Dracula (1931)
Transylvanian Count Dracula travels to London, falling for the daughter of a Insane Asylum Doctor who he attempts to make his Bride.
It's my birthday this weekend! So to celebrate I treated myself to some whisky I brought back from Scotland, whilst watching the 1931 Dracula, a movie which incredibly I genuinely have never watched before until now!
I love the 1922 Nosferatu, and I watched the Francis Ford Coppula version of Dracula years ago but somehow never got round to the Universal Bela Lugosi version until, well, now.
And yeah, it was very good. You can very much tell it's based an adaption of a stage production, and of course by modern standards has earmarks which date it but to be frank it's a near 100 year old film by this point!
And yet, even for it's age there are some outstanding examples of cinema that even modern films lack. There is a brilliant scene about 40 minutes in where, Count Dracula visits Mina whilst she is unwell and both Professor Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker notice the Count has no reflection in the mirror of Jonathan's cigar box. A perfect reveal executed brilliantly even though it's made plain to the audience from the beginning that the Count is a vampire.
To be critical, I did feel the pacing started to fall apart in the second act, with much of the developing story suddenly rushed to wrap the film up but that might be a symptom of production restrictions of the time. And I did feel Dracula's death at the end of the movie was a bit anticlimactic.
But otherwise, unsurprisingly I guess, this was a pretty good film, and I enjoyed it. In an era where almost every movie now is a smorgasbord of AI, computer special effects and an overbearing soundtrack, it was refreshing to go back, way way back, to a time when none of those things existed. There wasn't any music, there was some practical effects (read as: rubber bats dangling on strings...) and some clever cinematography but that was it. Everything else relied on the skill and delivery of the actors in the movie. And it was a nice refreshing change actually. In the year 2026 where I can write all of this using a small glass rectangle I keep in my pocket that is connected to almost everyone on the entire planet at all times, it's occasionally very nice to go back to, and enjoy, much simpler times.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
