Lambert Hillyer | Dracula’s Daughter / 1936

uncontrolled compulsion

by Douglas Messerli

Garrett Fort (screenplay, based on a story by John L. Balderston, itself based on Bram Stoker “Dracula’s Guest”; suggested by Oliver Jeffries [David O. Selznick], with contributions by Charles Belden, Finley Peter Dunne, Kurt Neumann, and R. C. Sherriff), Lambert Hillyer (director) Dracula’s Daughter / 1936

As one might expect for a vampire film with a female lead released in the midst of the early, and in some respects, harshest years of Joseph Breen’s control of the Production Code, US authorities rejected several versions of the script as being “a very objectionable mix of sex and horror.” As the writer(s) of the Wikipedia entry for this film, drawn from several sources including the Catalogue of the American Film Institute, tell us, the first version of the script, written by John L. Balderston, was a true hoot: “Balderston's screenplay involved tying up loose ends from the original film. In it, Von Helsing returns to Transylvania to destroy the three vampire brides seen in Dracula, but overlooks a fourth tomb concealing Dracula's daughter. She follows him back to London and operates under the name "Countess Szekelsky." She attacks a young aristocrat, and Von Helsing and the aristocrat's fiancée track her back to Transylvania and destroy her. The script included scenes that implied that Dracula's daughter enjoyed torturing her male victims, and that while under her control, the men liked it, too. Also included were shots of the Countess's chambers being stocked with whips and straps, which she would never use on-screen but whose uses the audience could imagine.”

       There would have been no way, however, for Selznick to have been able to produce such a version of the film since his contract with Stoker barred him from using any of his characters that did not appear in the story “Dracula’s Guest.” Film scholar David J. Skal, argues, in fact, that Selznick had purchased those rights simply so that he might sell them to Universal Studios, which he did in either 1934 or 1935 on the condition that if they did not start production by February of 1936, the rights would revert to MGM.

      Another version, even more complex and ridiculous was penned by R. C. Sherriff (long rumored to have been gay) in July 1935, beginning “with three scenes set in the 14th century and centered on the Dracula legend. It then switched to the present day, focusing on two engaged couples who visit Transylvania. The men explore the ruins of Dracula's castle. One is later found insane, and the other goes missing. Professor Von Helsing is summoned, and he tracks the missing man to London, where he is in thrall to Dracula's daughter, the Countess Szelinski (sic). When she attempts to flee with her thrall to the Orient by ship, Von Helsing and three others book passage on the same ship. During a violent storm, Von Helsing destroys Dracula's daughter, and with her hold over the men broken the scenario closes with a double wedding.

      The British Board of Film Censors, rejected it, responding, in part, "Dracula's Daughter would require half a dozen ...languages to adequately express its beastliness."

      Submitting Sheriff’s first draft to the Production Code Administration in September, Universal found even stronger resistance from Breen than from the British censors. A second draft submitted in October was also rejected, mostly centering around scenes in which Dracula himself appeared. And a third draft was submitted three days later, with a final script by Sheriff submitted in November. All remained unacceptable, James Curtis (the biographer of James Whale) arguing that Whale—having no interest in the project and perhaps even afraid that might cost him his directorial role in Show Boat, suggesting to Sherriff “ever more wildly unacceptable versions in hopes of getting himself off the film.”

     Finally, Universal abandoned the Sheriff script entirely, beginning over again from scratch.

     Garrett Fort took over the screenwriting duties submitting drafts in January and February of 1936. Upon the later date Universal executive Harry Zehner along with Producer E. M. Asher and Fort met with Production Code officials where they were asked that the scene in which Lili poses for Marya Zaleska be rewritten so that there was no suggestion of nudity and that there be no evidence of a “perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lili.”

      The script, now revised by Charles Belden appears to be the final film version approved by the PCA in April.

      In other words, both the Hays Code board and Universal knew that in Dracula’s Daughter they were carefully skirting the films implied themes of a female vampire, a direct descendent of Dracula, being perceived as a lesbian.

      In fact, the film begins in a manner that settles another question we might have from the original regarding Renfield’s relationship with Dracula. Although Dracula keeps Renfield alive, permitting him only insects and an occasional rat as sustenance, does he mean anything to the Count other than being merely a slave to carry out his desires or is he, in fact, keeping Renfield alive as an eventual victim/lover, someone from whom he will eventually “suck” his blood, granting him death on earth but possible eternal life as a vampire.  

      By beginning the film with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) who has just pounded a stake through Dracula’s heart immediately after Dracula has supped on Renfield’s blood, we now know that Renfield is among Dracula’s victims or as we also might describe them, lovers. With two unexplained bodies, one of which he admits killing, Van Helsing is arrested, unable of course, to fully explain the world of vampirism to the logic of the now modern world of 1936. His only hope is his star pupil, now a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger). But although Garth has been trained by Van Helsing to recognize the possibility of the unknowable, he too is a modern skeptic of the older folk myths. And the deeper question of the film, never quite answered, regards whether Jeffrey will be able to come to terms with his mentor’s “myths,” linking the irrational old world with modern so-called rationality?

     The only possible answer arrives in the form of Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter (Gloria Holden) who, unlike any monster previous to this, and foretelling, so argues film critic Harry M. Benshoff in his Monsters in the Closet, that the monsters that will arise in the films of the 1940s and 50s will somehow be different from those personified in Franken-stein and Dracula given the “increasing domesticization of the monstrous figures” and “…a more vigorous interest in psychiatry or medical science as a tool for treating and/or “curing” the monster.”

      Arguably, it is Marya’s desire, now the spell of Dracula has been removed through death, to leave her past world behind—specifically expressed, as Benshoff points out, “in terms of her queer sexuality, her non-traditional gender role, and death: she longs to be ‘free—free to live as a woman, Free to take my place in the bright world of the living, instead of among the shadows of the dead’”—that helped the PCA to permit the production of this otherwise quite queer script.

      Certainly, Universal publicists understood that Marya Zaleska, despite the fact that she first sucks the blood of a man and later desires to live through eternity with her Doctor friend Garth, was primarily a lesbian, advertising in their posters, as gay scholar Vito Russo points out: “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter.”

      One might even imagine that permitting Marya’s first victim to be a male, helped the film get past Breen’s list of “no-nos,” removing the film temporarily from tying up her lust for blood with gender, just as in the original Dracula.* Permitting her to be an equal-opportunity “neck-bitter” removed her from being seen as being sexually interested in young women.

      But soon even that pretense is removed, as she admits to Garth her “horrible impulses” As Benshoff summarizes her psychiatric confessions:

 

“Like an ego-dystonic homosexual, she feels compelled to lead a double life, and characterizes her subconscious urges as ‘horrible impulses.’ Although she tries to suppress them repeatedly, eventually these ‘overpowering command(s)'…overcome her, and she is forced to seduce her victims and drain their bodily fluids.”

     Like most misled psychiatrists, Garth argues that she must face her compulsions head on, rushing toward them instead of trying to suppress them, and in so doing proving that she can control her actions. Given that freedom, of course, the Countess no longer finds it of interest to dine on the blood of a mere male, but demands her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel)—who Benshoff describes, somewhat hilariously it seems to me, as “a bitchy queen”—procure her a young female model for a painting she plans in her Chelsea apartment.

      By locating her in that section of London, the writers also have associated her with the bohemian and queer lifestyles in the manner of a New Yorker who lives in Greenwich Village. And we recognize the moment that Sandor introduces the two, that despite the Code restrictions, Marya is most certainly out to disrobe this young pretty and sexually attack her by sucking the blood out of her neck. Even the young girl Lili (Nan Grey) recognizes that if the artist simply wants to sketch her face, she will probably also want to have pull down her dress, as she pulls down one of her dress straps, readying to pose while drinking a glass of wine.

     It is that sexual/bloody act of predation that makes the Countess realize that the always cynical Sandor is right, there is no escaping her condition. Although the plot forces her to decide that, despite his inability to cure her, she still wants to live out her life with Dr. Garth—although his attraction to her is quite apparent, her interest in him once she realizes he cannot cure her is far more inexplicable except as another attempt to delude herself—the way to get to him, she realizes, is to dine on yet another tasty female, his faithful secretary Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who serves as the plot’s last minute Nell tied up to the “Transylvanian” railroad tracks, the Countess having returned with the girl back to Dracula’s homeland.

      Having rendered Janet unconscious through the powers of hypnosis through her magic ring, Marya has made it almost impossible for Garth to bring her back to life; and she is saved only through the wooden arrow flung into her heart by the jealous Sandor’s cross-bow; it is he who has been promised eternal life, and he knows that if she succeeds with the doctor we will be left alone in the no-man’s land where Renfield had remained throughout the first of the Dracula films, half-surviving as a slave instead of an eternal lover.

     Marya Zaleska’s death frees Janet to awaken and marry the doctor and “normality” to close out the film—although I wonder, as does Henshoff, whether you might describe the marriage between a misogynistic male such as Garth (at one point he has Janet telephoned every half-hour throughout the night in order to punish her for interrupting his conference with the Countess) as representing normality.

      1936, two years after Breen’s take-over of the Hollywood screen, was strangely enough a very important year for lesbians with regard to screen portrayals. Previously throughout the 1930s, there were certainly number of female cross-dressers and strong hints of lesbian behavior in the films such as Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline (1930), Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform (1931), Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls (1931), John Francis Dillon’s Millie (1931), Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), Mervyn LeRoy’s Three on a Match (1932), William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About (1933), Rowland Brown’s Blood Money (1933), Frank Wisbar’s Anna and Elisabeth (1933), and Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. But in 1936 four films stood out as openly speaking about women who love other women: William Wyler’s These Three (in which the lesbian message was almost entirely erased), Jacques Deval’s Club des femmes, Jean de Limur’s La Garçonne, and Dracula’s Daughter. None of these were receptive to presenting positive statements of lesbianism, but at last in a decade that had originally pretended so much sexual openness, outsider female sex was at least presented as actually existing.

      Even then, however, it took some doing, as Russo has made clear, to even rouse the reviewers enough so that they might admit to the subject at hand. Utterly mocking the film, instead of discussing its true implications, Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times wrote: “Quite terrifying it all is, to be sure, and we strongly recommend your stopping off at a near-by florist to buy a few sprays of bat-thorn to hold protectingly over your head as the wolves howl on the screen and hooded figures drift through the eddying fog. Gloria Holden is a remarkably convincing bat-woman, but we found ourselves wondering all through the picture how she managed to preserve so attractive an appearance—after sleeping in coffins and all—without the aid of a mirror. Vampires, you know, can't see their reflections. Still, we suppose it's a minor objection to a cute little horror picture. Be sure to bring the kiddies.”

      The closest any review of day got to the real subject was in the New York World-Telegram where the reviewer, exaggerating again in mockery, argued that Gloria Holden went around “giving the eye to sweet young girls.”

         

*In F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), however, it quite clear that Count Orlock was enormously physically attracted to Thomas Hutter as well being drawn to his blood. Indeed, one might argue that Orlock saves Hutter because of his beauty and usefulness, while he has no trouble destroying his wife.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).