I can't believe it's not Dracula.

 Officially, there's no connection between The Return of the Vampire (1943) and Universal's Dracula.  Yes, both movies feature Bela Lugosi prowling about in evening dress as a sinister vampire with mesmeric powers, only to be defeated by the combined forces of science and faith, but in Return Lugosi is playing the vampire lord Armand Tesla (original character, do not steal) so that's totally different.  Unofficially?  This is as close as we get to Lugosi reprising the iconic character that he defined in a serious horror movie, and the last major studio picture to give him top billing.

The film opens in 1918 at a clinic run by Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort.)  One of her patients has contracted a mysterious aliment, and her old friend Professor Saunders (Gilbert Emery) has a shocking theory - the poor woman is the victim of a vampire!  Saunders consults a book written by an 18th century Romanian scholar named Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), and learns how to identify vampires how to destroy them, and apparently that the vampire in question is Tesla himself!  (It's really not clear how Saunders makes the connection.)

Lady Jane's patient dies, and that night Tesla instead attacks Saunders's young granddaughter Nicki (Sherlee Collier).  She's saved thanks to a quick blood transfusion, but Saunders and Ainsley have to move quickly.  They discover Tesla's lair, avoid his werewolf servant Andreas (Matt Willis) and destroy Tesla by driving a metal spike through his heart, as instructed by the guidebook written by Tesla himself.  Nicki is saved, and Andreas the werewolf is freed from his curse.  Hooray!

Years pass.  In 1942, Lady Jane is still running her successful clinic, ably assisted by Andreas, who has made a full recovery from his lycanthropy.  Nicki (now played by Nina Foch) is engaged to Lady Jane's son John (Roland Varno.)  Saunders has recently died in a plane crash, and his journal detailing the earlier vampire adventure has fallen into the hands of police detective Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), and that's where the trouble starts.  Fleet doesn't believe a word of this vampire nonsense, but the journal clearly states that Saunders and Lady Jane drove a metal spike through a man's heart, and you can't go around doing things like that even if you do belong to the aristocracy.  Fleet demands that Lady Jane show him the body, and she's happy to do so, because she's expecting the body to be intact and not decomposed, thus proving this vampire nonsense.

However, the war spoils both their plans.  The cemetery was hit by a nighttime German bombing raid, scattering corpses.  A pair of comic relief relief Air Wardens discovered Tesla's body and removed the spike so that they could bury the body again.  DraculaTesla has risen from the grave!

Meanwhile, Lady Jane has dispatched Andreas to collect respected scientist Doctor Hugo Bruckner, who recently escaped from a concentration camp.  Along the way, Andreas is confronted by Tesla.  There's a brief battle of wills, but the outcome is never in doubt; Tesla regains control over Andreas, rewerewolfs him, and dispatches him to dispose of Bruckner and bring the poor man's clothing and ID.  

At the reception that evening, Tesla takes the place of Bruckner.  Lady Jane, who has never met Bruckner and apparently hasn't seen any pictures either, cheerfully extends an open invitation for "Bruckner" to visit the clinic and her home whenever he likes.  Nicki, meanwhile, is fascinated by the stranger, who claims to have known her grandfather for a brief time, when she was a little girl.  And that evening Nicki hears a voice calling to her as the room fills with mist . . .

It sounds like paint-by-numbers vampire stuff, and it is.  The movie is trying very hard to copy the Universal horror style on a much smaller budget, and it does a good job, but the real draw here is obviously Lugosi.  And I will admit that I'm grading on a curve here; the film gave Lugosi a meaty role to sink his teeth into at a time when Universal was going out of their way not to cast him as Dracula.

Still, there are aspects of the film that I find genuinely interesting.  Tesla isn't quite Dracula; both vampires disguise their predatory nature (literally, in Tesla's case), but Tesla doesn't have Dracula's feral charm, so he supplements his mesmerism with more human manipulation.  One of his first moves is to deliver Saunders's journal to Nicki, hoping to convince the girl that she's already tainted and that he's the only one who can accept her as she is.  He's similarly manipulative with Andreas, always trying to isolate his victims and make them think that they deserve what they're getting.  Tesla lies, consistently, to everybody.

And he's countered by Lady Jane, who is absolutely the hero here.  War hero John is an obvious choice for protagonist, but he's sidelined pretty early by an apparent attack from Nicki (at least, that's what Tesla wants everyone to think, but Tesla lies) and instead it's Lady Jane who steps up.  She isn't even at the final confrontation, delayed by another German bombing raid, but she still manages to save the day with her words, and the sense of worth and belonging she's tried to instill in the people around her.  

She does get to confront Tesla earlier, though, in what is arguably the film's best scene.  Tesla boasts of his power.  He claims that Saunders died due to the vampire's curse (though Tesla lies), and threatens to enthrall both Nicki and John, transforming the youngsters into vampires as his final revenge against the woman who once dared thwart him.  Lady Jane plays the organ as he rants, and then moves the sheet music to show that she's been in control all along.  

Count Dracula looms large over the public imagination; he's one of the most recognizable characters in the world, and there have been many versions of him throughout they years, often wildly different from Lugosi's well-dressed mentalist.  But those incarnations are either drawing from or pushing against Lugosi; he's defined vampires in the same way that Margaret Hamilton has defined witches.  It's just nice to know that he had another chance to play the character onscreen without Abbott and Costello stealing top billing.