Completed July 16 1929, the first sound feature in which Bela Lugosi's famous Hungarian tones were heard. This was Bela Lugosi's first venture with Browning. Two years later, the director cast him in the film version of the Bram Stoker vampire tale after Chaney, Browning's first choice for the role, died. Lugosi and Browning made one other film together, Mark of the Vampire (1935), in which he played Count Mora, a knock-off of his more famous blood-sucking cousin.
Bela Lugosi is here seen already wearing the ring with an oval-shaped gemstone which he wore two years later in Dracula (1931). This would indicate that the ring always belonged to him, and was not a studio prop. Lugosi also wore it in many subsequent films. In a filmed interview, he mentioned losing it at some point.
Circa minute 44:20, Bela Lugosi points to the sitting medium and pronounces her name, Madame La Grange, with a flawless French accent. As he did in White Zombie (1932) and in The Black Cat (1934) when pronouncing French phrases, Bela completely drops his Hungarian accent and does not roll his R's as was customary for him when he spoke English with his thick native accent, but rather uses the same guttural R's as the French do. Not only that, but his French "an" sound is flawless, and nasal like a native Parisian, without a trace of any foreign accent. This would indicate that Bela Lugosi was probably fluent in French. For Bela to be able to so easily switch from one accent to the other, he would have had to have learned French as a child, and most likely before the age of 7 to be able to speak it like native, as he did. Where he learned it is a mystery, as he is only known to have lived in Germany besides Hungary and USA, and documentaries indicate that Bela dropped off school at the age of 12. The mystery therefore persists and has yet to be revealed.
The suspects are played by a virtual who's-who of recognizable character actors: Conrad Nagel, who emceed MGM's first sound musical extravaganza The Hollywood revue of 1929 (1929); Leila Hyams, later Venus in Browning's Freaks; and reprising her stage role as the medium, Margaret Wycherly, memorably evil as James Cagney's Ma Jarrett in White Heat (1949). Future leading man Joel McCrea also had a part, but his scenes were deleted before the film's release.
Holmes Herbert later played Sir Roscoe Crosby again in the 1937 remake, The Thirteenth Chair (1937).
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