Son of Dracula (1943)

Warning: I’m going to spoil one major plot twist of this movie that’s not quite as old as my grandma!

Somewhere in the swampiest part of the US South. The Caldwell family is looking forward to a very special visitor, one Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.). Apparently, “morbid” (actual quote) daughter Kay (Louise Allbritton) met that fascinating man with the oh so clever name while following her occult interests on her European tour. Kay’s long-time fiancée, Frank Stanley (Robert Paige) does fear the worst, though. Might his sweetheart not love him anymore and go for the aristocratic set now? Her mysterious pronouncements that he should trust her “whatever happens” is not the sort of thing to put a guy’s heart at ease.

The arrival of the Count does – of course – mark a bit of doom for the family. Kay’s pet witch – whom she imported and set up in the local swamp – has a fatal encounter with a bat, and soon after, Kay’s dear old dad dies rather mysteriously. As it happens, and to everyone’s surprise but Kay’s, the old man changed his will just shortly before his death. Unlike before, when the run-down family plantation and the family money were to be shared between Kay and her bland good girl sister Claire (Evelyn Ankers) equally, now the plantation goes to Kay alone and the rest of the fortune to Claire, who clearly has gotten the better deal, and reacts utterly confused by the whole affair. But Kay is surely going to marry Frank very soon now, and he’s got money, so things will be okay, right?

Family doctor Brewster (Frank Craven) is very suspicious about all that has happened these last few days, particularly since he actually figured out the good old Alucard/Dracula business right when he read the name, so he starts a campaign of sneaking around and various break-ins. And, boy, does he ever sneak around, probably because all that’s happening goes against every single one of his conservative ideas of propriety, whereas break-ins and attempts at breaking up romances that certainly are none of his business are a-okay as long as the guy committing them is a gentleman. He is, in a word, the Southern Patriarchy come to life. However, he doesn’t manage to hinder Kay from secretly marrying Dracula in the end.

The jilted ex-fiancée Frank for his part, never one to impress the viewer as a picture of mental stability, goes from whiny, to melodramatic, to creepy, to homicidal in very short order thanks to these events. When he tries to shoot Dracula, he seems to kill Kay instead. In truth, she is already one of the Undead.

The funny thing is, neither Dracula – who, by the way, isn’t the original Dracula but apparently really the titular son of or another relative - nor Frank have much of a clue about what’s actually going on. Kay, obviously a woman of strong opinions and a mind that can withstand the vampire mind whammy, has a plan of her own. Like a good femme fatale, she only marries Dracula Jr. for his immortality granting bite and plans to incite Frank to stake him for her, to then vampirize him and spend all eternity with the one guy less fit for such a thing than Dracula. I hope for her sake she’s lying about that last part to motivate Frank properly.

So yes, Robert Siodmak’s Son of Dracula is indeed a Southern Gothic noir movie about Dracula’s son finding his match in form of an awesome femme fatale. It is also actually as wonderful a film as that makes it sound. There’s nothing here on show of the jadedness Universal horror phase two very quickly succumbed too; this feels absolutely like a film made by people who wanted to make this specific movie, and for better reasons than just to cheaply satisfy an audience they didn’t particularly like.

I’ve read some internet grumbling about the casting of Lon Chaney Jr. as Dracula, which I do understand in theory. However, he is actually an excellent choice for the role and certainly is captured at a moment in his career when he could manage excellent performances when giving the right environment. One has to keep in mind, obviously, that he isn’t supposed to be Dracula, but another member of his line, and one, one can’t help but suspect who has his difficulties quite living up to his father’s particular talents while working the same job. Anyone seeing a parallel to anybody here? As a matter of fact, this Dracula is a bit of a fool in the end, but then, that’s the sort of thing Chaney was particularly good at portraying. He’s still a very dangerous and powerful fool, and while Chaney Jr.’s certainly not the picture of the suave vampire, there are a couple of scenes in which he presents a very convincing physical menace, using his height aggressively in a proto-Christopher Lee approach to vampirism that I found very effective.

The true and best villain of the piece is Allbritton’s Kay anyway, and the actress does some fine things presenting a woman with a plan in the body of an early born Southern goth, outmanoeuvring a guy who certainly is rather experienced at that sort of thing himself. It’s always refreshing to find a female character in a Universal horror film who is actually doing something. While it is a bit of a shame the main way for a woman to get into that sort of position was to become a villainess, yet Kay’s such a good villain – whose plan only fails because the man she chose as her helper is such an idiot – I wouldn’t want to exchange her for a heroine. It’s also not difficult to see why Kay turns to complicated masterplans and evil. The men around her are all absolutely horrible in a perfectly infuriating patriarchal way that more or less indirectly declares women like her who don’t fit into their picture of the world to be “morbid” or crazy, always think they know what’s best for them, and when in doubt, do whatever shitty thing they deem “necessary” to keep them down. It’s difficult, if not impossible to think that Siodmak didn’t construct the film this way on purpose, seeing that all male authority figures here are portrayed in ways that support this reading, while Frank is the archetype of the clingy, mentally unstable lover. Sure, things end with the patriarchal order restored, but I don’t think even a second that’s an ending the film would have had without the commercial and cultural pressures of its place and time.

However, even if a viewer isn’t interested in this sort of reading of the film, Son of Dracula is still something special. Siodmak, excellently assisted by the wonderfully creepy production design and sets and George Robinson’s camera that sits at the place where horror and noir intersect, makes a lot of the brilliant idea to set this Dracula movie (the first one after more than half a decade after the also very feminist Dracula’s Daughter) not in backlot Europe but a backlot South that’s just as creepily artificial as the European one, a macabre place of decay, dread and superstition. Southern gothic always shows parallels to the American idea of Europe being a comparable place, I believe, so it’s a perfect fit.

Siodmak holds the good-old-fashioned creepy atmosphere and sense of place throughout. Be it in the wonderful moment when Dracula glides upon the swamp waters to his lover, or in Kay’s visit to Frank in the prison, there’s a feel of the nightmare and the mythical to many scenes here.


Siodmak also avoids some typical Universal problems. The film is well-paced, without the too episodic feel that would dominate the monster mash phase of the studio’s horror output. There’s also no space wasted on comic relief. There’s some dark irony in certain of the situations on display, but otherwise, this is a film meant to make one shudder and think, not to make one laugh. Son of Dracula is very, very good at these things.

Some Thoughts on The Spiral Staircase (1945)

I hardly need to tell anyone that Robert Siodmak's thriller comes close to early perfection of the form (and is stylistically closer to my heart than Hitchcock's comparable films, but let's not go there), nor that the biggest hurdles it has overcome for a modern viewer are its alcoholism-based comic relief, its jerky romantic lead (who fortunately isn't important to the narrative at all and disappears from it early on - it's a film most interested in its female characters), and what can be read as its ableist tendencies. Siodmak overcomes most of these problems through the sheer beauty of his filmmaking, an eye for mood-building detail and a sense for filmic rhythm that just stops this viewer from thinking about possible flaws in the narrative. It's the sort of film that establishes its position as a period piece and the character of its lead by having her visit a silent movie.

With the high quality of filmmaking (Nicholas Musuraca's photography being another special point of beauty) a given, what I found most remarkable rewatching The Spiral Staircase was, how much of the film visually pre-shadows the giallo. There are shots and scenes that will later be quoted (by Bava and Argento, for example) and re-quoted (by directors unconsciously quoting Bava's quotes) in just about every Italian film of the genre you'd care to mention. No genre is, of course, without its predecessors, but I've seldom seen a whole genre (except for the sleaze and the colour) so close to coming into existence twenty years before the fact.

 

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In short: Phantom Lady (1944)

After an argument with his wife, engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) meets a mysterious woman (Fay Helm) in a bar and spends the rest of the evening with her. She seems to be just as hurt by something as he is, so he is willing to accept her refusal to tell him her name. When he arrives back home, a few cops and a strangled wife are waiting for him. The lead investigator, an Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), seems quite convinced that Henderson is the killer. The engineer's alibi isn't as good as one would expect - anyone who has seen him together with the woman now denies ever having laid eyes on her, and that's enough to convince this film's justice system to sentence a man to death.

Only Henderson's assistant Carol (Ella Raines) believes in his innocence. The young woman is going to do just about everything (including flirting with Elisha Cook, jr.!) to help the man she secretly loves. Unfortunately, the real killer has no qualms about silencing a few people more if necessary.

Phantom Lady by Robert Siodmak is a very fine adaptation of a Cornel Woolrich novel. It's quite a bit friendlier than its source, but it is still a very fine and quite dark work that would recommend itself alone through its use of female characters as something a little different from the usual noir femme fatales. Carol is somewhat frightening in her perseverance - sure, she does everything she does for a good reason, but people are still dying around her, a fact she's obviously willing to accept.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,film noir,in short,robert siodmak,ella raines