I recently spotted that the 1931 film Dracula was playing on the Horror channel, and duly recorded it with one eye on a seasonal blog (this) and another eye on a suitably creepy family night-in with a classic, justified by the proximity to Halloween. Frankly, I was sceptical about the latter, given that my mind’s eye visualisation of an idealised family event or shared experience doesn’t always pan out as imagined; I suspected that the obvious ancientness of the movie would turn off teenagers. Indeed, it did turn one of them off and she soon drifted vampirically off to her bedroom, but the other one, and her mother, were gratifyingly drawn into this atmospheric and trope-laden classic.
The cultural icon that is Count Dracula had had its treatment earlier than this movie: the German Expressionist filmmaker F W Murnau had filmed Nosferatu in 1922 (though without permission and subject to a copyright infringement claim brought about successfully by Bram Stoker’s widow). The first authorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was the stage play written by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924 and revised for Broadway in 1927 by John L Balderston. The Broadway production cast Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the lead role, which helped him (though not without opposition from certain quarters) secure the role in the film version four years later.
Directed by Tod Browning, the film premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on February 12, 1931. Newspapers reported that members of the audiences fainted in shock at the horror on screen. This publicity, shrewdly orchestrated by the film studio of course, ensured that people would flock to see the film, and indeed, within 48 hours of its opening, it had sold 50,000 tickets, and ended up being the biggest of Universal’s 1931 releases.
The mesmerising performance of Bela Lugosi was of course a key element in the success of the movie. It is said that he was quite an odd and quiet man; David Manners (who played Jonathan Harker) said: “He was mysterious and never really said anything to the other members of the cast except good morning when he arrived and good night when he left. He was polite, but always distant”. However, on screen he certainly looked and acted the part to the point of creating an enduring archetype.
The atmosphere of the movie is cleverly crafted, and it has all the defining features that you’d expect: the huge, cobweb-bedecked castle, with an impossibly large and ranging staircase, an inordinate number of candles and hovering bats at the window. Lugosi nails the Count’s stand-offish charm and of course the authentic eastern European accent, and there is a lingering, pervasive sense of danger.
Enjoy this clip, the excellent “mirror scene” in which, after a tense meeting between Dracula, Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Mina, Van Helsing notices something very unusual…
You could call this a “two for one” this week in that the poem that inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ masterful piece for violin and piano, The Lark Ascending, is itself a masterpiece. Written by poet George Meredith in 1881, and having the same title, it was a paean to the skylark and its song. Siegfried Sassoon called it “a sustained lyric which never for a moment falls short of the effect aimed at, soars up and up with the song it imitates, and unites inspired spontaneity with a demonstration of effortless technical ingenuity…one has only to read the poem a few times to become aware of its perfection”. For those whose appetite is whetted by Sassoon’s praise, the poem is at the foot of this blog; however, today let’s look at the beautiful music it inspired.
Vaughan Williams was one of England’s great composers. Influenced by Tudor music and English folksong, he composed everything from operas, ballets and choral pieces to chamber music and symphonies, spread over sixty years, and is a staple of the British concert repertoire. He continued to compose in his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at eighty-five in 1958.
Vaughan Williams loved poetry and was a keen reader of the great Victorian poets. The composer’s second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had “taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought…and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight”. It’s not hard to detect the allusion in the music.
Although completed in 1914, the premiere of The Lark Ascending wasn’t until 15th December 1920 at the Shirehampton Public Hall (given by leading British violinist of the time Marie Hall and the pianist Geoffrey Mendham). Rather like the Edwardian era itself, as viewed retrospectively from the other side of the Great War, it seems to reflect nostalgia for a partly mythological lost age of innocence.
Although most performances these days are orchestral versions, some have recreated the original version for violin and piano only, including this exquisite performance by Finnish violinist Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä, with Jaan Ots on the piano, at the Helsinki Chamber Music Festival 2019.
The Lark Ascending by George Meredith
He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, All intervolv’d and spreading wide, Like water-dimples down a tide Where ripple ripple overcurls And eddy into eddy whirls; A press of hurried notes that run So fleet they scarce are more than one, Yet changingly the trills repeat And linger ringing while they fleet, Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear To her beyond the handmaid ear, Who sits beside our inner springs, Too often dry for this he brings, Which seems the very jet of earth At sight of sun, her musci’s mirth, As up he wings the spiral stair, A song of light, and pierces air With fountain ardor, fountain play, To reach the shining tops of day, And drink in everything discern’d An ecstasy to music turn’d, Impell’d by what his happy bill Disperses; drinking, showering still, Unthinking save that he may give His voice the outlet, there to live Renew’d in endless notes of glee, So thirsty of his voice is he, For all to hear and all to know That he is joy, awake, aglow, The tumult of the heart to hear Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear, And know the pleasure sprinkled bright By simple singing of delight, Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d, Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d Without a break, without a fall, Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, Perennial, quavering up the chord Like myriad dews of sunny sward That trembling into fulness shine, And sparkle dropping argentine; Such wooing as the ear receives From zephyr caught in choric leaves Of aspens when their chattering net Is flush’d to white with shivers wet; And such the water-spirit’s chime On mountain heights in morning’s prime, Too freshly sweet to seem excess, Too animate to need a stress; But wider over many heads The starry voice ascending spreads, Awakening, as it waxes thin, The best in us to him akin; And every face to watch him rais’d, Puts on the light of children prais’d, So rich our human pleasure ripes When sweetness on sincereness pipes, Though nought be promis’d from the seas, But only a soft-ruffling breeze Sweep glittering on a still content, Serenity in ravishment.
For singing till his heaven fills, ’T is love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which overflows To lift us with him as he goes: The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine He is, the hills, the human line, The meadows green, the fallows brown, The dreams of labor in the town; He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins; The wedding song of sun and rains He is, the dance of children, thanks Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, And eye of violets while they breathe; All these the circling song will wreathe, And you shall hear the herb and tree, The better heart of men shall see, Shall feel celestially, as long As you crave nothing save the song. Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink: Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.
Yet men have we, whom we revere, Now names, and men still housing here, Whose lives, by many a battle-dint Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint, Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet For song our highest heaven to greet: Whom heavenly singing gives us new, Enspheres them brilliant in our blue, From firmest base to farthest leap, Because their love of Earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve and pass reward, So touching purest and so heard In the brain’s reflex of yon bird; Wherefore their soul in me, or mine, Through self-forgetfulness divine, In them, that song aloft maintains, To fill the sky and thrill the plains With showerings drawn from human stores, As he to silence nearer soars, Extends the world at wings and dome, More spacious making more our home, Till lost on his aërial rings In light, and then the fancy sings.
In 1942, Hollywood churned out over 500 movies, most of which, naturally enough, you will have never heard of (unless you happen to be a professor of Film Studies specialising in the forties, which is unlikely). When they were making Casablanca in that year, nobody was thinking that this was going to be the movie that would become an enduring classic still appearing near the top of “greatest ever movie” polls eighty years later. What makes Casablanca so great?
You already know the synopsis: it’s set in 1941 in Vichy-controlled Casablanca just before Pearl Harbor and America is stalling about entering the war. The Germans’ hold is tightening, and everyone’s fates are uncertain. Everybody is wanting to get out before it’s too late. Against this backdrop, American ex-patriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs a nightclub and gambling den, Rick’s Café Américain. He also has previous as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, so he’s no slouch, and he knows a lot of people. He has also come by two “letters of transit”, valuable and authentic documentation that would allow the bearers to make their escape through German-occupied Europe.
Rick’s former lover, from when they met in Paris during the fall of France, Isla Lund (Ingrid Bergman), walks into his club. Her husband Victor Laszlo is a linchpin in the Czech resistance; they need those documents to escape to America and continue his work. When Isla confesses that she still loves Rick (she’s no hussy though: when they’d met in Paris she had thought her husband dead) we come to the nub: Rick’s moral dilemma is to decide between his love for Isla and the good of the world. He makes the right choice, and at the end of the film (surely this is no spoiler) sends Isla and Laszlo off, with their papers, to fight the good fight.
Let’s talk cinematography; it’s full-on film noir by Michael Curtiz. The use of light and shadow is used to dramatic effect: the morally torn Rick is often seen half in light, half in shadow. Laszlo, the bright hope for the future, is almost always in full light. Isla’s flawless and pearlescent skin is accompanied by eyes sparkling impossibly by the use of tiny lights. The venetian blind is a handy way to cast prison bar-like shadows on the protagonists.
The narrative is economical; there is no detail that doesn’t matter to the plot, no scene that is wasted. Sure, there’s corn (more corn than Kansas and Iowa combined, said its screenwriter Julius Epstein) but it’s Hollywood, what do you expect? And surely it’s no coincidence that so many classic lines were thus spawned: “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”. I know that you already know that the line “Play it again, Sam” was never actually said, so we needn’t mention that!
But let’s look at that closing scene when Rick sucks up his personal loss and delivers that classic parting speech to Isla, to the emotional orchestral accompaniment of As Time Goes By. It is pretty marvellous stuff, isn’t it?
Bogart and Bergman
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
