Sometimes you’ve gotta go back to the original spooky source. Seeing Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat made me realise I’d never seen his portrayal of Dracula (1931), the very role that made him a star and a horror icon. The performance, and Lugosi’s Hungarian accent, looms so large over pop culture, everything from Sesame Street’s The Count to Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning performance of the guy in Ed Wood. What a pleasure then to rediscover Lugosi’s suave, urbane and ultimately strange work as Count Dracula, his halting delivery and claw-link hand movements. For me, though, the absolute highlights were the close-ups. Every close up of Bela was like a beautiful gothic painting. Between director Tod Browning and cinematographer Karl Freund, they gift Lugosi’s distinctively hypnotic expressions with deep focus and lighting across the eyes. While the bat effects are pretty dated and flimsy, I loved the atmosphere of the sets, Dracula and his brides waking up in their coffins, or that gigantic stairwell in the castle interior. The lack of score helps create a disquieting effect – though it also did often have a narcoleptic effect on me as well (I do want to see the Phillip Glass scored version now). Edward Van Sloan was a good Van Helsing, but I was really struck by Dwight Fyre’s performance as Renfield, particularly the contrast between him as a normal chipper chap in the start and the broken mad man for the remainder of the movie. David Manners and Helen Chandler are the stiff English couple, Jonathan and Mina Harker, caught in Dracula’s nocturnal tour of London. Here’s to Bela, and his enduring legacy, a role that brought him great fame but also was a bit of type-casting curse; I recommend once again the ‘Bela and Boris’ season of the You Must Remember This podcast. Available to rent on iTunes. Recommended.
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