Movie Quote of the Day (“Dracula,” Showing Why You Can’t Trust Teetotalers)

Count Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi): “This is very old wine. I hope you will like it.”

Renfield (played by Dwight Frye): “Aren’t you drinking?”

Dracula: “I never drink… wine.”—Dracula (1931), screenplay by Garrett Fort (and five uncredited others), adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker and the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, directed by Tod Browning and Karl Freund (uncredited)

I first saw this version of Dracula—released 80 years ago this week—when I was a kid, on a Saturday-morning show called “Creature Features.” I made it all the way through poor Renfield's bite from the ol’ bloodsucker before it scared the hell out of me and I turned it off.

A decade later, on a high-school field trip into New York, I saw the Broadway revival with Frank Langella. The centerpiece was not the Renfield scene, but the one where Langella, still young and possessed of all his dark hair, went into full matinee-idol mode, methodically circling innocent Mina's Victorian bedchamber before sinking to his knees next to her, ready for his seduction. When she let out a cry, just before intermission, all the girls from my group gasped in delight, giving the distinct impression that they wouldn't mind being in her place.

It wasn’t until several years ago that I saw the Spanish-language version of this film, shot simultaneously as the more English one, using the same sets and filmed at night, but with different actors. Yes, the English-language version had Bela Lugosi (who would not have repeated his Broadway triumph had not the original Universal Studios choice, “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney, died).

But the foreign one was more vigorous (Dracula slaps a mirror out of Dr. Van Helsing’s hands), the acting better, the script closer to the barely suppressed eroticism of Stoker’s novel (sample line: “The next morning, I felt very weak, as if I had lost my virginity”), and the clothes leaving less to the imagination (on the DVD, the female lead, Lupita Tovar, recalled her grandson saying, after seeing her in a revealing costume: “Now I know why grandpa married you!”).

Over the past several months, visiting the offices of our family physician, I've grown used to the sight of Twilight's Robert Pattinson, the young-adult counterpart to Bela, in a photo on the wall. In the popular imagination, the vampire shows as much life as the Count from Transylvania.