La Sangre es la Vida

La Sangre es la Vida
by
Michael Ferguson

Sixty-five years ago under a canopy of Southern Californian
darkness, evil things were being enacted on a studio soundstage. Universal
Pictures' Dracula was being played before the cameras and there was a
bustle of activity to finish before dawn. Like its title vampire, the film
cast and crew were ordered to conduct all of their business by night. They
were forbade from working during the daylight hours and such a unique
psychological edict would be fascinating Hollywood legend-"Vampire Film
Shot From Dusk til Dawn"-if it weren't for the fact that Tod Browning and
Bela Lugosi were snoozing.

Over 22 such nights in late 1930, director George Melford, whose
rather unremarkable The Sheik (1921) proved Rudolph Valentino's superstar
vehicle, directed his cast through an interpreter who could relay his
instructions in the actors' native language...Español.

Spanish-language versions of American movies were a
budgetary-efficient phenomenon in the early days of sound films when a
Mexican market and Spanish-speaking population proved not only close but
profitable. Dracula cost a handsome $442,000 to produce, complete with its
cavernous Charles D. Hall-designed sets of the vampire's castle and Carfax
Abbey at Whitby, but the cost of using the same sets on off-hours to shoot
an "identical" foreign-language version amounted to a mere $66,000
investment.

Instead of paying the English actors double-time to shoot a Spanish
version, as Laurel and Hardy used to do-phonetically and quite noticeably
reading their lines from cue cards, Universal hired a Spanish cast and
delegated a flip-flop arrangement: the English-version would shoot by day,
the Spanish-version would shoot by night.

The result was a Spanish film completed 13 days before the English
version and running a full 29 minutes longer. Universal previewed the
Spanish-version in Los Angeles a whole month before the English-version
would appear and Bela Lugosi, all-smiles, attended for publicity purposes.
The reviews were excellent, going so far as to say that if the English
version is anything like the Spanish, Universal would have nothing to worry
about.

Well, it wasn't. And they didn't.

The Spanish-version was never copywritten by Universal, who
apparently felt no attachment to it as years passed. The Library of
Congress had a fairly good copy, but it was incomplete, and so it was that
author and Dracula-archivist David Skal ventured to Cuba in 1989 to see
what was rumored to be the most complete and well-preserved print on the
planet. His resulting report, furnished in his superb book Hollywood
Gothic (1990), which chronicles the transition of Dracula from novel to
stage to screen, claims the Spanish film's superiority over the creaky
Lugosi "classic."

Available on video through Universal since 1992, but only after a
couple of years of legal maneuvering, the Spanish-version provides a
rewarding look at how two directors approached the same material. Though
Melford saw dailies from the English-version, he was not constrained to
recreate them. In fact, the only actor allowed, nay, mandated, to watch
footage from the daylight shoot was Carlos Villerias, who was told to study
the Lugosi performance and copy it as much as possible.

Villerias doesn't have a chance. With a lumpy face and distinctly
undistinguished looks, he's further plagued by modern audiences easily
seeing, as Skal points out, the decidedly distracting facial resemblance to
Carl Reiner's Alan Brady character on the Dick Van Dyke show, complete with
hair-piece, as Villarias pasted on the same widow's peak Lugosi wore during
the daytime production.

Villerias simply hasn't the exoticism, the dark romantic looks and
penetrating charisma of Lugosi. Watching him in most scenes is like
watching a classic performed by a novice. When attempting to frighten with
leering, pop-eyed stares, Villerias looks loony (as did Valentino in
Melford's The Sheik) and when Renfield cuts his finger slicing bread, which
is a direct nod to Nosferatu (as Browning's Renfield cuts himself with a
paper clip), Villerias' reaction to the swinging crucifix amounts to a
facial contortion of the "P.U." variety.

On the other hand, in extreme close-ups of his hungry eyes, with
all the rest of his face obscured, Villerias manages a frightening gaze;
his bloodshot, watering eyes looking remarkably like Christopher Lee's.
The sexual elements of vampirism are played to a greater degree in
the Spanish-version, with Dracula's vampire brides appearing far more
frightening and predatory than the ethereal, ghostly synchronicity of
Browning's trio. Interestingly, the Spanish Dracula allows the brides to
feast on Renfield in a very effectively built sequence, whereas Lugosi
enters and the brides glide into retreat as he descends upon his first male
victim. (The studio wanted to make sure that Lugosi was never seen with
his lips in close proximity to Dwight Frye's neck.)

Furthermore, Lupita Tovar's Eva has more life blood and verve than
does Helen Chandler's rather pallid Mina. Once bitten, she is outfitted in
a low-cut diaphanous nightgown for the scene in which she bursts forth with
joyous laughter immediately before her attempt on fiancé Harker's throat.
Earlier on in the film, in one of many sequences mired in the talkiness of
the play and during which characters describe visually intriguing nightmare
episodes instead of having the film actually show them to us (e.g.,
Renfield's "Rats, rats, rats" soliloquy and Mina's nocturnal visit by her
dead friend Lucy), Eva confides to all present that a particularly
disturbing dream in which a man's livid white face came out of the dark and
came closer and closer to her left her "weak, as if I had lost my
virginity."

You might guess this particular allusion didn't make the final cut
in the English-language version.

Continuing along this line of more graphic presentation, the
Spanish-version doesn't hesitate to show us the close-up of the two tiny
wounds on Lucy's neck-under a magnifying glass no less.

As to why these and other shots don't show up in Browning's version
probably has something to do with how unhappy the director was at the time.
Struggling both with alcohol and the studio, he simply failed to complete
his shot list and thus several scenes are presented in tableau or medium
shots instead of cutting for close-ups or inserts.

A classic example is provided in the scene where Renfield crawls
across the floor toward the maid who has fainted dead away in front of him.
The script calls for a clever sight gag, one you don't even get a hint at
in Browning's version, but can see at last in the Melford take. (Aw,
c'mon, just rent it.)

At 104 minutes, the Spanish version doesn't seem a bit longer than
Browning's 75 minute version, so it's not padding that makes up the
difference, it's completed and usable footage.

Pablo Alvarez Rubio's Renfield is wonderfully nutty, not as much
the seething, pathetic, morose little madman of Dwight Frye's. Though I
prefer Frye's performance and inimitable gloating "laugh," it would have
been nice to see him given as much screen time as Rubio gets, including a
speech about having graduated Oxford that is suddenly interrupted by a
distracting fly and another clever ploy.

Likewise, Browning's film completely forgets about the fate of poor
Miss Lucy, last seen wandering the night, and, according to newspapers,
seducing little girls with candy only to bite their necks (another missed
visual opportunity). At least Melford shows Van Helsing and Harker
emerging from the local cemetery after having driven a stake through her
heart.

One of the other striking areas in which the Spanish version is far
more creatively designed than the American is in its visualization of the
Count's emergence from his coffin. Browning's version, you may recall,
curiously avoids the sight of Lugosi getting out of his earth-box, perhaps
because it looked too undignified. Melford solves the problem by shooting
from behind the box, with the lid creaking open towards us, followed by a
dramatic cloud of smoke billowing upwards from within the coffin, through
which emerge the features of Dracula, eerily lit from below to cast shadows
across his visage.

Overall, both films make brilliant use of sound and, more
importantly, sound born out of heavy silence. What a strange notion for a
horror film at the dawn of Talkies to realize that its silence should play
such an important role. Dracula has been chewed up over the years for its
lack of a music track, but the eerie contrast between dead silence and the
intrusive sounds of creaking coaches, doors and coffins, the tinkle of a
music box or the melancholy howl of a far-off wolf are extremely effective.

Melford's Dracula isn't flawless, mind you, but very well thought
out, optimized with an eye for visual details and the creation of mood.
Truthfully, it's more brightly lit than Browning's, which sometimes works
against it, and for all its interesting camerawork by George Robinson, its
exploration of Hall's gorgeous sets, and attention to frame composition, it
lacks the nearly poetic, otherworldly stupor of the Lugosi film. The
significant lack of a powerful presence in the personage of Conde Dracula
is a big reason. But there are a few other minor "flubs," too, such as the
avoidance of the stage play's timely announcement of "Count Dracula"
immediately after Harker asks Van Helsing, "What could have caused those
marks?" to a noticeably less-effective cross-cut-away from the showdown
between Van Helsing and Dracula to the prelude of Eva's attempted necking
with Juan.

George Melford's Dracula is, without a shadow of a doubt, a much
better film than Browning's choppy "classic," clearly far more influenced
by F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu than by the Deane-Balderston stageplay that
entraps Browning's version. Watching them back to back, it's very hard to
resist mentally transporting the English cast to the Spanish scenes; if for
no other reason, than to allow them to finish the film they all thought
they were going to make.

Just imagine Dwight Frye wandering into the cobwebbed castle, a
diminutive figure at the bottom of the screen. Cut to a medium shot as he
looks about and a bat suddenly swoops down at him. He waves it off with
his cane and then jolts as his eyes fix on a dark figure perched upon the
broken stairwell in front of him. The camera dramatically glides past Frye
and then up onto the steps, quickly moving in on the strange, caped Bela
Lugosi, framing him on the staircase with flickering candle in hand to
announce that, "I am...Dracula. I bid you welcome."

It almost makes one wish a 48-year old Hungarian actor, who
practically pleaded to take the job and then settled for the paltry sum of
$3,500 because Universal knew how desperate he was, could have spoken
Spanish.

Given the fact he learned his first American stage roles
phonetically, I wish the hell they would have let him. Not only is the
Spanish-version in dire need of his services, but Lugosi's magnificent
Count Dracula deserves the better film.

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