In celebration of the tri-state area’s snow day yesterday, I cobbled together a classic Universal horror double feature while My Lovely Wife took an afternoon work-release nap. I started with the original The Wolf Man (1941), a picture I’ve always found a little bland and workmanlike, particularly in contrast to the earlier, wonderfully atmospheric, Werewolf of London. And sure enough, Lon Chaney, Jr.‘s luggish, strangely moving histrionics notwithstanding, it’s an iconic piese that’s still not a lot to write home about as a motion picture. Hardly unenjoyable though, and really short. For the second feature, inspired at least in part by a little side discussion of Robert Siodmak over at Dave Kehr’s place, I chose Robert Siodmak’s 1943 Son of Dracula, which I haven’t watched in years, and is most famous for its incredibly inapt casting of the aforementioned lug Chaney, Jr. as the supposedly suave and sinister titular (sort of) vampire, and for the incredibly lame bit of wordplay that’s one of its major plot points—that said vampire calls himself “Count Alucard,” and “Alucard,” you know, is “Dracula” spelled backwards. D’oh!
To be fair to poor old Lon, he and his new mustache do their damnedest to underplay in this new role, and he only turns silly at the end, flipping out over a fire. And in any event, not too far beneath the film’s surface glitches there’s a great, fascinating story of amour fou that’s almost a powerful as the one Siodmak would essay a few years later (with the seemingly unlikely Deanna Durbin in the lead) in Christmas Holiday. Son of’s scenario, by Robert’s brother Curt (here credited as Curtis), has the vampire emigrating to America to find “fresh” blood as it were; many bits of the dialogue seem to anticipate what Nabokov saw as a fatal misreading of his Lolita, that is, as a tale “of old Europe debauching young America.” The Count’s invitation to relocate to New Orleans in this tale has come from ur-Goth-girl Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton), whose seeming infatuation with the continental bloodsucker seems to increasingly alienate here from her childhood sweetheart Frank (Robert Paige). Things come to a nasty boil when Frank pulls a revolver and plugs Alucard…only the bullets go through him and seem to kill Katherine. Which spectacle appears to drive Frank mad.
Throughout all this Siodmak laces the film with genuinely surreal touches. The screen cap at top is from one of the film’s most hypnotic, memorable sequences: Alucard floating across a swamp to meet Katherine after emerging from his once-submerged coffin. There’s also a very amusing meta-moment, in which Siodmak cuts from a scene to a printed page of Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula, which one character is then seen to be reading, as a way to study up on what seems to be plaguing the general vicinity.
Things really perk up, though, when—um, spoiler alert?—the undead Katherine materializes in Frank’s jail cell (where he’s being held for, you know, “killing” Katherine) and tells him that, no, she doesn’t really love Alucard, but that she merely lured the vampire to her so that she could convert him and that she, in turn, could convert Frank, and that as vampires they could know eternal love. But now Frank is needed to complete the scheme by putting a stake through Alucard’s heart, thus removing him from the picture. It is here that it occurred to me that the ideal film with which to pair this one would not have been another Universal horror, but rather Buñuel’s 1954 Mexican-made riff on Wuthering Heights, Abismos de Pasion, which builds to a similarly morbid frenzy.
I’ve already discussed, more than once even, I think, the not-so-odd affinity between Christmas Holiday and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. And once again, watching in this film as Katherine takes her leave of Frank by dematerialize into smoke, I thought of the smoke from Buñuel’s cigarette turning into clouds just before he opens that eye…
Man, we need more SIodmak out there. The guy was absolutely major.
Could not agree more with your last two sentences. I would particularly like to see more of his European work, both early and late. Like so many European exiles he was hard done by in Hollywood; even when he came back for that Custer movie, as I recall Budd Schulberg talked about how Siodmak was maneuvered into taking a salary that was a fraction of the going rate. But he was, as you say, major. The Spiral Staircase – ah, what a movie.
It never occurred to me back when I first saw it on “Creature Features,” but I can’t look at “The Wolfman” now without seeing it as some sort of extended metaphor for addiction.
Just substitute “alcoholism” every time they say lycanthropy, and all the pieces – the blackouts, the self-loathing, the lack of control, the bursts of rage, the special suffering of your loved ones – all make sense.
I wonder if any of it was on Curt Siodmak’s mind (particularly as he really wrote this from scratch, inventing a lot of the details we now accept as part of the mythology).
Interestingly, the final cast – Chaney, Warren William, Maria Ouspenskaya and poor old Bela – was full of substance abusers. And lots of those “Inner Sanctum” bottom-of-the-bill pictures that Chaney churned out right after – collected not long ago on DVD – had similar obsessions with guilt and amnesia.
By no means a great actor, but certainly one of the more sympathetic and, yes, tragic figures from the old horror canon…
I went on a Siodmak kick a couple of years ago, and was quite impressed. THE CRIMSON PIRATE, THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, THE KILLERS, and CRISS-CROSS were all terrific, and PHANTOM LADY, THE DARK MIRROR, THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY, and CRY OF THE CITY just a cut below (never a fan of CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY or THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN, unfortunately, though that might have something to do with the horrible condition of both prints I saw). I wish someone would issue (or in the case of THE CRIMSON PIRATE, re-issue) his stuff on DVD (I know SPIRAL STAIRCASE, KILLERS, AND CRISS-CROSS are available).
“Count Alucard” is also in 1969’s one-of-a-kind sexploitation farce Dracula, The Dirty Old Man.
Ahem. Your analysis is really hitting me where I live, Mr. Whitty.
By the way, I don’t mean to dismiss Lon Chaney, Jr., in any respect. To me the key quality of his work is the almost painful sincerity he brings to it, even when he’s not up to the task at hand, as is truly the case in the Siodmak picture. That being the case, the other quality, the thing that jumps off the screen when he first walks into a frame, is his awkward physicality (didn’t his dad tell him he was too tall to make it in pictures?) that vividly projects…well, luggishness. And I say that as a lug myself.
And “Alucard” lives on in the Castlevania video game series, in the personage of Dracula’s turned-good-and-now-fighting-his-father son.
I’ve always had a lot of affection for Chaney, Jr., despite the fact that he usually isn’t very good, and I think you hit the nail on the head with his “almost painful sincerity”– there is something endearing about that.
@Stephen – Gad sir, you are on to something there.
Yes, Glenn, the awkward, lumbering physicality is a big part of Chaney’s power, as it was for Chaney friend and drinking buddy Broderick Crawford.
(Interestingly, they played the same part a couple of times, with Chaney of course doing the film version of “Of Mice and Men,” which Crawford had done on stage, and Chaney once doing summer stock of “Born Yesterday,” which Crawford had done on film).
With Chaney, though, there is a sort of pathos, and as you note, that painful sincerity. And it results in the ultimate, oddly doubling effect of watching an actor desperately struggling to play a character who is himself desperately struggling.
And thanks, Siren – any tip of your stylish hat is always welcome!
Ironically, I just bought SIodmak’s The Crimson Pirate last night on eBay. It’s one of those South Korean DVDs, but for $8 it will have to do for now.
If it’s as good as Tourneur’s Anne of the Indies (and from what I’ve read, it should be even better), I’ll be more than satisfied.
A career-justifying moment for Lon Chaney, Jr. comes in “High Noon”, when his character tells Gary Cooper’s embattled sheriff, who is vainly seeking help against three psychopathic killers from the cowed citizenry, “They don’t care, they just don’t care.”
Whoever the greatest actor who ever lived happens to be (and he isn’t Lon Chaney, Jr.), this person could not possibly have surpassed the blending of rage, sorrow, and resignation that the journeyman son of the “Man Of A Thousand Faces” brings to this small but piercing, indelible vignette.
@Michael: Beautiful, and true.
Coincidentally enough, Glenn, yesterday was also Lon Chaney, Jr.‘s birthday (his 104th).
My favorite instance of apparent Chaney miscasting that nevertheless pays off occurs in WEIRD WOMAN, where he plays a college professor being pursued by Anne Gwynne and Evelyn Ankers. So much jars with Cheney’s look and style – the idea of him being a professor, the idea of Chaney as object of romantic obsession – that somehow the result comes together to make a perfect kind of crazy sense. The key, I think, is that Chaney plays it all so nonchalantly, for once keeping his emotions in as way of suggesting this is all the most natural state of affairs imaginable.
For a truly great Chaney performance, see MAN MADE MONSTER. The film attains a genuine sense of tragedy in its incredibly compact running time because of the sense of easygoing grace he brings to role. I’m a much bigger fan of Waggner’s direction in THE WOLF MAN than you are, but MAN MADE MONSTER is his masterpiece – it’s a theoretically routine programmer that achieves perfection without any fuss or the least bit of ostentation.
As far as R. Siodmak, I love CRISS CROSS and like SON OF DRACULA a lot, but I’ve never gotten around to a thoroughgoing exploration of his work because I’ve always been a little underwhelmed by what are probably his two highest regarded movies, THE KILLERS and THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE.