The Road to Dracula

ホラーファンを対象に「有名人のなかで『親戚のおばあちゃんだったらいいな』と思えるひとはだれ？」と聞いたら、カーラ・レムリは間違いなく上位にランクされるでしょう。

『魔人ドラキュラ (1931)』の冒頭オープニング、馬車で旅するレンフィールドさんが出てくるところ。馬車に同乗するメガネのカワイコちゃんがパンフレットを読み上げる。「Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass ... 」という台詞をしゃべったら、馬車が揺れて彼女はドテッとズッこける。あのメガネ女性を演じたのがカーラ・レムリであり、彼女はユニバーサルの創始者カール・レムリの姪であり、さらに『オペラ座の怪人 (1925)』『魔人ドラキュラ (1931)』出演者の中で唯一の存命者です。まさにレジェンド！

このメガネのお嬢さん

カーラちゃんの100歳の誕生日の映像がyoutubeにありました。とてもかわいらしい↓

彼女がホスト役で進行するドキュメンタリが『The Road To Dracula』です。こんなかんじではじまる↓

「はい、こんにちは。カーラ・レムリです。わたしの伯父、カール・レムリがユニバーサルを設立したのが1915年でした。その16年後に制作されたのが『Dracula』です。わたしはこの映画のいちばん最初の台詞をしゃべるという名誉な役をもらえました。こんな小さな役だったのに、いまでも世界中のファンのみなさんからお手紙を頂くのですよ。という点からしても『Dracula』はやっぱり不朽の名作なのですね。ワンダフル！それでは、みなさん、わたしといっしょに深い霧に覆われたBorgo Passへ旅をしましょう。はじまりはじまり」

てな調子で始まるオープニングはおそろしく魅力的です。もうこれだけで涙が出てくるというかですね、フワーとしちゃいます。優しいおばあちゃんに昔話をしてもらっているようです。

ブラム・ストーカーに関することから始まり、ムルナウその他の関連映画の話をはさみつつ、後半はベラ・ルゴシの偉業を愛でる、ルゴシ万歳の内容です。私はこのドキュメンタリを『Dracula (75th Anniversary Edition) (Universal Legacy Series)』で見たんだけど、他のドラキュラのDVDにも入っています。

このDVDには、他2本のドキュメンタリも入ってて、いずれもこの時代のユニバーサル映画のファンなら必見です。これらのドキュメンタリはユニバーサル製作なのでユニバーサルひいきの内容ですが、でもとてもおもしろいですよ。詳しくはこちらのエントリをどぞ↓

• 魔人ドラキュラ (1931)

以下は『The Road To Dracula』の完全なるtranscriptです。最初は気に入ったラインだけを書き出していたんだけど、結局、ぜんぶになってしまいました。ひまじん？いやー、感動したもんで。DVDを見ながらタイプしたので、打ち間違いがあるかもです。

Carla Laemmle: Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make! Hello. I'm Carla Laemmle. When my uncle, Carl Laemmle, founded Universal Pictures in 1915, one of the first properties he considered for production, as a silent film, was Bram Stoker's horror classic Dracula. Sixteen years later, when Universal finally produced the film, I had the privilege of speaking the first lines of dialogue in the first talking supernatural thriller. "Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass are found crumbling castles of bygone age." It was a very small part, but the fact that I still receive fan mail from all over the world is a wonderful testimonial to the film's status as an enduring classic. Join me now as we return to the fog-shrouded Borgo Pass and take a ride together along The Road to Dracula!

Clive Barker: Why are we scared by something? Why are we aroused by something? I'm talking about sexually aroused. Ummm... because in the case of Dracula, very often the two responses overlap.

Bob Madison: Who wouldn't want to be like Dracula? You live forever, you don't work, you stay up all night.

David J. Skal: Dracula is quite simply the most media-friendly, fictional personality of the 20th century, if not all time. Even people who've never read the book or never seen the movie still know exactly who he is.

Carla Laemmle: Today, thanks to Universal Studios, everone knows the name of Dracula. Although at first, my uncle, Carl Laemmle, had serious resevations about horror movies, Universal eventually filmed Bram Stoker's classic three times. First, in Tod Browning's famous 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi. Next was the simultaneously-produced Spanish-language version, starring Lupita Tovar and Carlos Villarías. Some people feel that this was the superior version from a technical standpoint, but you'll have to be the judge. And then came the romantic 1979 remake with Frank Langella. I can't imagine how my uncle, a very proper man, would have reacted to such a sexy Dracula. But speaking for myself, I would have given anything for a bit part in that production. The story of Dracula didn't begin at Universal City. As a fictional character, Dracula is more than 100 years old. First published in 1897, Bram Stoker's original novel has been frightening readers ever since. His centennial was recently celebrated in high style at events, exhibitions and conventions all over the world. But perhaps the most revealing exhibition took place at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, where novelist Bram Stoker's original working notes for Dracula were placed on public display for the first time.

Michael Barsanti: We have here Stoker's working notes for Dracula. His earliest notes concern certain elements of plot. There're particular scenes in the novel Stoker imagined at its earliest stages that survive all the way to the end a scene where Jonathan Harker, trapped in Dracula's castle, is preyed upon by three female vampires who are then interrupted by Count Dracula barging into the room, saying, "This man is mine. I want him." This was one of Stoker's earliest ideas for Dracula.

Carla Laemmle: Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania, but he was very well-acquainted with the picturesque town of Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast, where a good deal of his novel takes place. Stoker often vacationed there and was most impressed with its ancient windblown cemetery and crumbling gothic abbey.

Michael Barsanti: Whitby is certainly a wonderful place for atmosphere. It would lend itself to its cinematic treatment, if we could imagine Stoker thinking of that. Whitby, as a popular port and as a popular shipping port, had its number of shipwrecks. Stoker must've been fascinated with the idea of having a shipwreck in Dracula. So he used the shipwreck of a Russian schooner caled Dmitri as a model for Dracula's arrival onto the English coast.

Carla Laemmle: It was in Whitby that Stoker first came across the name of Dracula.

Michael Barsanti: He discovered that there was this 15th-century Transylvanian prince whose name was Dracula, also known as Vlad the impaler, due to a method of disposing his enemies of which he was particularly fond. If you can see behind me, this is from a late 15th-century wood cut showing Vlad at lunch with some of his victims behind him. Stoker was the first to take the legend of Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula, and attach it to the vampire, and they haven't really come apart since.

David J. Skal: The historical Dracula didn't inspire Stoker to write the book. There's some confusion about this. He'd already outlined the novel when he came across Vlad the Impaler and simply used it as a kind of window dressing or atmosphere.

Carla Laemmle: Stoker's novel unfolds through letters, diaries and journals. Count Dracula, a 500-year-old vampire, leaves his castle in Transylvania in search of new blood in a new country. Carrying the boxes of soil in which he must rest during the hours of daylight, Dracula kills the entire crew of the ship that transports him to England. Two young women, Lucy and Mina, become his victims in turn. Dracula kills Lucy, transforming her into a foul thing of the night, an undead creature like himself. Soon Mina falls under Dracula's spell and is terribly endangered. But thanks to a scientist wise enough to believe in the supernatural, the vampire is finally destroyed, and Mina is released from her thrall.

David J. Skal: Stoker drew on an already-established tradition of the vampire in literature and in folklore, but did it in such a way that the legend really achieved a critical mass. Unlike the earlier fictional vampires, Stoker's Dracula was not a romantic character. He was a decrepit old man who became younger as he drank blood, but he never really became attractive.

Clive Barker: He was writing a blood-and-thunder, piece of, I suppose what we would now call sort of exploitation. It's a first-rate 19th-century trashy novel.

Carla Laemmle: Above everything, Bram Stoker wanted his story dramatized. He may have been a bit of frustrated playwright. Stoker's real career was managing London's prestigious Lyceum Theatre, and he knew exactly whom he wanted to play Dracula on stage, his employer, the great Victorian actor, Sir Henry Irving.

Michael Barsanti: Henry Irving has a lot to do with the character of Dracula. A lot of the characters Henry Irving was most famous for playing could be considered to be Dracula-like characters, roles like Mephistopheles in Faust or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. There were Irving's greatest roles, or the ones for which he was most popular, psychologically complex villains.

Carla Laemmle: Irving would have been perfect for the part. After all, he already was a boss from hell.

Nina Auerbach: Irving really was a vampire, and he really was a kind of horrible person who fed on the energy of others. They did an interminably long reading of the novel at the Lyceum, for purposes of copyright, and Irving was reputed to have walked through the theatre and intoned, "Dreadful" and walked out. And that was stupid of him. It would have been a very good part, he should have done it. And now Dracula's more famous than he is.

Carla Laemmle: Bram Stoker died in 1912 and never saw his story properly dramatized. But nine years later, the character of Dracula made his first screen appearance in a now lost Hungarian film called Dracula's Death. The plot owed almost nothing to Stoker or his book, but I guess Dracula's movie career had to start somewhere.

Lokke Heiss: In the story, Dracula plays a music teacher who has gone crazy and then is after some of the patients in the asylum. So the story plays more like Phantom of the Opera than Dracula. However, there is this idea of a monster loose with fangs and a cape.

Carla Laemmle: The following year, German filmmakers got on the Dracula bandwagon with Nosferatu,a symphony of horror. It remains one of the most frightening movies ever made, a classic example of German expressionism.

Nina Auerbach: It's so frightening. Well, for one thing, Dracula is so evil, he's disgusting. And he's a plague spreader. And he looks like a rat. There's nothing suave about him.

David J. Skal: The Dracula character was called Count Orlock and was played by a German stage actor named Max Schreck, whose name, by happy coincidence, means "terror" or "fright" in German. And it was his real name. It wasn't just a publicity stunt for the film. And he remains to this day the single screen Dracula who really embodies the essential repulsiveness that Stoker intended.

Lokke Heiss: In the early part of the century, the laws of copyright were not well understood, especially with filmmaking, and Prada Films, which was the very small studio that made Nosferatu, did not either bother or know to get a copyright from Bram Stoker's widow. Murnau used the novel without clearing the rights.

Jan-Christopher Horak: And, in fact, eventually got involved in a big lawsuit and the film had to be literally pulled from the market.

Carla Laemmle: With two movies already to his credit, Dracula decided to give the theatre another try. In 1924, the British actor/manager Hamilton Dean added the first authorized dramatization of Dracula to his popular traveling repertory. Film historian and actor Ivan Butler was a member of Dean's company.

Ivan Butler: He had to cut it down for expense, for one thing, and it's such a vast, rambling novel. It was a sort of a skeleton of the original.

David J. Skal: It was Hamilton Dean who really created the modern image of Dracula, and he took his inspiration not from Henry Irving's Shakespearean villains but from a much lower end of the theatre. Essentially, his Dracula is a kind of vaudeville or music hall magician. You know, the suave trickster in evening clothes who knows how to work a crowd.

Ivan Butler: When they came to London, of course, and those dreadful notices they had we all know, they were very depressed. Somebody came up to them and said, "What are you worring about? Have you looked outside?" And there was halfway around the block, queuing for it.

Carla Laemmle: Several actors performed the role of Dracula for Dean, including Raymond Huntley, who played the part thousands of times in England and America and still holds the all-time record for sheer number of performances. Ivan Butler worked with a noted actor, W.E. Halloway.

Ivan Butler: He was an old man, very, very gaunt-looking, very deep-set eyes and everything, and a good voice, and it seemed to work better - more like the real Dracula, in a way. But he always seemed to me to have something that the young ones lacked. There was no sort of sex attraction in those days. Dracula came for one thing only, his evening drink. We had the bat coming in to the French window, you see, at the end of the second act, it was big scene. The assistant stage manager was standing on a stool with a fishing rod, a big long rod, and about two foot of bat. And he starts floating it around outside like that and it banged into the window. And smoke came and everything. And then, Dracula appeared out of the mist. One day, I don't know why, but the string attached to the bat, the fishing rod, broke and the bat sailed through the window right through the window, right across the stage and landed in the floats with two green eyes looking outside. And then of course, Dracula himself had to appear. It must have been difficult to explain. I think some possibly rather bewildered audience. Are there two bats or two Draculas?

David J. Skal: The stage production was corny, but it was a crowd pleaser and it was full of startling special effects and loud noises and flash bombs and swirling fog and a trick coffin for Dracula that was essentially a magician's disappearing cabinet.

Ivan Butler: Dracula got in, and there was a false bottom under the boards where he would pull a string. And the boards would open like that. Dracula would fall down into the base of the coffin, and the fool's earth would all fly out into smoke like that. And it would look as if he'd disappeared into dust.

Carla Laemmle: Given Dracula's success in London, it was only a matter of time before Broadway beckoned. The producer Horace Liveright wanted changes and hired the playwright journalist John L. Balderston to improve the product.

John Balderston: One day, Horace Liveright, who was a New York producer, was taken to see Dracula. But he was concerned over the Britishness of the language and a lot of the idiomatic stuff that nobody in New York would understand. So he asked my father if he would rewrite it.

Carla Laemmle: In the 1920s, the only kind of vampires American audiences knew about were vamps like Theda Bera. For the Broadway version of Dracula, Horace Liveright wanted a male vamp, an exotic foreigner with an air of mystery and sex apeal.

John Balderston: The budget was pretty tight, and they had cast all the parts except for the count. And they were out of money, so they couldn't hire a name actor to do the count.

Carla Laemmle: Liveright found exactly what he was looking for in an expatriate Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi.

Bob Madison: Bela Lugosi was an expatriate from Hungary who was escaping all kinds of political unrest in his native land and actually landed in New Orleans completely without any skills in English at all, made his way to New York, learning many of his early parts phonetically, amazingly. So when they were casting around for the perfect person to play Dracula, Lugosi managed to have both the old world charm and certain mysterious seductive quality.

Clive Barker: He had that thick accent. He had the eyes. He had a series of gestures which to us now look rather hokey. But, you know, women fainted, and grown men grew nervous.

Bela G. Lugosi: Well, my father's performance in Dracula brought him to the attention of, in particular, the female portion of the audience. They loved his performance. They must have found something of sexual overtones in it. And he became an idol.

Carla Laemmle: The very night Dracula opened on Broadway, Universal had a representative in the audience. As I mentioned earlier, Carl Laemmle wasn't a big fan of horror pictures, even though Universal had made a fortune on films like Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. It was my cousin, Carl Laemmle Jr., who really wanted to produce Dracula. Like me, he had grown up with the oppotunity to actually watch Lon Chaney filming his famous horror roles for Universal. He loved creepy stories and everything macabre, and Lon Chaney was his first choice to play Dracula.

Rick Baker: I have no idea what Chaney would have done if he played Dracula makeup-wise. I'm sure he would have done. I'm sure Chaney would have had much more elaborate makeup. He was into to makeup aspect of it. You know, the "man of a thousand faces." He was always changing his look. I don't think he would have gone with the light makeup with dark lips. In the case of London After Midnight, he had all these pointy teeth and this permanent grin and these pulled-down eyelids, which I think is a classic makeup. Umm.. I have no clue. I would love to see what Chaney's version of Dracula would have been.

Gary Don Rhodes: Chaney died of cancer in 1930, and a number of other actors were considered other than Bela Lugosi.

Bela G. Lugosi: My father, to his great surprise, was not the first choice when the Universal Studios began casting for the lead in the motion picture version of Dracula, even though my father had successfully played the part hundreds of times on Broadway and throughout the United States. And, actually, he had to fight for the role.

Carla Laemmle: Next to Bela Lugosi, the film's most memorable performer was Dwight Frye as the unfortunate Mr. Renfield. He was such a gentlemen when I fell into his lap in the opening scene. You'd never dream he'd end up eating spiders and developing an appetite for even worse.

Dwight D. Frye: I don't really think he was surprised by the roles he began to play when he got to Hollywood because he'd had such a variety of roles in New York on Broadway, from comedy to musicals to serious drama to crooks and all kinds of characters. By the time he was 30, he was an experienced character actor. Renfield is probably the most multifaceted character in the film. I mean, he's sane at times, he's mad at times, he's vampirish at times.

Carla Laemmle: Also on hand from the Broadway production was Edward Van Sloan, repeating the role of Professor Van Helsing. Here's part of his screen test. Dracula was directed by Tod Browning, the famous mystery man of silient movies who had directed many of Lon Chaney's most successful films.

Lokke Heiss: Browning always had trouble adapting his style of shooting to a sound film. When you see Browning work with Dracula, for example, there're long sequences in the film which are silent. And I think that Browning uses some of the silence to create a mood, which in some areas of Dracula is quite effective.

Scott MacQueen: It may have been that he was frightened by dealing with dialogue. It may have been that he was frightened by the mechanics of the sound equipment.

David J. Skal: Tod Browning had been a very successful silent film director, and he always specialized in stories about outsiders. Dracula is very much like that. He's a fantastic alien invader who cannot live within the world but can only prey upon it like a parasite. And Dracula may be the ultimate Tod Browning outsider, and so it's not surprising that Dracula was Browning's most successful film.

In terms of responsibility for a visual style of Dracula, we know, of course, the cameraman Carl Freund was behind the camera, the great German photographer who pioneered so much moving camera in Germany in the late '20s. It's very easy for people to say, "Any value in Dracula is due to Freund, who was a great cameraman." And there's the anecdotal report of one of the actors, David Manners, who couldn't remember Browning's presence on the set well, but did recall Freund as being very outspoken.

The beginning of Dracula uses a lot of mobile camera setups. We have some tracking shots, and we have a feeling that we're almost watching a German expressionist film that has come over to Hollywood. These tracking shots give us feeling like we're being pushed against our will to go to different areas of the castle.

Bob Madison: There are things like broken-down withered mansions with huge cobwebs and for some reason, armadillos running around, and some bats floating overhead. In fact, Browning and the Universal Dracula, are sort of responsible for almost all the iconography that we associate with horror films, long capes, sweeping staircases, mold and decay, lots of cobwebs, spiders and bats. Everything that now has become this Saturday morning thing that kids associate with horror films all comes from Dracula.

David J. Skal: Originally, Dracula had been planned as a lavish, big-budget production, that would have been based primarily on Stoker's novel. But in the wake of the Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression, the studio raelly had to cut back, and they ended up basing the film largely on the stage play for simple reasons of economy. Today it may seem difficult to imagine audiences really being frightened by a film like Dracula, but they really were. It was the first time Hollywood had presented this kind of a supernatural story that didn't have a logical explanation tacked on at the end. And audiences were really creeped out by this atmosphare of weird decadence. They'd never seen anything like it.

Gary Don Rhodes: Among other things, there were a lot of theaters in parts of the world that were still not equipped with sound equipment for the audiences to hear the movie. And as a result, sound films like Dracula were released in silent versions so that those audiences that weren't equipped with sound equipment could actually see the film. That was another way of getting over language barriers in the early talking era.

Scott MacQueen: The adoption of English-speaking talkies posed a real problem for the latin American markets, which wanted to hear talking films spoken in their own language. Dubbing was still not an efficient and known commodity. And those studios that had the biggest interest in that market turned to doing secondary productions of their major films in Spanish versions for that market. Dracula was one of these pictures.

Carla Laemmle: The Spanish version of Dracula, directed by George Melford, was produced by Paul Cohner, an ambitious young protege of my uncle. His overall enthusiasm for the film may have had something to do with his feelings for his leading lady, the beautiful Mexican ingenue Lupita Tovar.

Lupita Tovar Kohner: So the cast for the English version would come in the morning started shooting at 8:00. And the Spanish cast will come in the evening. We shot all night long till next morning because we used exactly the same sets.

Lokke Heiss: Apperently what happened was that the initial crew Browning's crew would shoot these sequences, the second Spanish crew would look at them, and say to themselves, "We can do better than that!" And they would go, and they would do better.

David J. Skal: I don't think anybody's going to give any acting awards to Carlos Villarías. But, overall, the Spanish film is a real delight for film buffs because it's kind of like discovering all these fascinating new rooms in a familliar old house. And it's full of these wonderful optical effects and visuals that really seem ahead of their time.

Gary Don Rhodes: What we do see in the Spanish version is, among other things, a much more artistic, a much more innovative use of camera movement. And that's not what we get in the Lugosi version at all. The camera movements are far more fluid. There's far more of them. It's more lively film to watch unfold before your eyes than the Lugosi film. One only wishes that Lugosi had been directed in like fashion as the Spanish version.

Carla Laemmle: Dracula did sensational box office, the result, in part, of Universal's atmospheric and imaginative promotion.

Ronald V. Borst: One of the most inventive designs of posters was of Lugosi, arms upraised, clawing at the air, behind a spider web in which various heads of his female victims were ensnared in the strands of the web like some sort of bizarre insects. So you have a whole bunch of different poster designs that sought to emphasize both the mystery and the sexual, underlying sexual content of this film. It was very unique film in that sense.

Gary Don Rhodes: Children are another category that found strong interest in Dracula. There was even a group of sociologists that studied movie responses to the various films of the early '30s and often children would mention among their favorite movies, ones they liked to act out at home, was Dracula.

Bela G. Lugosi: I remember early on being taken to other movies that he had made with some of my friends and classmates. And they would always be frightened and hide behind the seats in the theater. And I would never be frightened, because that was my father. That's who I'd see. But I remember when I was very young I would try to imitate my father as Dracula. I have some home movies that show that. So he showed me how he did it.

David J. Skal: Certainly, more than any other performer, Bela Lugosi showed the world, for all time, how a vampire was supposed to look, how a vampire was supposed to act and how a vampire was supposed to talk.

Rick Baker: I don't think Lugosi's face was as fascinating as Karloff's. I think Karloff would have made a good Dracula as well, but that whole Hungarian accent and the way that he spoke and the weird rhythm of his speech and everything, I think, is what people remember about Dracula.

Richard Gordon: He felt very strongly that, in Dracula, he had created a character that was quite different and far more powerful than the way he's described in Bram Stoker's novel. And, thereafter, he would always be regarded as the Dracula and Dracula and Bela Lugosi would become synonymous. Lugosi had a magic all his own. He was the kind of man who, when he walked into a room, even if nobody knew who he was, everybody would look and stare and turn around and say, "Well, who is that?" He had that kind of a personality.

Gary Don Rhodes: And especially in the horror film, where characters can be so larger than life, Lugosi probably seems to be about the darkest personality, the larger-than-life personality beyond any other I know of in the horror film, possibly in the cinema at large.

David J. Skal: Many fine actors have played Dracula in recent years and almost all of them play against the Lugosi characterization. But paradoxically, and I guess inevitably, they end up only bringing Lugosi to mind because somehow we can't help but make that comparison in our minds.

Bela G. Lugosi: Because of the success of the motion picture Dracula, he became so associated with that part that a lot of people regard him as Dracula even though Dracula is a fictional person. And it changed his life. He was pretty much typecast after that. And when interviewed, he would say that Dracula is a blessing and a curse. And Dracula never dies. And really that's what happened, and he carried that role to his death.

David J. Skal: If there is a Holy Grail of Dracula collectibles, the Transylvanian Shroud of Turin, it would have to be Bela Lugosi's original Dracula cape.

Bela G. Lugosi: My father had several different capes. Some were heavier material, some were lighter, depending upon, you know, where he was going to use it. I had one cape left, and my mother told me that this was the cape that he had worn in the motion picture Dracula. And I've had it independently verified that that is from the film. So it is one of America's rarest pieces of film history. And I really treasure it. My mother and myself had him buried in one of this capes. Not that he had ever expressed that wish, but we thought it would be appropriate.

Gary Don Rhodes: Most all audiences haven't always seen Dracula, but certainly not the Universal version with Lugosi, that's the image we carry of Dracula, of vampires. It's Universal's Dracula. It's Bela Lugosi.

David J. Skal: Dracula has become one of the great media superstars of all time. There's a line from Macbeth, a play that Bram Stoker was very familiar with: "And yet, who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"

Carla Laemmle: When Dracula was first released, it was accompanied by a final curtain speech read by the character of Professor Van Helsing. If memory serves, the good professor held up his hand and said, "Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen. Just a word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula won't give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance: When you get home tonight, and the lights are turned out, and you're afraid to look behind the curtains and you dread to see a face appear at the window, well, just pull yourself together and remember, after all-" There're such things!

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