I can’t for the life of me find the source, but I believe I
read at some point that there’s a scene in Dracula
in which the camera remains completely static for six excruciating minutes.
It’s the scene in which Mina talks with Van Helsing and Harker on an outdoor
lounge about 48 minutes into the film. Every time I re-watch Dracula, which I do at least once a
year, I watch the DVD counter during this scene, and every time it falls well
short of six minutes. Where do these rumors get started?
This was probably an exaggeration of a more well-traveled
accusation that has director Tod Browning allowing his camera to remain still
for three minutes in this scene, which is something that has been repeated by
no less a Dracula scholar than David
Skal. This is untrue too. A dolly-in occurs only seconds into the scene, and a
dolly-out ends it. Based on the way dollies frame the scene, it actually seems
pretty well planned out and not the lazy blunder a lot of film historians want
you to believe it is.
The same can be said of the entire film. While only a fool
would argue that the very first sound horror film featuring one of the all-time
iconic performances in any genre is not historically important, a lot of
critics still argue that Dracula is a
slow, talky, music and camera movement-devoid, overacted, underacted, dated bit
of piffle that front-loads its only worthwhile scenes in the first two reels.
Such criticisms always irk me, because Dracula
is my favorite film from Universal’s golden age of monster movies that wasn’t
directed by James Whale. I don’t find it slow. I think its “talky” script is
swollen with quotable lines. I think Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye give two of
the great horror performances, and I love how the relative lack of music
contributes to its atmosphere of quiet, eerie dread.
The bad rep Dracula
has developed throughout the years also really irks film historian Gary D.
Rhodes. He backs up his belief the film has been unfairly and ignorantly
maligned with a mountain of evidence in his new book Tod Browning’s Dracula. Rhodes knows you can’t get too scientific
about opinions; if someone doesn’t like a movie, they don’t like it. But he
proves that a lot of the reasons critics give for disliking Dracula are simply wrong. Rhodes compares
the film to twenty other specimens released around the same time and concludes
that its use of camera movement, music, and dialogue are not unusual for its
day. This holds true when held against George Melford’s Spanish-language
version of Dracula, which historians
regularly rate as superior for its more active camera. This is an easy conclusion
to repeat, but far more tedious to check. Well, Rhodes did the tedious work, counting
the number of camera movements in both films, and guess what… Tod Browning’s Dracula has the more active camerawork and in a far tighter timeframe.
And speaking of Browning, Rhodes is making another point
with the title of his book. The author refutes the rumors that Browning barely
directed the film, that cinematographer Karl Freund did all the directorial
work. He also challenges the often-repeated notion that the film is a faithful
adaptation of the Balderston-Dean play and the gossip that Universal never
wanted Lugosi for its star.
The misinformation surrounding this film is staggering, and
it has sadly played a major role in lessening its standing as a great film. I
really hope that will start to change with the publishing of Tod Browning’s Dracula. This is a superior piece of cinematic
detective work and a great example of what one can accomplish when one simply
does his or her homework. I’m not sure if it will make any of Dracula’s multitudinous haters
reevaluate the movie for the better, but I sure hope they’ll at least stop using
lies to rake it over the coals. Rhodes’s book is apparently the first
installment of Tomahawk Press’ new series about classic horror films. I can’t
wait for the next one, and I hope it is written with the same care, attention,
and sense of purpose as Rhodes put into his book.
