DRACULA:
FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
Bram Stoker
never lived long enough to see his most famous creation Count Dracula
dramatized on stage or screen before his death in 1912. The book achieved a
celebrated literary and cinematic afterlife, recreated countless times by each
future generation on film. He had made an abortive attempt to stage a play version
whilst he was still business manager for Sir Henry Irving at London’s Lyceum
theatre; Stoker had not only partly based Dracula’s distinguished appearance on
Irving himself but hoped his employer would play the title role. However, after
hearing a staged reading of it, Irving reputedly pronounced it ‘Dreadful!’
Over the
next few years there were to be two films that unofficially introduced the
world to the Count. F.W. Murnau’s aforementioned plagiaristic masterpiece Nosferatu in 1922 is the most famous
(albeit poorly disguising its obvious source). The year before, a little-known
Hungarian film appeared called Dracula’s
Death which borrowed the title character and not the plot from Stoker. It
concerns a music teacher within an asylum who only believes himself to be
‘Drakula’ (carefully using the more distancing Hungarian spelling), so only has
a passing connection with the novel.
In 1924
actor-manager Hamilton Deane decided the time was right to make an (as it were)
full-blooded bid to officially present Dracula
for the theatre as part of his touring repertoire. In Universal’s valuable
documentary The Road to Dracula by
David Skal, company actor Ivan Butler recalled that “He had to cut it down, for expense for one thing…It was a sort of
skeleton of the original”. Deane’s production was largely responsible for
the look of the Count that we know so well today. Rather than the aged,
moustached, longer-haired novel’s description, the stage Dracula was a middle-aged,
debonair figure only ever seen in evening dress and reminiscent of a gentleman
magician – an atmosphere augmented by the stage production’s elaborate magic
effects including a false-bottomed coffin for him.
The part was
played on tour by a number of actors, most notably Raymond Huntley who still
holds the record for the literally thousands of times he played the role across
England and America. The play was a smash hit, so inevitably Broadway came
calling. To transfer to the ‘Great White Way’ however, producer Horace
Liveright wanted changes, for example to render the anglicisms suitable to a
New York audience. He brought in playwright John L Balderson to streamline the
script.
At that
time, 1920s American audiences had no real knowledge of vampires. The closest
approximation they had was the alluring sexuality of Theda Bara, heating up the
screen as the exotic ‘vamp’ archetype in films like The She-Devil. Liveright felt that his Dracula actor should have
some of her ‘foreign’ mystique and marketable sex-appeal. His problem was who
to hire, on a limited budget almost all of which was already spent on the
supporting cast. He couldn’t afford the usual box-office boost provided by a
star name. His prayers were about to be answered from an unlikely quarter…
ENTER LUGOSI
Bela Lugosi
(Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó) was born in Hungary in 1882. After an early film
acting career in supporting roles, his union organiser activities during the
unsuccessful communist revolution of 1919 forced him to flee his native
country. Initially he tried his hand in German Weimar cinema (which may explain
the intense, somewhat Expressionist style of his movie acting) before he pitched
up in America’s New Orleans looking for theatre work. Having no command of
English, Lugosi had to learn his early parts phonetically. When the Broadway
producers heard about him, they realised that the otherwise limiting attributes
of this ex-pat actor could actually be perfect for them; they even allowed for
his still-hesitant grasp of English by agreeing to direct him in French. His
strong Hungarian accent (local enough to Dracula’s home region) coupled with an
air of commanding, aloof mystery satisfied the needs of the role – moreover
they were under time and financial pressure to complete the casting.
Debuting in
October 1927, the Broadway production was a great success, and although in
retrospect it simultaneously made Lugosi and imprisoned him for ever in the
role’s association, many actors would gladly have bargained for the
opportunity. In his late 40s suddenly Lugosi was a Broadway star, unnerving
male and female audiences alike in what the posters trumpeted as: ‘New York’s
latest shudder!!’ He ultimately went on to play the role thousands of times, 33
weeks in the Broadway run and then on one of two simultaneous tours, the other
Count played by Raymond Huntley. Universal Studios caught the hit show early in
the run, having already established a practise of scouting for theatre talent and
plays to fulfil the new demand for talking pictures and ‘well-spoken’ actors to
showcase in them.
DRACULA (1931).
“In all the annals of living
horror…One name stands out as the epitome of evil!”
Ever since
Carl Laemmle had founded Universal Studios back in 1915, he had wanted to
produce a film of Dracula – yet even though the studio had earned huge success
with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera, both starring
Lon Chaney, he was apprehensive about its viability. Until that time, horror
had not become an established genre like westerns or romance dramas. Finally it
took the enthusiasm of his son Carl Laemmle Jr to finally commit the studio to
making it and $40,000 secured them the movie rights to the play.
Initially,
the studio aimed to minimise its risk as much as possible by persuading the
proven film star Chaney to take the lead part instead of transplanting the original
Broadway cast. Negotiations got as far as offering Chaney a three-picture deal
and the enticement of a talking sequel to The
Phantom of The Opera. Tragically, audiences would be denied his startling
craft in both roles when cancer took his life in 1930. One connection to Chaney
that would remain was the hiring of his long-time collaborator Tod Browning as
director.
Whilst we
can only speculate as to how Chaney would have no doubt metamorphosised himself
to fit Dracula’s physicality, Lugosi imprinted his own attributes onto the part.
Aside from the air of exotic mystery and intensity in his playing, the unusual
rhythm and word emphases of his non-native English delivery of the lines is
still the most widely-imitated version of Dracula – in much the same way that
Olivier’s distinctive speaking of Richard
III is inextricably bound with that role. Sadly, this would prove part of
the fateful draw-back for Lugosi, as unlike Chaney’s trademark as ‘the Man of a
Thousand Faces’ he was using his real accent that could not be adapted to other
roles for greater versatility.
Lugosi had
to campaign hard to be cast in the film, denigrating himself so far as to
contact Bram Stoker’s widow for extra support. Before settling on him, Universal
had considered such names as Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni. Finally, the studio
agreed on Lugosi. A further humiliation was his agreeing to a fee of just $500
a week for the seven-week shoot (a quarter of that paid to David Manners for
playing the supporting role of Harker). Presumably he tolerated this exploitation
because he knew instinctively that this was the chance of a lifetime for an
actor to make his name. Allegedly during the shoot he maintained an aloof air
from the rest of the cast, preferring to walk about seemingly hypnotising
himself by repeatedly intoning “I am
Dracula”. Perhaps this speaks as much about understandable insecurity and
the pressure upon him as any perceived arrogance of manner.
The overall
budget for the film was set at $341,000, less than was originally intended for
a proposed full re-imagining of the novel; the aftermath of the catastrophic
stock market crash of 1929 left the company no choice but to tailor the film
closer to the less ambitious play.
The prologue
sequence transporting us to olde-worlde Transylvania begins with an impressive
glass shot that augments the real shot of the carriage on a road at the bottom
with the winding path up to the ghoul’s fairy-tale Castle Dracula. Inside the
carriage, the first dialogue ever spoken in a pure horror film is by the young
Carla Laemmle as an American tourist en route. The famous orchestral music
refrain we hear is from Swan Lake and
would recur in other Universal horror films such as The Mummy and Murders In the
Rue Morgue.
In filling
out the rest of the cast, Asie from Herbert Bunston as Dr Seward, Edmund Van Sloan was the only other Broadway cast
member brought in to repeat his crew-cut boffin of a Professor Van Helsing, a
vivid presence if lacking the attractive, dynamic energy and gallows humour of
the novel’s character. Charles Gerrard, the cockney sanitarium orderly, (“They’re all crazy!”), was recruited from
James Whale’s film of his distinguished stage run of Journey’s End. Whale would pick up the horror baton from Browning
to direct Frankenstein for Universal
the same year.
To be fair
to the juvenile leads, the play and film translation had to sacrifice much of the
location scenes and characters that work (in an uneven book) in favour of their
relative modest budgets. It’s easier to stage talky expository scenes in a
single English location than showing the book’s climax moving to Transylvania
for example – but it does mean that the one forgets that it’s supposed to be a
horror film about a terrifying supernatural threat not a modern love story of
romantic trials, particularly after the halfway point. The aping of current
theatre styles is compounded by updating the period to the 1920s for budgetary
reasons.These interpretations of Stoker also both omit most of the trio of
heroes committing excitingly to kill Dracula under Van Helsing’s leadership. In
the novel, Quincy Morris, Arthur Holmwood (Lucy’s fiancé) and Dr Seward are
former suitors of Lucy who make a tribute pact as she is dying to end the
vampire with Van Helsing and Harker – thus implying how powerful an adversary
just this single undead figure of evil must be. Now, however, Dr Seward is
Mina’s father so it is a less dramatic father and mentor dynamic in opposition.
The less
successful special effects in Browning’s film involved the same bats-on-wires
as the stage production - which transform into Dracula off-screen - and a storm
at sea sequence taken from Universal’s 1925 silent film The Storm Breaker which is speeded-up, owing to the slower camera
speed of silent footage. There are significant improvements that the film makes
of course. John Ivan Hoffman’s superb set designs give us the huge decrepit interiors
of Castle Dracula complete with a sweeping staircase, plentiful cobwebs and
spiders that only nowadays could be lavished on a Broadway production. (It even
has an insert shot of inexplicable armadillos wandering about). This was
achieved like the opening vista of Transylvania by a glass shot placed over the
lens, adding the extra expanse of scenery ‘live’ during filming.
My favourite
of the invented plot changes is the opportunity for Dracula and Van Helsing to
meet face to face in a dialogue scene as worthy enemies verbally challenging
each other. One of the weaknesses of the novel is that we don’t get this
satisfaction. After over-long research preparations for pursuing Dracula back
to Transylvania, the team hurtle across Europe, suddenly rip open the Count’s
coffin on sight and while Quincy slits the vampire’s throat, Arthur stakes him
to death. There is no time for Dracula to awake and for us to savour any kind
of confrontation. In fact, other than the deliciously suspenseful early scenes
of the vampire with Harker in Castle Dracula, the Count is virtually absent
from the rest of the book till the end. In the film he has a more fitting
amount of screen time, and visits Van Helsing who ignores Dracula’s boast of
command over Mina and his demand that he return to his homeland. The
Professor’s will equally proves too strong for the vampire’s hypnotism.
Finally, we also gain the extra pleasure of seeing the expert older hero
himself executing the vampire, albeit staged less than triumphantly. (Dracula’s
long death groans were cut from the soundtrack until the 1990s Laserdisc
release put then back).
Though Tod
Browning could identify with the ‘alien misfit outsider’ status of Dracula, a
theme he mined powerfully in films like the later Freaks (1932), he struggled with adapting his style of shooting
silent films to the new sound medium. As far as he could, he cunningly filmed
scenes without dialogue which did add to the eerie atmosphere, such as when
Dracula is hypnotising his victims wordlessly. According to the actors, he was
not a strong guiding hand on set, deferring frequently to his superb
cinematographer Karl ‘Metropolis’ Freund
for many of the stylistic filming decisions. Freund was full of creative ideas
and with such striking techniques as tracking shots leading us into the castle
and the sanitarium, as well as great use of lighting and fog it’s no surprise
that he went on to supplement his camerawork by fully directing Universal
horror classics like The Mummy and Mad Love.
At the very
end of the film, the first cut included an epilogue taken from the New York
theatre run in which Van Helsing speaks directly to the audience, playfully
assuring them not to blithely dismiss what they have just seen as pure fantasy
because: “…after all, there are such
things as vampires! This coda was later dropped.
To bolster
its chances on release, the studio gave Dracula
a splendidly eye-catching poster campaign in various full-colour designs,
possibly the most memorable featuring a spider’s web with Lugosi poised at the
epicentre, surrounded by his female prey from the cast caught in his terrifying
snare. Nowadays these poster fetch huge sums as valued collectors’ items.
When Bram
Stoker conceived Count Dracula, he had consciously or not played on Victorian
cultural paranoia in different forms. There was an irrational xenophobia about foreigners,
racism toward anyone who was not a product of polite English society. In awakening
both Lucy and Mina’s deep sexual yearnings and desire to fulfil them, the book
also aroused traditional men’s fears of female emancipation, their dominance
also threatened by the Suffragettes. Dracula’s character could even be viewed
as a metaphor for the terror of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases, a
living virus infecting us as a result of consorting with the unclean outsider. (Stoker
allegedly suffered from tertiary syphilis). These anxieties still resonated in
1920s western audiences, particularly in the post-war mistrust of other
countries. This may help explain the peculiarly unnerving effect that Lugosi’s
portrayal had on both men and women in cinemas.
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