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The Siodmak brothers—Robert behind the camera, Curt on the page—swiftly set up the joke: Count Alucard comes to the Deep South, the local doctor (Frank Craven) spots the name tag on the luggage and absent-mindedly reads it backwards, "just a silly idea." Lectures on metaphysics at the Dark Oaks plantation, complete with oracular gypsy (Adeline DeWalt Reynolds) who dutifully keels over following a particularly baleful prophecy ("The angel of death hovers over a great house"). The "morbid" heiress (Louise Allbritton) dreams of immortality, catnip to the bogus nobleman from Budapest who on his first night abroad liquidates her father the colonel. Bat, swirl of smoke and pencil-mustached Lon Chaney Jr., the Count materializes atop his coffin and glides across the bayou toward the smiling prey. Old and New Worlds, a wartime vision of European invasions, "a young and vital race" very much already in the noir grip. The belle feels the pull of the macabre and engineers her own marriage and resurrection, in full bloom she's a bloodthirsty flytrap in flowing white gown. "Bad judgment," say the fuddy-duddies, and yet there's the vampire himself as a patsy in the femme fatale's scheme of eternal life with the cloddish fiancé (Robert Paige). Arcane signs carried with droll verve by Siodmak, down to the iodine crosses on a boy's punctured jugular. Bergman in Fanny and Alexander remembers the torched crypt in the playroom, and the whole thing is secretly remade as Criss Cross. "Gentlemen, the farther we go, the crazier it sounds!" With Evelyn Ankers, J. Edward Bromberg, Samuel S. Hinds, Etta McDaniel, and George Irving. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |