VAMPYR (1932) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Julian West, Maurice Schultz, Rena Mandel,
Sybille Schmitz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard
A man checks into an isolated inn, where the first thing he sees out the window is a figure with a scythe getting into s boat, like Death about to cross the River Styx. An omen? Well, yes, and it's only the beginning. A one-of-a-kind vampire movie, eerie and dreamlike, shot as a silent and dubbed into various languages. Most of the actors were amateurs. Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, who plays the lead role under the pseudonym "Julian West," appears to be sleepwalking. (He never made another film.) The vampire is not the elegant, caped figure played elsewhere by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. And what happens to the vampire's chief disciple, a doctor, is truly horrifying. Based on a couple of stories by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, but the creative sensibility behind it was definitely the director's. This was Dreyer's followup to "The Passion of Joan of Arc", and he was hoping for a hit. (Lugosi's "Dracula" had come out the previous year.) But the picture lost money, and Dreyer's reputation for being demanding and difficult made him unemployable. He went back to journalism for a while, and didn't make another movie for ten years.
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