USA 75m Dir: Tod Browning Key Cast: Bela Lugosi
Surely few films have been as influential to pop culture as this one? Though Bram Stoker's novel had been adapted for the screen before, notably in Nosferatu, this version actually had the rights and brought the vampire into the sound era.
Really this film is all about Bela Lugosi's performance as Dracula. My goodness he is superb! Though he doesn't quite match the look of the character from the novel I felt he got the character spot on, initially a welcoming host with a creepy side to eventually becoming a full on embodiment of evil. The way he pauses between words is delightfully creepy. Few other actors have performed a role that becomes the staple of how we imagine a character in popular culture.
I was also really pleased to find that the rest of the cast give excellent performances too. Helen Chandler is a convincing Mina and Dwight Fyre is great at being the utterly mad Renfield. I was most impressed by Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing who manages to be the hero the character is in the novel and the only person who can properly stand up to Dracula.
As adaptations go, this is a relatively faithful one. The biggest change from the novel is that here Renfield is the estate agent who travels to Transylvania rather than Jonathan Harker but I thought that this change works well- Harker always felt to me like he went from being the protagonist to a supporting character in the novel so it makes a lot of sense to have him always be a supporting character. An interesting detail about the film is that is treats Transylvania as if it were in Hungary- as well as casting the Hungarian Lugosi people speak in Hungarian and signs are written in the language too. When the novel was published Transylvania was actually in Hungary before the borders were changed in 1914.
Director Tod Browning was frankly fortunate to have a strong cast, a good story and fantastic sets to make his film with because it's really not directed very well. It feels like he hasn't worked out how to move on from making silent films and that is apparent in the way this film is directed. There's a stiffness to the camera and a lack of flair that Nosferatu managed to use ten years earlier.
I don't think Dracula is a particularly fantastic film but the cast make it work, no-one more so than Lugosi whose performance here is one of the most memorable in film history.
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