The Bela Lugosi Collection

The films in Universal's Bela Lugosi Collection were all available on VHS for years, and have enjoyed countless TV airings. But strangely, whereas all the Universal "monster" films of the 1930s and '40s were issued at the dawn of the DVD format in 1999, these classics were only re-released after the Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, Mummy, and Invisible Man films had been mastered for release a second time in 2003. I have never been a fan of "flippers"--two-sided discs--because the defective rate is much higher than with single-sided DVDs. Indeed, I went through three copies of this Lugosi flipper before getting a copy that didn't freeze up somewhere; my experience with other Mexico-pressed Universal "Franchise" collections like the Hammer Horror Series and some 2-DVD Monster Legacy reissues, all of which contain at least one flipper, was the same.

Nevertheless, if you get a copy that works, this is a disc that is worth the wait if you are a Lugosi aficionado, as I have been all my life. The only problem has to do with Lugosi's unfortunate career itself: Karloff's arrival at Universal eclipsed Lugosi; soon the Hungarian actor found himself taking second billing to Karloff and finally losing his Universal contract altogether. Therefore, of the five films on this disc, only one--Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)--is a real Lugosi vehicle, and even there, he is shamefully given second billing to the watery heroine played by Sidney Fox (who?). The other four films are as much, or more, Karloff's films, as they are Lugosi's. For solo Lugosi efforts, one has to look for films by small companies like Monogram--or worse, all "B" pictures with dreadful casts and direction, but with one giant in the person of Lugosi, made during the sunset years of his career. The best Lugosi film besides Dracula that doesn't also co-star Karloff seems to be White Zombie (1932), produced by the Halperin Brothers, available in a complete version only on a Roan DVD. So the Universal Franchise Bela Lugosi Collection is a trifle misleading. As indicated, it contains five films on one two-sided DVD.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) only takes Poe's concept of a murderous ape, and concocts a bizarre story about a scientist (Lugosi) who communicates with his pet gorilla--in Hungarian!--and attempts to prove a deranged version of evolutionary theory by mixing his pet's blood with that of various street women--who die, of course. Such failures don't stop him from trying to use the heroine in such a transfusion; she is saved in time, while Lugosi's Dr. Mirakle (Tales of Hoffmann anyone?) is killed by his ape. The story is lunatic, but the direction and sets are nearly Caligariesque in their expressionistic style so the plot becomes less of a problem. The film was a consolation prize given to Lugosi after he turned down the role of the Monster in Frankenstein, and to French director Robert Florey who was originally slated to direct it but lost out to James Whale. It is early enough that it has no film score (like Dracula and Frankenstein [1931]), its opening credits accompanied by the same rendition of Swan Lake that opens Dracula (1931) and The Mummy (1932).

The Black Cat (1934) is split between Karloff and Lugosi, but weighted more toward Karloff. It has nothing whatever to do with Poe, and the title refers to the Lugosi character's superstitious dread of black cats. Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi) returns to Hungary for a revenge visit with former General Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) who deserted his troops during the first world war and left them to die. Among them was Werdegast who had been sent to a hellish prisoner-of-war camp where he remained for fifteen years. Poelzig, in the intervening years, seduced and then married Werdergast's wife, convincing her that her husband had been killed, and after her mysterious death, married Werdegast's daughter; Poelzig has also become the head of a satanic cult. Weregast's revenge is certainly justified. The film is not really horror at all, but melodrama, and although Karloff is very effective and Lugosi's performance is unusually moving, the overall result doesn't hang together especially well. Nevertheless, it is an important film and the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi. The visual style is brilliant, with many experimental techniques, including an entire sequence shot subjectively from Poelzig's point of view, his spoken voice soliliquizing on the sound track throughout. The director, Edgar G. Ulmer, was a great one. Incidentally, the name "Werdegast" is commemorated in Dario Argento's Suspiria.

The Raven (1935) is the second of Universal's Karloff/Lugosi pairings. This time it's Lugosi's film; he plays the eccentric but brilliant surgeon Richard Vollin who goes from odd to insane when his passion for a patient he saves after a road accident is thwarted by her disapproving father. An avid collector of Poe memorabilia, Dr. Vollin uses various torture devices described in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" to revenge himself, with the aid of an escaped convict Edmund Bateman (Karloff) whose face he has surgically made hideously unrecognizable. The film presents Lugosi with the melodramatically juiciest role of his entire canon. Comparison with either of the previous films, however, shows its direction to be very pedestrian; the director is Louis Friedlander, who later changed his name to Lew Landers and directed Lugosi again in the 1944 Return of the Vampire.

The Invisible Ray (1936) is one of the final high-level fright/sci-fi films to be produced at Universal before investors bought the financially troubled company from founder Carl Laemmle in 1937 and transformed it into a "B" picture studio. Like The Black Cat, The Invisible Ray is again more a Karloff showcase, though Lugosi lends brilliant support--but it is support. Scientist Janos Rukh (Karloff) is convinced that a meteor deposited a substance more powerful than Radium in Africa millennia earlier and convinces a group of scientists and explorers to help him find it. Among them is Dr. Benet (Lugosi) who prepares an antidote for Rukh when he is poisoned by the substance. However, Benet warns about the high risk of unpredictable side-effects, and the antidote drives Rukh slowly insane. Later, when Benet makes humanitarian use of the new substance "Radium X," Rukh becomes convinced that his discovery has been stolen. One by one, he murders the entire party who accompanied him to Africa before self-combusting from the effects of the Radium X itself. The film has the germ of some important ideas about scientific achievements, their proper use and attribution. Like The Black Cat, it expresses a real sense of sorrow and human suffering; but it also contains some seriously offensive, if typical and unconscious, racial stereotyping.

Black Friday (1940) is billed as another Karloff/Lugosi project, but Lugosi's role is very brief, unimportant, and ill-cast. The confused story has to do with the dual personality resulting from a partial brain transplant, an over-reaching scientist (Karloff), and gangsters (Lugosi is one). It should not have been included in a Bela Lugosi Collection at all. Moreover, it is of poor quality, representing the sadly fallen state of Universal after its great earlier years under Laemmle and his son.

As I said, in the era when these film were made, Karloff's star shone more brightly than Lugosi's. Lugosi always blamed Karloff for ruining his career when, in fact, it was his own decision to turn down the role of the Monster in Frankenstein that caused the unknown Karloff's unpredicted rise. Ironically, during the past few decades, it is Lugosi's meatier, no-holds-barred performances that captivate audiences more successfully than Karloff's paradoxically more modern, subdued ones. So when we watch The Black Cat, The Raven, or The Invisible Ray, while Karloff gets top billing or more central roles, our attention is riveted on Lugosi when he is on-screen, and we wait impatiently when he is not. I have felt this since I was a child, and feel it even more now.

The transfers of these films are not vast improvements upon the VHS tapes of the 1990s, except for the inherent superiority of the DVD medium. In fact, it is easy to tell from points of print damage that the same grainy, worn 35mm copies were the sources. It is clear that Universal wasn't going to spend any time or money to clean up the sources or compare prints to select optimal masters. The Dolby Digital sound is over-filtered; because of inappropriate noise-reduction, some dialogue becomes faint while some background sounds heard on the old VHS tapes and TV prints are erased altogether. I would have preferred the honest, original sound, however crackly; nothing would have been lost, and it certainly would have matched the look of the prints. Moreover, The Raven is slightly re-framed, losing more material on all sides (beyond TV overscanning) than earlier VHS and TV prints. On that subject, we should be aware that the frame of the early sound era was more square, with an aspect ratio of 1.19:1, because the optical soundtrack occupied the remaining space on the film; only late in the 1930s did the more rectangular 1.33:1--or, to be exact, 1.37:1--"Academy" aspect ratio become standard again as it had been for the silent films of the 1920s. So unless films that date exactly from the era of the great Universal fright classics are reduced in size and window-boxed, as I believe they should always be, we invariably lose substantial visual information when they occupy the incorrect 1.33:1 TV frame size. There are no extras on the disc except for 1940s "Realart" re-release trailers when they happened to survive.

Still, after having been completely out of circulation for over a decade, the return of the first four films on this disc is to be celebrated.

Review by Robert E. Seletsky