of them supporting roles, but he never hit the peak
again like he did with Dracula. Dwight Frye, bless his crazy heart,
plays the insane Renfield in a way that nobody else has ever played the role.
If you watch Frye in the movie, you honestly can believe you are watching an
insane man go deeper and deeper into his own madness. Edward Van Sloan, a
Universal staple character actor, gives the first interpretation of Dr. Van
Helsing, the doctor who knows that vampires exist, and recognizes our
illustrious count as one of the undead. His portrayal set the table for other
classic interpretations, most notably the Peter Cushing/Hammer Studios version.
Our second feature, if you hadn’t guessed by now, is Frankenstein,
made almost on the heels of Dracula, in 1931. The story is relatively simple
– a doctor becomes obsessed with the idea of creating human life by using dead
bodies, pushing science to the extreme, finding the right formula to revive the
various parts of dead bodies and thus creating new life from the dead.
Colin Clive plays the mad doctor, trying to prove his theories
by stealing freshly-dead corpses and using them to build a man. And, while
Clive is indeed integral to the story, it is the monster he creates that truly
steals the story. Lugosi, hot off his triumph as Dracula, was offered the role
of the monster, but he declined the role. While many film historians will swear
it was the worst mistake of his career, Lugosi was correct in his decision – AT
THE TIME. The script he was offered was an early one, set forth by a slew of
possible directors and screenwriters, and the monster did little more than
grunt and tear things down.
That all changed with the hiring of director James Whale...
Whale saw so much more in the story than just a rampaging
monster and a mad scientist. He ordered writer John Balderston (who had written
the original Broadway script for Dracula) to retool the script, to find
the depth behind the doctor’s desire to create life and to find the humanity
behind the
horrific beast created by the mad doctor. Who to play this horrific,
yet somehow beautiful, soul of a monster? Whale searched every studio and contacted
ever stage actor he knew in the quest for the monster. One day, as he sat in
the Universal commissary having lunch, he happened to look across the room and
his eyes landed on an exotic-looking man. High cheekbones, strong jaw, heavy
brow, a man who looked both regal and intimidating as hell. As the story goes,
he crossed the room, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the table with a
journeyman actor named Boris Karloff and said, “Excuse me, but your face holds…
all sorts of wonderful possibilities…” And a legend was born…
Universal Studios head of make-up Jack Pierce began working
with Karloff, accentuating Karloff’s already-exotic look. After four weeks of
tests and piecework, Pierce created the look of the monster, a look that both
horrified and stunned audiences, but a look that allowed one very
important thing. It did NOT restrict Karloff’s ability to use his face and his
body to interpret the role. Whale was vehemently against any make-up or
costuming that would restrict Karloff from being able to show that this
creature was, indeed, human. Karloff also refused to play the monster as simply
a mindless killing machine. Whale and Karloff worked together to make the
monster, for lack of a better way of saying it, a child. The monster is a true
newborn being, one who does not understand the world he finds himself in,
learning as best as his afflicted brain can. And that, friends and neighbors,
is the real miracle of this movie. We see The Monster’s fear, his uncertainty,
and his few moments of happiness.
As horrific as The Monster looks, the audiences of 1931
found themselves feeling true sympathy for this beast. In 1931, America was
deep in the throes of the Great Depression. Americans knew what it was like to
be one thing one day and be something different the next. They knew what it
felt like to be considered beastly because of sudden poverty. They knew what it
felt like to be shunned because of lack of wealth or food or a home. They took
Karloff’s monster into their hearts and, while he did scare them initially,
they came to realize he was one of them.
Full credit cannot be left only with Karloff, though. James
Whale also knew what it was like to be considered something less than “normal.”
Whale was a homosexual at a time when being gay was simply not accepted as
anything other than “abnormal.” He knew all too well what it was like to living
with the shadow of having to hide from the world. He and Karloff had many
discussions about the life of someone who felt he had to hide from the world
that considered one to be a monster. And every bit of that shows in the film as
well as Karloff’s portrayal.
I could go on and on about Karloff and The Monster, a role
he
considered to be his “best friend.” He said in many interviews that he
considered The Monster to be one of the most wonderful roles of his career. He
often noted that, more than most of his other roles later in his life, The
Monster was the role that children got more than adults. Children understood
that The Monster was truly a giant child, trying to get along in a world not
meant for children.
Before I let you enjoy these movies for yourself, let me
calm your fears about spending “a lot of time” watching two different movies.
Both Dracula and Frankenstein run approximately 75 minutes in
length, a fact that still stuns me when I watch them. In a time when an average
feature-length movie runs about 2 hours or more as a general rule, these two
films tell amazing stories, whole and complete, in less than 90 minutes. And
you will never be sorry for spending roughly 2 and ½ hours with the two
original Universal Monsters. There is no blood shed in either movie. There are
no gory effects or stunning CGI moments. These are pure moviemaking at its
finest. The art is in the atmosphere, the shadows and storms that defined an
entire genre, full of dark and stormy nights, softly blowing curtains and lightning
slicing through the darkness. The beauty of the performances blend with this
atmosphere to create a gothic fever dream that has yet to be rivaled.
I do want to add one more point, if you will let me. Many people scoff at these movies, as well as the other Universal
Monsters like The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and The Creature From
The Black Lagoon. They scoff because they aren’t scary by today’s standards,
they are often melodramatic and, yes, laughable at times. But if you doubt
their legacy in film history, let me put a couple of questions to you.
If I were to ask you to “talk like Dracula,” how would you
speak? If I handed you a pencil and asked you to draw Frankenstein’s Monster,
how would you draw him? Unless you are in a VERY small minority, your “Dracula”
voice would be Lugosi’s stilted pronunciation, slow and methodical, slightly
rolling your consonants and overdoing the “V” sounds as “F” sounds. Likewise,
if you draw The Monster, it is most likely to be some form of Jack Pierce’s masterful
Karloff make-up, with the flattened head and wide forehead, the Cro-Magnon brow
and sunken cheeks, and those incredible half-closed eyes. The brackets holding
the head together, the electrodes in the neck. Like it or not, THOSE
images, THOSE speaking mannerisms, are what you know and accept to be
the embodiment of the creatures. And THOSE, folks, are NOT how
either of the creatures are described in their original books by Bram Stoker
and Mary Shelley. Not by a damn sight. THOSE are from Universal Studios,
plain and simple.
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