Movies

A Tod Browning double-feature at the local Carolina Theater kicked off with Bela Lugosi in DRACULA (1931), a story I doubt anyone reading this is unfamiliar with. Based on a stage version rather than directly from the book (being scaled down for stage automatically meant a smaller, cheaper production), it stars Bela Lugosi in his star-making powerhouse performance as Dracula (though star-making didn’t stop his career slowly going down the toilet over the next decade), with fine backups in Edward Van Sloan’s Van Helsing and Dwight Frye’s Renfield. It also boats the kind of amazing Gothic sets that to me define the Universal look. On the downside, watching this on the big screen it’s obvious (as TYG pointed out) how they avoid anything so tacky as blood or violence, even the final staking of Dracula taking place off-screen (the version shot for the Mexican market is supposed to be much more intense). And after Lucy gets vampirized, she just sort of disappears from the plot. A classic but I don’t think as well executed as Frankenstein the following year. “I do not like mirrors—Van Helsing will explain.”
FREAKS (1932) was Browning’s tribute to his youth as a circus boy, the story of a seductive trapeze artist who manipulates a wealthy midget only to learn that his fellow freaks take care of their own. This was legendary in its day (and still striking today) for its use of real freaks of various types (watching a limbless man light a cigarette is certainly striking), which Cinema of Isolation says caused a lot of complaints from MGM employees who didn’t like them eating in the cafeteria. The book also discusses the bizarre climax (which makes little sense) and the complicated power inversions (a despised and depowered minority retaliates against the oppressor by making her one of them). Memorable and, I think, in a good way. It’s also strikingly pre-Code inasmuch as some of the fully abled carnies are obviously shacking up together. “I was already a joke—and now I see how funny it is.”
As usual at the Carolina, the films came with trailers for other films of the year, including (with FREAKS) Son of Kong, Duck Soup and a delightful Thin Man trailer that has William Powell as Philo Vance chatting with Powell as Nick Charles (“I thought you’d retired from detecting, Nick.”).
PACIFIC RIM (2012) is Guillermo del Toro’s Kaijin vs. Mecha epic in which monsters manifesting through a dimensional rim in the Pacific lead to the creation of a “Jaeger” army to fight them. When the world opts to shut down the program in favor of building a supposedly impenetrable wall to contain the monsters, Jaeger commander Idris Elba has to recruit the requisite rag-tag band for a final battle (in the best WW II film tradition the plot requires a glory hound, a retired pilot and a revenge-obsessed woman to learn to work together for the greater good). Good on spectacle, and stronger on the personal element than I’d expected. “Today, we call off the apocalypse!”