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Jan 23 12 6:21 AM
>>In the latest MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT Garydon Rhodes...<<
Speaking of print articles, here's an interesting one....(apparently some contemporary reviewers also thought the English version of Dracula inferior to the Spanish) :
Universal Pictures was one of the last major studios to adopt the idea, when it filmed Spanish and English versions of the film The Cat Creeps in 1930. Dracula was slated to be only the studios second Spanish-language film.
Paul Kohner, Universal’s head of foreign production, hired director George Melford, who’d worked with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, and cinematographer George Robinson. A 38-year-old Spanish actor named Carlos Villarias was cast as Dracula, and a multilingual actor named Barry Norton was hired to play "Juan Harker." A 17-year-old Mexican actress named Lupita Tovar was hired to play Harker’s fiance Eva, who was known as Mina in the English version.
"The American crew left at 6:00 PM and we were ready," Tovar recalled. "We started shooting at eight. At midnight, they would call for dinner… They didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t complain. We were happy to have some money -most actors were starving."
FIRST RATE
Since they were using a second-rate cast and crew after Hollywood’s finest had gone home for the day, the assumption was that the film made at night would be inferior to the original. That may have been true in most cases …but not in the case of Dracula.
For all of its popularity and accomplishments as Hollywood’s first vampire film, on a technical level, the English-language Dracula is considered a very poorly made film. A lot of the blame for this goes to director Tod Browning, a hard-drinking recluse with a reputation as a troublemaker. Browning had been fired from at least one studio for his drinking, and was blacklisted from the entire industry for two years in the early 1920s. Making matters worse, Browning had directed nine films starring horror superstar Lon Chaney, Sr. when both men worked for MGM, and he was still reeling from Chaney’s recent death from throat cancer.
Browning’s myriad personal problems found their way into the finished film. "In scene after scene," Skal writes, "the script demonstrates just how much Browning cut, trimmed, ignored, and generally sabotaged the screenplay’s visual potentials, insisting on static camera setups, eliminating reaction shots and special effects, and generally taking the lazy way out at every opportunity." In one scene, a piece of cardboard the crew used to reduce the glare of a lamp takes up nearly a quarter of the entire screen, and in the film’s climax, Dracula’s death isn’t even shown on film; moviegoers had to settle for the sound of Lugosi groaning offscreen.
ON PURPOSE
Legend has it that cinematographer Karl Freund got so exasperated with Browning’s slipshod style that he just turned the camera on and let it run unattended, Skal writes:
Indeed, there is one endless take in the finished film featuring Manners (who played Jonathon Harker), Chandler (Mina Murray), and Van Sloan (Dr. Van Helsing) that runs 251 feet, nearly three minutes without a cut that was clearly meant to be broken up with close-ups and reaction shots. At one point Chandler tells Manners, "Oh, no -don’t look at me like that," in an apparent reference to a dramatic change in his expression. The two-shot, however, shows Manners as motionless as a wax dummy -as if oblivious that the camera is even catching his face.
As if that isn’t sloppy enough, in the final credits, Universal President Carl Laemmle’s title is misspelled as "Presient."
¡EL VAMPIRO!
The film crew on the Spanish Dracula was another story.
Kohner, who had produced the Spanish version of The Cat Creeps, was headstrong and ambitious -and not above second-guessing the English-language unit, trying to improve upon their work. On The Cat Creeps, he watched the daily footage produced by Robert Julian, the director of the English version, and found the scenes to be poorly lit and uninspiring. So when filming the same scenes for the Spanish film, Kohner relit every set and filled them with atmosphere-creating candles, cobwebs, and shadows that had been missing in the English version. Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was so impressed with Kohner’s work that he ordered Julian to refilm his own footage, this time using Kohner as his artistic advisor.
Kohner did the same thing during the making of the Spanish version of Dracula. Using a moviola machine that was kept on the set, they watched the daily footage, or "dailies" that had been shot for the English-language version, made notes of the sloppiness and mistakes, and then made sure that their own scenes were better.
One thing they didn’t try to improve on was Bela Lugosi’s masterful performance as Count Dracula. Instead, Kohner insisted that Carlos Villarias imitate Lugosi as closely as possible, and he alone among the actors was allowed to watch the English-language dailies to make sure he got it right. They even let him wear Lugosi’s hairpiece, although it’s unclear whether Lugosi ever knew about it.
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
Perhaps the most notable difference between the two films is their use -or lack thereof- of special effects. In scenes showing Dracula climbing out of his coffin, for example, the Spanish version uses a double exposure to show a cloud of mist rising out ofthe coffin and turning into Dracula.
In the English version, the coffin lid starts to tremble, the camera turns away from the coffin and points at a wall …and by the time it returns, Bela Lugosi is already out of the coffin.
NUMERO UNO
When completed, the Spanish version of Dracula cost just over $66,000 to make and only took 22 nights to film, compared to the seven weeks and $450,000 it took to film the English version. In fact, the Spanish crew shot the film so fast that they ended up shooting some of their scenes on sets that weren’t completely finished. Rather than wait for them to be finished, the filmmakers compensated for the empty sets with clever lighting.
The first preview was held in early 1931, before the original Dracula was even finished, and the reviewers who saw the Spanish version were impressed. "If the English version of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, is as good as the Spanish version," Hollywood Filmograph magazine wrote, "why, the big U (Universal) hasn’t a thing in the world to worry about."
The only problem, of course, was that the English version wasn’t as good, as Filmograph reported a few weeks later. The first few minutes of the film were enthralling, the magazine wrote, but quickly deteriorated after that. "Tod Browning directed, although we cannot believe that the same man was responsible for both the first and later parts of the picture. Had the rest of the picture lived up to the first sequence in the ruined castle Transylvania, Dracula would have been a horror and thrill classic long remembered."
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