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| Gloria Holden |
Countess Marya Zaleska
(Dracula's daughter) is played by the indelibly Sapphic Gloria Holden, here
remonstrating with her devoted manservant, Sandor, played by Irving Pichel
(pronounced "Peee-Kel") who looks like he's been dabbling far too
long in Madame's makeup drawer, in the fantastic Dracula/Lesbian crossover
masterpiece, Universal's great 1931 Drac sequel, Dracula's Daughter from 1936.
 |
| Irving Pichel |
The director, a deeply
underrated Lambert Hillyer gives this picture an entirely "insider"
sympathy for the central character, one of the screen's first and possibly most
moving gay characters in peril of giving up her identity to
"normality" in this great, barely emblematic breakthrough picture.
God knows a very young Otto Kruger playing "Garth" the potential male
love interest and agent of cure for Marya's "problem" is no match for
the tender flesh of so many beautiful young women, including the luscious
Marguerite Churchill upon whom Marya preys for blood and sustenance and
everything else that remains more explicit than implicit in this amazing,
beautiful work of 1936 Universal expressionism.
A few production cues
don't begin to give weight to the sheer visual spectacle of these great horror
series, including Dracula, Frankenstein, and the most melancholy of all, Wolf
Man: DP George Robinson, Art/Production Design Albert D'Agostino and other
unnamed craftsmen and artisans of light and shadow. The new 4K scan is
literally jaw dropping revealing every nail and beam crack, every shadow and
mist, every bit of arch and fog in one of the great celebrations of
expressionism in Hollywood.
Hillyer is another
underrated if not ignored figure. In at least one other movie from 1936, The Invisible Ray he directs genre
stalwarts Lugosi, Karloff and Frances Drake through another picture with a
profoundly touching sub-theme of filial devotion involving Boris Karloff in the
usually predictable Mad Scientist part with Drake as the daughter whom he loses
to his obsession.
The new BD50 disc from the
Universal Horror Legacy Series released last year and this year also hosts a
spectacular new 4K scan of Siodmak's great Son
of Dracula from 1943 with the sublime Lon Chaney as "Alucard" and
his human soulmate and a comparably higher being, Louise Allbritton. Two cursed
souls given over to the dark side with a brilliant fascist themed sub-textual
screenplay from Curt Siodmak. Director and bro Robert delivers the picture with
more than enough recognizably fluid mise-en-scene to stamp his personality all
over the film: a ravishing reverse track and dolly from the plantation mansion
door to a pullback of the first image in human form other than bat or cloud or fog
of Alucard/Lon. In other shots Siodmak films Alucard appearing as mist to
literally glide across a Universal studio lake in one of the most memorably
romantic surreal images in cinema to take uninterrupted human form via lab
process work from the cloud as a man to take his equal as woman, Allbritton
into his arms.
These films are forever,
and anyone who cannot or does not love Universal Horror does not or cannot love
cinema.
My favourite scenes in "Son of Dracula" is the one in which Alucard's(Dracula's) coffin/casket slowly emerges from the depths of the Louisiana bayou, a white mist oozes from within and reforms into the Count's physical body and he glides suggestively towards his waiting paramour Kay Caldwell and the other one is where Kay(by now a vampire) enters her former lover Frank's cell in bat form, ingests some of his blood, then awakens him, reiterates her love for him and reveals her plan for him to kill her"husband" Alucard before turning into mist and floating through the bars of the cell!
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