Wednesdays in October | 26 Films
Bela Lugosi will forever be identified with his defining role: Count Dracula. He played it on Broadway and in the first official screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and his portrayal colored the screen image of vampires for decades. Yet his career neither began nor ended with the iconic Count. He first appeared on the stage professionally in his native Hungary almost 30 years before making Dracula (1931) and enjoyed a successful career on stage and screen until a failed revolution forced him to flee the country. He landed in New Orleans in 1920 before making his way to New York, where he struggled to establish a career on the stage thanks partly to his limited English and thick accent. Then, he landed the title role in the Broadway production of "Dracula" in 1927.
Lugosi was almost 50 when Dracula made him famous, yet he still harbored dreams of becoming a romantic leading man in America. Hollywood had other ideas, and he remained associated with the Gothic horrors that flourished in the 1930s. When his horror stardom was eclipsed by Boris Karloff, Lugosi started taking whatever he was offered, including a succession of cheap horror B movies. As Lugosi biographer Arthur Lennig described, the actor struggled with “impossible characterizations and infantile dramaturgy, and through the magic of his own skill and personality managed to elevate the reprehensible to barely palatable." Always the professional, Lugosi tried to invest himself in every role, whether playing a mad scientist in a bargain basement thriller or a sinister supporting part in a silly comedy. When film roles dried up at the end of the War, the actor toiled away in vaudeville, summer stock and traveling revivals of "Dracula" and other stage productions. In his final years, divorced, forgotten and with a career on the decline, he sank into alcoholism and morphine addiction, and he died neglected by most of Hollywood. It's a shame he didn't live to see his legacy celebrated by new generations of horror fans.
Wednesday, October 2
TCM's month-long tribute opens with the film that made Lugosi not just a star but a horror icon. Dracula was the first film in what became a long, successful series for Universal Studios. Though Lugosi had made a name for himself playing the darkly mesmerizing Count on Broadway and later on stage in Los Angeles, studio head Carl Laemmle Jr. was resistant to cast a relative screen unknown in the lead of such an important film. Tod Browning, however, had seen Lugosi on stage and even directed him in an earlier film. Universal finally cast Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan to reprise their stage roles. In retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer. Lugosi brought an exotic appeal to Count Dracula with his Hungarian accent and ominous delivery, creating a figure both mesmerizing and intimidating, darkly romantic and dangerous. His performance helped make Dracula a top moneymaker of 1931 for Universal, and his theatrical intensity and aristocratic bearing (not to mention the accent) became the defining portrait of a vampire for decades to come.
Along with the inimitable Count, Lugosi is arguably most famous for playing a succession of mad scientists. His first was Dr. Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), which is more inspired by than based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story. Mirakle uses his sideshow act as a carnival hypnotist as a cover for his beastly experiments. Lugosi embraces the theatricality of the carnival act to create another darkly mesmerizing figure. In Island of Lost Souls (1932), he leaves the science to Charles Laughton, who plays the cruel Dr. Moreau, and instead brings compassion and dignity to one of Moreau's experiments, a beast-man who serves as a kind of high priest of Moreau’s religion.
He gets a rare heroic role in The Black Cat (1934) as a haunted doctor who tracks a demonically dark priest (inspired by real-life Satanist Aleister Crowley and played by Boris Karloff) to a castle built on the graves of a World War I massacre. Lugosi embraced the opportunity delivering perhaps his finest performance as the obsessed, tortured man whose simmering hatred and rage finally boil over into madness and sadistic revenge.
The Black Cat was another hit for Universal but did little to raise Lugosi’s profile at the studio. He was increasingly cast in smaller supporting parts but played an essential role in one last horror classic: The Wolf Man (1941). Lugosi brings a sense of foreboding and doom to the film as the Romani fortune-teller who passes the curse on to Lon Chaney Jr.'s tormented hero. It launched Chaney as Universal's new horror star while fifth-billed Lugosi only appears shortly.
Wednesday, October 9
The second night of programming spotlights Bela Lugosi's work in comic horrors, in most instances playing off his image as a horror icon. Nowhere is that more effective than in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), where Lugosi reprised his role as Count Dracula for the first time in more than 15 years (along with Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man and Glenn Strange as Frankenstein's Monster). It was the apex of Lugosi's horror comedies and there were many. If the 1930s were the golden age of classic horror, by the 1940s, horror had slid (with a few exceptions) into B movies and juvenile matinee fodder. Lugosi never fully broke out of his horror film typecasting.
He plays a mad scientist experimenting with human subjects in Zombies on Broadway (1945) starring the comedy team of Wally Brown and Alan Carney. Bandleader and radio comedian Kay Kyser takes the lead in You'll Find Out (1940), which teams Lugosi (as a phony spiritualist) with Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre as conspirators in a murder plot that plays out between musical numbers. He stars with The East Side Kids in Spooks Run Wild (1941) and Ghosts on the Loose (1943), the latter featuring Ava Gardner in an early supporting role. He's a butler whose very presence induces shivers in bumbling private detectives played by the Ritz Brothers in the slapstick mystery The Gorilla (1939). Scared to Death (1947) isn't a comedy at all—the low-budget production is a Gothic thriller with Lugosi as a man on a mission of vengeance—but it is narrated by a corpse and is the only color feature with Lugosi in a starring role.
Not all of these films fall into the same typecasting, however. In The Death Kiss (1932), a comic mystery that plays out behind the scenes of a movie studio, Lugosi plays the studio manager trying to manage the bad publicity of an on-set murder. Lugosi is of course a suspect—his portentous, continental performance stands out from the snappy patter of the American actors—but this fast-paced, low-budget effort allowed Lugosi to show another side of his talent while also reuniting him with Dracula costars David Manners and Edward Van Sloan.
Wednesday, October 16
If Dracula launched Bela Lugosi as a horror star, his subsequent films solidified his place as a horror legend. White Zombie (1932), made on a low budget by fledgling independent producers the Halperin Brothers, casts a dreamy spell thanks to moody cinematography and a darkly menacing performance by Lugosi. Even his name seems to carry a threat: Murder Legendre. Though dismissed by critics at the time, the film's reputation has grown over the years, and it stands as a landmark for introducing zombie and Haitian voodoo to American horror cinema.
Lugosi's health was declining when he took a small role as a slow-witted handyman in The Body Snatcher (1945) for producer Val Lewton. Headlined by Boris Karloff, it would be their last film together. But Lugosi is in prime form in The Devil Bat (1940) playing a bitter cosmetics inventor who breeds vulture-sized bats to carry out his revenge. It’s a cheap production made for the bargain basement outfit PRC, which is evident in the giant rubber bats that flop through the film, but Lugosi plays his vengeance with theatrical flair.
Two years before Dracula, Tod Browning directed Lugosi in the actor's first significant Hollywood role, The Thirteenth Chair (1929). Though practically absent until the film's second act, he almost takes over the film as the commanding, continental detective bringing a gravity to the mystery. They made one more film together, Mark of the Vampire (1935), a murder mystery with a supernatural angle that gave Lugosi a chance to riff on Dracula as he stalks through the foggy grounds of a castle.
Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) was infamously branded "the worst film ever made," a distinction that has perhaps unfairly stuck for decades. While it is hardly a fitting epitaph for Lugosi, who died after only a couple of days of shooting, the film is both absurd and endearing, with cheap special effects, cheaper sets and costars Tor Johnson and Vampira stumbling past wobbling cardboard gravestones. It's become quite the cult film and even more beloved since Tim Burton’s loving tribute Ed Wood (1994).
Wednesday, October 23
Our fourth night begins with starring roles in two Monogram horrors. By 1942, Lugosi was working more for poverty row studio Monogram, than for Universal, where he first became a star. He's back in mad scientist mode in The Corpse Vanishes (1942), where his sadistic scientist murders young brides to keep his ailing wife alive and young. He leads a double life in Bowery at Midnight (1942): a college professor teaching psychology by day but by night a criminal mastermind who uses a bowery soup kitchen as a cover for brazen jewelry robberies. In both films, he plays utterly ruthless characters and gives them a lurid edge.
The rest of the line-up spotlights Lugosi's work as a character actor, featuring a number of appearances outside of the horror genre, such as The Saint's Double Trouble (1940), where he plays an international criminal opposite a debonair detective played by George Sanders. He plays a South American lothario with a jealous nature and a short temper in the Joe E. Brown comedy Broadminded (1931). Under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy, Lugosi is marvelous as an elegant romantic figure who becomes increasingly exasperated as big-talking jokester Brown literally collides into his love life. Lugosi plays henchman to Lionel Atwill in Genius at Work (1946), a comedy mystery and his second film with the comedy team of Brown and Carney.
He stars opposite the great Greta Garbo for a brief appearance in Ernst Lubitsch’s witty romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939), playing the Russian commissar who sends the loyal comrade to Paris. "It took Mr. Lubitsch just 10 minutes to change the whole course of my screen existence," Lugosi proudly (if prematurely) proclaimed at the time. Unfortunately, those opportunities never arrived, and Lugosi was back to typecasting.
Our series ends with the Ole Oleson and Chic Johnson comedy 50 Million Frenchmen (1931), which features Lugosi in a bit part, exotically outfitted with a turban and a beard as a magician whose troupe is pulled into the shenanigans of the comedy duo. It's such a small part and he doesn't even receive screen billing, but his presence is unmistakable. He wouldn't be left off the credits again; Lugosi's next film was Dracula, and a horror star was born.
