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Synopsis: Two nervous policemen
enter the crypt of Carfax Abbey, where they find a body lying at the
foot of the stairs. At that moment, Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van
Sloan) emerges from an inner room in the crypt. The sergeant (Halliwell
Hobbes) demands to know whether he killed the man lying at their feet.
Von Helsing tells them that Count Dracula did it....and that he
has just killed Count Dracula. Von Helsing is arrested and taken to
Scotland Yard, where he tells his story to the Commissioner, Sir Basil
Humphrey (Gilbert Emery), then asks to see, not a lawyer, but a former
student of his, the psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger). Sir
Basil warns Von Helsing that if he persists in talking about vampires,
he will either be executed for murder, or committed to an asylum.
Meanwhile, at the police station at Whitby, a woman swathed in black
from head to foot appears as if from nowhere. She asks to see the body
of Count Dracula and, when the constable (Billy Bevan) refuses, draws
him to look closely at her ring, at which he stares transfixed.... When
the sergeant returns, he finds the constable insensible, and the body of
Count Dracula gone.... Out in the fog-bound woods, the Countess Marya
Zaleska (Gloria Holden) lights a pyre, burning Dracula’s body to ashes.
She then cries exultantly that she is free of his curse at last. The
following night, the Countess tries to celebrate her release, but her
manservant, Sandor (Irving Pichel), convinces her that nothing has
changed, that she is still a creature of the dark. The Countess dons her
cape and her ring and goes out into the night, where she approaches a
man in evening-dress.... As daylight approaches, the Countess returns to
her rooms, handing her blood-stained cape to Sandor and retreating to
her earth-filled coffin.... Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill) tracks
her employer, Dr Garth, to Scotland, telling him that his old friend
Professor Von Helsing needs his help. Back in London, Garth tells Von
Helsing that he cannot believe his story, but nevertheless promises to
help him if he can. At an evening party, Garth is introduced to the
Countess, by whom he is instantly struck, much to Janet’s annoyance. The
conversation turns to the Von Helsing case, and Garth reveals that the
murder charge will probably be dropped, as they cannot find Dracula’s
body. He also diagnoses Von Helsing’s belief in vampires as a form of
obsession, which can be cured by psychiatry. The Countess begs Garth to
visit her at her apartment, claiming that she wishes to discuss his
ideas further. There, she confesses that she feels herself controlled by
a power from beyond the grave, one that fills her with horrible urges
that she cannot overcome. Garth tells her that the way to cure an
obsession or an addiction is to confront it head on and fight it. When
he has gone, the Countess tells Sandor that she will be painting at her
studio, and sends him out to find a girl – to model for her. Sandor
smiles....
Comments: All throughout the early
1930s, Universal Studios teetered on the brink of financial disaster,
chiefly because of the company’s policy of making the bulk of its output
costly prestige productions, instead of employing its rivals’ tactic of
supporting a few quality films with numerous low-cost programmers. On
several occasions a big success managed to hold off the inevitable –
All Quiet On The Western Front, which would win a Best Picture Oscar
towards the end of 1930, helped, as did the unexpected one-two punch of
Dracula and
Frankenstein in 1931 – but the
writing was on the wall. In 1935, a run of expensive failures finally
forced the studio into some belated cost-cutting. Nevertheless, Carl
Laemmle Sr obstinately refused to surrender his long-standing strategy
altogether, and took out a loan in order to fund the making of Show
Boat. The borrowed quarter of a million was not enough, however: the
production ran $300,000 over budget. In March, 1936, the loan was called
in, and “Uncle Carl” was forced out of the studio he had founded more
than twenty-five years before.
A year earlier, however, Universal had
finally made good on a long-standing plan to produce a sequel to
Frankenstein, one repeatedly
frustrated by the studio’s inability, professionally speaking, to get
James Whale and Boris Karloff in the same place at the same time.
Bride Of Frankenstein, when it finally went into production, was a
lavish effort costing around twice what the original film had. Its
success had a predictable effect upon the studio, which immediately
began to lay plans for a sequel to its other great 1931 triumph,
Dracula. Initially, Dracula’s
Daughter was conceived upon the same expensive lines: a major
production that would reunite the original cast and tell the story of
the Count’s vampiric origins before picking up the story in more or less
contemporary times. Circumstances, however, conspired to consign this
notion to the scrap heap. By 1936, the Production Code was beginning to
bite, and bite hard: horror films in general, and Universal horror films
in particular, were a major target. Bride Of Frankenstein had
been a battleground, with Joseph Breen taking personal offence at its
treatment of sex and religion. However, the Hayes Office wasn’t the only
motivation for the, pardon the expression, eventual bloodlessness of
Dracula’s Daughter. With its finances in a mess, Universal could
scarcely afford to risk the lucrative overseas market (and again,
Bride had been banned in several countries). The British censors, in
particular, had instigated a public crusade against horror movies,
denouncing them outright in an effort to discourage their production,
banning a number of them, cutting others, and slapping the dreaded “A”
rating on any that made it into cinemas anyway.
And so the plug was pulled on the planned
version of Dracula’s Daughter. The budget was cut, and
drastically. The name cast also vanished, to be replaced by a mixture of
B-level stalwarts and newcomers, along with a smattering of British
character actors there to remind the audience that we’re supposed to be
in England. And the screenplay went into re-writes....and
re-writes....and re-writes. Officially, Dracula’s Daughter is
credited to Garrett Fort. We might remember that Fort was also credited
with the screenplay of Dracula, where he re-wrote the stage
version of the story authored by John L. Balderston, who re-wrote the
stage version authored by Hamilton Deane, who re-wrote Stoker’s novel.
(Got that? Pay attention, I’ll be asking questions later.) Here, history
repeating, Fort is again supposed to have based his screenplay upon “a
story” by Balderston. The contribution of both gentlemen being whatever
it may, at least four other writers worked uncredited upon the
screenplay. Hardly surprising, amongst such a crowd, that Bram Stoker
hardly rates a mention.
(The real mystery man, however, who did
make the credits, is one “Oliver Jeffries”. Hollywood legend holds
that this is a pseudonym for David O. Selznick, who acquired the rights
the “Dracula’s Guest”, the story upon which this film is extremely
loosely based. While we cannot imagine that Selznick had any intention
of making such a film himself, his foresight and business acumen did
force Universal either to buy the rights from him, or face the
possibility of a lawsuit.)
The history of motion picture making is
littered with examples of productions – the most famous example being, I
suppose, Casablanca – that, by all known laws of logic, should
have been a failure, but which instead surmounted such hurdles as
constant re-writing and last minute re-casting to become greater than
the sum of their parts. Alas, in the case of Dracula’s Daughter,
the movie gods declined to smile. The film ended up being exactly what
you would anticipate from such a production history, a patchwork effort
full of inconsistent characterisations and gaping plot holes – one in
particular. The critic Andrew Sarris once
famously conferred upon Edgar Ulmer’s 1957 pot-boiler, Daughter Of Dr
Jekyll, a kind of immortality by observing snarkily, “Anyone who
loves the cinema must be moved by The Daughter Of Dr Jekyll, a
film with a scenario so atrocious that it takes forty minutes to
establish that the daughter of Dr Jekyll is indeed the daughter of Dr
Jekyll.” One wonders what Mr Sarris would have made of Dracula’s
Daughter, which in the course of its rather haphazard seventy-one
minutes, never does bother to clarify whether Dracula’s daughter is, in
fact, Dracula’s daughter.
All this is not to say that Dracula’s
Daughter is without worth or interest. On the contrary, there are
some genuinely original and imaginative touches here, but the film is
guilty of continually undercutting itself, forcing even well-disposed
viewers into the exasperating task of making allowances.
Dracula’s Daughter begins badly, very badly, with a large helping of
the kind of “comedy” that taints so many films of this era, as two
bumbling British bobbies stumble (for no readily apparent reason) into
the crypt of Carfax Abbey, where they find the body of Renfield lying at
the foot of the stone staircase, and where, in the next room, Count
Dracula has just been despatched with a stake through the heart.
Although there is a pretence of continuity between Dracula’s Daughter
and its predecessor, in fact this is as good as it ever gets. Our first
glitch occurs immediately afterwards, as....well, as Edward Van
Sloan’s character wanders into shot, and we discover that, between
films, he has mutated from being Professor Van Helsing into being
Professor Von Helsing. The Professor obligingly declares that it
was he who drove the stake through Dracula, and is promptly arrested. He
is next seen comfortably ensconced in an armchair in the officer of the
Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Basil Humphrey – and indeed, we
scarcely see him anywhere else (like, for instance, a prison cell),
thanks to his “position in the scientific world”, if you can believe
that. The Professor tells his tale – paraphrasing one of his famous
lines from Dracula as he declares, “The strength of the vampire,
Sir Basil, is that he is unbelievable!” – and we notice the
absence of certain facts. While the powers that be might not believe
a story about vampires, you would imagine that it would at least give
them pause if the story were to be supported by corroborating evidence
from such social luminaries as Dr Seward, Miss Mina Seward and Mr John
Harker. For reasons best known to himself, however, the Professor never
mentions their names, still less calls them as witnesses. In the face of
his unsupported assertions, a concerned Sir Basil offers some helpful
advice about retaining council and what an English jury will and will
not believe. And jolly nice of him it is, too.
(What we have here, of course, is an
instance of one of the most cherished conventions of literature and
film, which states that, unlike their American brethren, British law
officers are always willing to lend a sympathetic ear to an eccentric
story. This is a convention that extends well beyond the horror and
science fiction genres: see, for example, the reaction to Ray Milland’s
“There’s-a-Nazi-in-my-cake!” story in Fritz Lang’s Ministry Of Fear.)
All this is pretty painful, and it gets
even worse, as we are served up another large dollop of Sergeant Stupid
and Constable Clod. But at length our endurance is rewarded, as
Dracula’s Daughter moves to a whole new plane with the appearance of
its leading lady. As the mysterious Countess Marya Zaleska, Gloria
Holden is the highlight of Dracula’s Daughter. Holden was a
newcomer to Hollywood when this film was made. She would go on to
achieve critical acclaim the following year in The Life Of Emile Zola,
but beyond that her career was never what it might have been, perhaps
because Holden simply wasn’t the usual Hollywood “type”. It is precisely
that, however, that makes her so right here. With black hair, huge dark
eyes, finely chiselled features, and cheekbones you could cut diamonds
with, Holden is perfectly cast as the enigmatic creature of the night.
Her performance is good, too; but although she wrings what she can from
the material she was given, her character is, in the end, too
underwritten for her quite to achieve true iconic status. Still, there
is much to enjoy here, such as Holden’s exquisitely judged re-reading of
the Count’s immortal line, “I never drink....wine”, or the
Countess’s half-amused, half-taunting challenge to the sceptical Jeffrey
Garth, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in
your psychiatry!”
The Countess Marya Zaleska is one of
thirties horror’s most interesting female characters – although it must
be admitted that her intriguing ambiguities owe as much to the vagaries
of an ill-structured screenplay as to any intent on the part of the
film-makers. When we first set eyes upon Marya, she is swathed in a robe
of black, only her eyes and a single white hand, a hand bearing the
glowing jewelled ring that she uses to hypnotise her victims, visible.
By all known indicators, she is a creature of evil; yet her destruction
of Count Dracula’s body is accompanied neither by oaths of revenge for
her “father’s” death, nor by any of the usual speeches about “freeing
the soul”. Far from it. “Into the keeping of the lords of the flame and
lower pits I consign this body,” intones Marya. “Be thou exorcised, O
Dracula. May thy body, long undead, find destruction throughout eternity
in the name of thy dark, unholy master....” – and she performs two rites
of purification, tossing salt into the funeral pyre (salt, my eye! –
that’s Whooshing Powder© if ever I saw any!), and then
holding a cross over the fire....
And here the mystery of Marya Zaleska, and
whether or not she is a true vampire, begins in earnest. If the film
never really makes it clear whether Marya is Dracula’s daughter in the
biological sense or the vampiric, then Marya herself seems equally in
doubt. Certainly, when she destroys Dracula’s body, her expectation is
that she will be released from his “curse”. “Free! Free forever!” she
exults – and as all vampiric lore to this point has taught us, free
indeed she should have been, as Mina Seward was in Dracula,
had she been just one more of the Count’s blood-victims. But Mina, when
her release came, knew it. Marya isn’t sure; and it takes only a
few ominous words from her manservant, Sandor (more on his
ambiguities in a moment), to send her hastening back to London before a
new day can dawn, possibly fatally. The following evening sees Marya
again trying to convince herself that she is now free, celebrating with
music, and recalling memories of her mother and her childhood; memories
that certainly imply a biological relationship with her “father”. Again
Sandor is on hand to turn her thoughts, insisting that she is still a
creature of the night, and that this night will be like all the ones
that came before.... And Marya yields to him, donning her robe and her
ring, and trolling the dark streets of London for a victim – which she
finds. The next morning, too, finds her hurrying back to her sanctuary,
handing her blood-stained cape to Sandor and taking refuge in her coffin
before the dawn can break....
Ambiguous? you might be saying in a
puzzled way – and I say again, yes. The question is not whether
Marya is guilty of vampiric activity, but whether she is truly undead,
or suffering an extreme form of delusion. Never at any point do we see
any supernatural act associated with Marya. She never transforms
herself. She never shows herself impervious to everything save the stake
and the daylight. Her hypnotism of her victims is true hypnotism, the
mortal kind, as evidenced when Dr Garth examines someone recently in her
thrall. She cannot look upon a cross, true – but why should she be able
to touch one? In short, all of Marya’s symptoms can be
interpreted as the manifestations of a mental illness – and that she is
“ill”, and therefore curable, is what she most desperately wishes to
believe. Small wonder that she attaches herself so desperately to
Jeffrey Garth, when he begins holding forth on the various kinds of
human obsession, and how they can be banished with the help of
psychiatry.
Nor does the character of Sandor do much
to clear these muddy waters. On the evidence available, Sandor is
human....yet when Marya holds the cross over Dracula’s pyre, he too must
look away. On the other hand, he does not fear the dawn, as Marya does;
there is only one coffin in the back of Marya’s studio. More to the
point, it is made clear towards the end of the film that what Sandor
expects in return for his service is immortality: that is, for
Marya to make him a vampire. The question here is whether he knows
that Marya is a vampire, or whether he has, rather, bought just as
deeply into Marya’s delusion as Marya herself. The relationship between
the two is profoundly disturbing. When Marya consults Garth about her
“condition”, he insists that the greater part of any cure is the will of
the individual to be cured. In saying so he draws an analogy with
the treatment of alcoholism....but in truth, a far more accurate
description of Marya’s situation (one not allowed by the Production
Code, even if they had wished to be more explicit) is drug addiction.
Marya reacts to Dracula’s death like an addict who has heard that her
pusher has been busted – as if that was enough on its own to change her
condition. In this context, Sandor comes across as the worst kind of
enabler. He doesn’t want Marya cured of her “addiction”. On the
contrary, he does everything he can to undermine her resolve to be
cured, playing upon her fears and her self-loathing until she
capitulates and goes out looking for a “fix”. When Garth encourages
Marya not to run from her “horrible impulse”, but to “meet it – fight
it!” – not realising, of course, what it is he is encouraging her to do!
– Sandor is pleased. He knows very well that Marya’s addiction, whether
it be vampiric or all too human, is as yet too strong for her; and when
she puts Garth’s advice into practice and orders him to bring a girl to
her studio – to “model” for her – Sandor obeys with alacrity.
Dracula’s Daughter is a film not
much known these days, but as far as it is known, it is for the
confrontation between Marya and the destitute young girl brought to her
by Sandor: a confrontation that has seen this film enrolled in the ranks
of gay cinema, and the Countess Marya Zaleska hailed as the screen’s
first lesbian vampire. While the inference of this scene is in one sense
inescapable, it is difficult to decide what was actually intended by the
film-makers. Certainly there was an acute awareness on their part of the
implications of same-sex vampirism: when Dracula was in
production, Carl Laemmle Jr refused to allow the Count’s attack on
Renfield to be shown, so bothered was he by the possible homosexual
overtones of such a scene. Lesbianism being, as always, considered less
“threatening” than male homosexuality, the makers of Dracula’s
Daughter eventually got away with the scene in the studio, but it
was re-written and re-shot several times before it passed censorship
muster, and in the end we still do not see Marya’s attack upon the girl.
Having already removed her blouse, the
doomed girl, Lili, gestures towards the straps of her slip. “I suppose
you’ll want these lowered?” she offers....and so seals her own fate....
There is indeed a disturbing eroticism about this sequence, not least in
the contrast between Nan Grey’s fair fragility and Gloria Holden’s dark
imperiousness, but whether lesbianism per se is the intended
implication is moot. Given the film’s vintage, it is of course possible
that Marya’s expressed desire to be free of her “curse”, to “live as a
woman”, to take her place “in the bright world of the living”, is meant
as an expression of disgust at her “aberrant” sexuality. In the
depiction of her lifestyle, however, there does not seem to be anything
so specific. Intriguingly, Marya lives the kind of double life generally
associated with wicked young men: that is, she keeps a “respectable”
apartment for the entertainment of her “respectable” friends, and also
secret rooms in a far less respectable locale, taken under an assumed
name, for her more nefarious activities. She is also an artist – not a
mere dilettante, but a professional. She is an aristocrat....and a
foreigner....and she keeps a studio in Chelsea, for heaven’s
sake! She is, in a word, decadent....and if her sexual
preferences seem a little unfocussed, that would be entirely in keeping
with such a characterisation. Let us not forget that Marya’s first
victim, one of her own choosing, is a young man out on the town; and
that by the end of the film, her interest in Jeffrey Garth has become
far more personal than professional. Frankly, the sexual overtones of
Marya’s behaviour seem rather less significant than the social ones:
when she feeds on women, like her “father” before her she preys
predominantly upon the lower classes; but when she pursues a man, her
preference is unmistakably for a “toff”....
One of the most unexpected aspects of
Dracula’s Daughter, considering when it was made, is its positive
attitude towards the profession of psychiatry. It was common at this
time, and for some years to come, for psychiatrists to be rather roughly
handled in American films; to be regarded as quacks as best and con
artists at worst; the butt of jokes if they were lucky, and unmasked as
villains and criminals more often than I can remember. It was not,
indeed, until the later years of World War II, with so many mental
casualties in desperate need of help, that this attitude really began to
change. For a film of 1936 to cast a psychiatrist as its hero is very
surprising – and so too is the way in which Dr Garth conducts himself.
Initially Garth is completely disbelieving of Von Helsing’s stories of
vampirism, but still has sufficient faith in his old mentor to promise
to help him, if only he can figure out how. But although he has not
believed what Von Helsing has been saying, Garth has been
listening....and as soon as physical evidence of the Professor’s
claims begins to turn up, he recognises and accepts it for what it is,
without any sign of that contrived and artificially extended scepticism
that so many films insist upon as the way of the “scientific mind” – and
which so often results in countless avoidable deaths, all in the name of
“logic” and “rationalism”. Here, it takes only the puncture wounds on
the throat of a single victim for Garth to start contemplating the
impossible.
(All this is not to say that we in the
audience entirely approve of the way Dr Garth conducts himself
professionally, but this is certainly due to the distance between the
time of the film’s production and our own. Dracula’s Daughter is
hardly alone in this respect. Try watching a Dr Kildare film
these days without gasping in horror at the various gross malpractices
committed by the good doctor, all in the name of “having the courage to
experiment”.)
There is, then, quite a lot of interest to
be found in Dracula’s Daughter. What a shame that so much of the
material in which it is embedded is so ill-conceived! Perhaps the film’s
biggest blunder is its poorly written “romance” between Jeffrey Garth
and his human love interest, Janet Blake. This is obviously intended to
be the kind of love-hate relationship so common in the screwball
comedies of this time, but instead of coming across as
affection-concealed-by-hostility, much of the interaction between Garth
and Janet seems very much like genuine hostility! This is
particularly true on Garth’s part, and really, we can’t blame him: Janet
Blake is one of the most annoying “heroines” ever foisted onto an
exasperated audience. She’s supposed to be “cute” and “spirited”, but
take it from me, she’s just plain obnoxious! This severely weakens the
final act of Dracula’s Daughter, in which Marya, after her
inability to control her “impulse” with regard to the tragic Lili,
accepts that she cannot change – and decides that she wants as her
immortal consort, not Sandor, but Jeffrey Garth. To this end, she
hypnotises and kidnaps Janet, using her as bait to lure Garth to
Dracula’s castle – her castle. (Another hint of a “real”
relationship, I suppose; but then it’s not as if people were going to be
queuing up to contest her right to the place.) This is the most bizarre
part of the whole film. There is very little effort made in general to
make Dracula’s Daughter contemporaneous with Dracula,
particularly in terms of such things as the decor, the costumes, and the
means of transport; but even so, you hardly expect it when the various
characters start jumping into planes and jetting off into the wilds of
Transylvania! – and especially not when we arrive in “modern”
Transylvania to find it still inhabited by the same old crowd of
lederhosen-wearing knee-slappers.
Garth arrives at the castle to find Janet
still trance-bound, and to have Marya make him the obvious offer: his
life for Janet’s. If he will willingly join her and become one of the
undead, Janet will be released unharmed. It is here that the
screenwriters’ failure to draw a believable love between Garth and Janet
really hurts the film: we simply do not feel for Garth, nor appreciate
his sacrifice when he accepts Marya’s offer, as we should. But of
course, fate is about to intervene. Von Helsing, Sir Basil Humphrey and
a couple of anonymous gendarmes (in Transylvania?) arrive at the
castle just at the critical moment – namely, when Sandor is expressing
his displeasure at Marya’s reneging on her promises to him by firing an
arrow at her....and through her. He is about to put another one through
Garth when he is shot dead by one of the gendarmes.
Marya, meanwhile, has staggered out onto
and collapsed upon the ramparts of her castle, and the survivors duly
gather around her to deliver the inevitable epitaph. “She was beautiful
when she died,” pronounces Von Helsing, “a hundred years ago....”
– a remark that means nothing and answers nothing. Had Marya been shot
with a bullet, like Sandor, we should at last have known the truth about
her; but a wooden arrow in the heart is, after all, just as fatal to a
delusional human being as it is to one of the undead; and in this
particular universe, vampires suffer no dissolution upon being
“released”. Who, then, was Marya Zaleska? – and what was
she? It seems that we shall never know for sure. Dracula’s Daughter,
like Marya herself, takes its secret to the grave.
Want a second opinion of Dracula’s
Daughter? Visit
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