Pauline Kael reviews Dracula (1931)
I found our copy of 5001 Nights at the Movies, a collection of reviews Pauline Kael did for The New Yorker. I’ll start with Dracula (1931):
It begins well, wandering around the crypt of Dracula’s castle in the Carpathian Mountains as the vampires get up from their coffins. But this first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel rather than from the Bram Stoker novel itself, and it becomes too stagey. It was a tremendous popular success, however (it was advertised as “The Strangest Love Story of All”), and spawned many sequels. As Count Dracula, Bela Lugosi is the courtly personification of evil. He had toured in it for years, and he seemed inside it in a wonderfully hammy, slightly demented way; his stilted manner and his ripe Hungarian accent have been imitated and parodied by subsequent Draculas. With pale Helen Chandler, who seems too anemic to attract a vampire, David Manners, Frances Dade, Edward Van Sloan, and the peerlessly degraded Dwight Frye, always looking for insects to munch on. Cinematography by Karl Freund; script by Garrett Fort, with dialogue by Dudley Murphy; play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Universal. b&w
