*SPOILER ALERT, BOTH FILMS*
the Vampire Bat: (1933. dir: Frank R. Strayer) Blue-tinted like a silent film, written and acted like an old play, it's a vampire movie without anything supernatural, and in that sense it resembles a Val Lewton movie: supernature permeates it, and yet it cannot be pinned down, and, in the end, is dismissed with a sigh of relief. Melvyn Douglas is a policeman (although we never really see him at work), Fay Wray some sort of scientific assistant (although we only see her sort of dawdling amidst beakers and Bunsen burners in a fetching white lab-coat), and they are both ridiculously American to be running around in a lugubrious castle plagued by bats and howling wolves.
Dwight Frye, who made a career of playing The Renfield Character in horror films, including in the original Dracula, plays Herman, a crazy-eyed half-wit who is scapegoated when the village decides the mysterious deaths plaguing them are the work of a vampire, just because the victims all have fang-punctures in their necks and their bodies are drained of blood. Melvyn Douglas, the rationalist, naturally scoffs at the notion, but poor Herman has a fondness for raising bats to keep as pets, so he's done for. In the end, it turns out there is a mad scientist at the back of it all, and the town's bat-infestation is merely synchronicitous.
There are a few rather lovely visuals which are reminiscent of the old, beautiful vampire classics (Dreyer's Vampyr, Murnau's Nosferatu, Browning's Dracula): a torch-bearing mob pouring every which way, bat-like, into a cave in pursuit of Herman. A disembodied, nebulous bodily organ pulsating in a tank in front of a splayed, unconscious victim. The "vampire" creeping up on his sleeping prey while dressed in an opera cloak and slouch hat, as if he stepped out of a Toulouse-Lautrec print. On the whole, it's slow, the humor plods, and only the piercing gazes of Frye and Lionel Atwill inspire any chills, but it's an interesting oddity.
.jpg)
Dead Men Walk: (1943. dir: Sam Newfield) It begins with a challenge: "How can you say with absolute certainty what does or does not dwell within the limitless ocean of the night?" and, later: "We're all quick to call insane any mentality that deviates from the conventional."
We open at a funeral. The casket is open, the minister invites anyone who cares to view the deceased to come forward. After an uncomfortable moment, an older man (George Zucco) rises reluctantly and looks into the coffin at his own face, the face of his twin.
The dead twin was evil; the living is a doctor, a kind man, a paragon of virtue. This is both a vampire and a Jekyll & Hyde story. When the doctor sees the leeringly malicious face of his dead brother out the second-floor window of a dying woman's bedchamber, we cannot help but imagine for a moment that it is his own reflection he sees, himself as he truly is. And when the end-battle comes, we know that if the evil brother is to be destroyed, it will be the good one who does it, and he must sacrifice himself in the doing.
The vampirism itself comes not from the traditional curse passed on from another, but is conjured purposefully by the Crowleyesque brother through black magics in his relentless hunger for a powerful immortality. Moonlight is repeatedly associated in the script with lovers, and it is only beneath the lover's moon when the monster can walk. Once again, as in the most effective vampire stories, a virgin on the brink of matrimony is the slowly fading victim, as if her own opening to sexuality invokes the demonic energy. Her fiancee, a young doctor, is woefully misplayed by Nedrick Young, who in profile looks very much like Leonard Cohen and communicates all the emotions of a garden vegetable, but who was primarily a screenwriter (the Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Jailhouse Rock) blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and so can grudgingly be forgiven his stiffness in front of the camera. Dwight Frye again plays the Renfield character, and does it with his usual, eerie, wild-eyed flair.
No comments:
Post a Comment