This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

This Day in Theater History (Langella’s ‘Dracula’ Puts Bite Into Bway Fans)

October 20, 1977—In every possible way, Dracula should have been dispatched by critics with their usual mindless one-word dismissals of Broadway revivals: “dated.” It had been 80 years since publication of Bram Stoker’s horror novel, and 50 years to the month since John Balderston had adapted Hamilton Deane’s British play for an American audience. Bela Lugosi was dead, and the count from Transylvania had become fodder for comics with his thick accent, pallid pallor and preposterous sleeping habits.

Instead, the production premiering at the Martin Beck Theatre on this night became a roaring success, a straight play that lasted for more than 900 performances—three times the length of the original Deane-Balderston play that made Lugosi a star in the United States. In no small measure, the play’s success owed much to star Frank Langella and scenic and costume designer Edward Gorey.

The photo accompanying this post, in a way, captures the contribution of both men. Langella fills the space below the arch not just with his tall frame but upstretched arms. Not for him the familiar blood-red eyes and fangs, nor even that accent. Instead of a creature of the mists and howls of his overseas castle, he radiates a sexual charisma that makes him more our contemporary than that of the Victorians he threatened. He is “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” to borrow the phrase used by Lady Caroline Lamb about her lover, the poet Lord Byron (who, as it happened, inspired what is considered the prototype of the modern vampire tale: The Vampyre, by his doctor friend John Polidori).

Notice the background of the photo: It’s black and white. Much like photography of this kind, it’s stark, eliminating the distraction of color, forcing attention to shapes and shades. It is beyond time, much like the un-dead Count himself.

Gorey’s black-and-white design has other implications. It suggests that the mere presence of Dracula has drained the world he invades of the normal palette of colors. At the same time, as director Dennis Rosa noted in a short interview with radio hosts Isobel Robins and Richard Seff for their “This Is Broadway” series, it also represented “good against evil, white against black.”

But that’s not all here. Over the archway, anchoring the curtains, is a pair of skulls—the kind of macabre but satiric touch that Rosa and the show’s producers hoped for when hiring Gorey, whose illustrations had appeared in outlets as diverse as children’s books and The New Yorker. Bat motifs appeared increasingly throughout the play, suggesting Dracula’s spreading, insidious influence, and amid each black-and-white tableau is a spot of red—a symbol of blood.

Some critics, including New York Magazine’s John Simon, complained that all of this was camping the play up even before the plot started. I think the Gorey-Rosa approach was exactly right, however. Staging the drama without a wink of only kind would have been ridiculous, practically inviting comments about the hoary nature of the material, with the inevitable jokes about the show being un-dead on arrival.

No, the wink-and-a-nod approach allowed the show’s creators to challenge thinking about the character. Lugosi’s Dracula had only directly addressed the audience once, with a comment about how living in Transylvania had left him with “few opportunities.” In contrast, Langella’s Count was continually looking out of the corner of his eye at the audience, making them complicit in his actions—and mocking the staid British Victorians he was attempting to subvert.

All of this made this Dracula doubly threatening—and, for the fictional women onstage and real-life ones in the audience, all the more exciting. The climax (in more sense than one) of all of this occurred at the end of the second act, just before intermission, when Langella’s “creature of the night” circled Lucy Seward in her (bat-shaped) bed. Lasting several minutes, the scene was all but soundless until the last second, when Lucy’s moan as Dracula goes for the jugular indicated erotic satisfaction more than terror.

The following spring, I saw the play as part of an “Enrichment” day offered by my high school, in which we had the choice of several plays or musicals to attend. I had heard the play was good, but I had no idea of the particular nature of it, nor why so many females were in my class group attending the show.

Hearing the mass squeals of delight from the co-eds, I suddenly understood the intense appeal to this group. Yet they were hardly alone: one female theatergoer on opening night, in a widely reported remark, observed, “I’d rather spend one night with Dracula dead, than the rest of my life with my husband alive.”

Like Lugosi, Langella repeated his star turn onscreen as the bloodthirsty count, albeit with less successful results. The fault, however, lay not with him (nor with his co-star, the luminous Kate Nelligan) but with director John Badham, who, fresh off his success with Saturday Night Fever, jettisoned Gorey's design for a more "realistic" color palette and introduced ill-conceived changes to the original story.

I had seen Langella previously on TV, in PBS’s Theater in America production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, but this experience was my first hint of what a magnetic stage performer he could be. He had already won a Tony Award as a lizard in Edward Albee’s Seascape, and now he would gain a nomination as Stoker’s eternal bat-man. 

Among my cherished memories of Broadway shows in the past couple of decades have been his appearances in appearances in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, and Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy. The septuagenarian might no longer be a matinee idol who can make women of all ages swoon, but he remains as much a mesmerizing stage presence as when I saw him 35 years ago.

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.