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Happy Boo!-thday...
Topic Started: Dec 3 2011, 09:43 AM (258 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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Last night, the FNF gang watched a double-feature of Dracula and Frankenstein to celebrate the 80th birthdays of both of these films (the former released in Feb. 1931, the latter 8 months later). Dracula is to me a film where the enjoyment can be broken down into a few key points: Dwight Frye's Renfield; those lovely ladies who show up in the diapanous gowns early in the film; the atmospheric sets, layered with all those cobwebs; Edward Van Sloan's understated and underpraised performance, smugly confident in his dealings with his nemesis; the still-quoted dialog; the way the guy with the penlights keeps missing of Bela Lugosi's eyes, so that in any given scene his left eye and his right cheek glow. Also, it's amusing to note how much of the action happens off-screen and has to be described by the various characters.

Frankenstein is a different matter, as primitive in its own way as Dracula but helmed by a much better director and much more Germanic in its design; the fake clouds in the mountain background add a nightmarish quality that much improves the film's sense of dread. Karloff is the quintessential walking dead, of course, Colin Clive emotes all over the place, the electrical equipment is cooler than hell, and I always love the way that Dwight Frye stops on the huge staircase to pull up his sock. The scene in which Van Sloan (HIM again?!?) is dissecting the Monster, who quietly swings his massive hand behind the doctor's neck to strangle him, is as horrifying as anything in any Universal film.

We watched Dracula in 1999 when I first moved to California, and this is our first viewing since. We haven't seen Dracula's Daughter yet (I've seen it, of course) and Son of Dracula hasn't shown up since our 2001-02 season, so it's probably time to dust that one off, too.

We watched the entire Frankenstein series in our 2000-01 season, and since then, we dust them off and rotate through them, last revisiting the 1931 original eight years ago. Bride will be later this season or possibly next, followed by Son and then the great parody of the three films done by Mel Brooks.

The cartoons are worth mentioning too... Three early Universal talkies by Walter Lantz. Spooks is a 1930 parody of Phantom of the Opera with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit as the hero; King Klunk (1933) is pretty much a scene-for-scene remake of THAT film, with the dinosaur a dead ringer for what would later be Godzilla; and Oswald is back (in 2-strip Technicolor!) for Toyland Premiere, which has cartoon Laurel & Hardy as the villains(!) and Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller and the Frankenstein Monster as the heroes(!). Fun stuff, all from the Woody Woodpecker Vol. 1 DVD set.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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