We could've been anything that we wanted to be.

Bugsy Malone (1976) doesn't sound like a real movie. The premise is ridiculous on its face; it's a G-rated gangster melodrama set in Prohibition-era New York, with a cast made up entirely of child actors. Oh, and it's a musical!  However, this is a movie that commits completely to the bit, and it has a couple of secret weapons hiding up  its sleeve.

The young cats present themselves as adults, and some of the boys are even sporting period appropriate mustaches, but everything is presented through a child-friendly lens; the vintage cars are pedal-powered, the liquor racket is replaced by the sarsaparilla racket, and most importantly, nobody gets shot, they get splurged.  Traditionally this takes the form of an old-fashioned pie to the face, but Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) has armed his gang with splurge guns, which are basically Tommy guns that use whipped cream instead of bullets.  However you're splurged, though, the effects are the same. You don't die, but you're washed up, out of the game, and out of the movie.

Dandy Dan's gang are the only ones with splurge guns,which means they're cutting a swathe through the businesses run by Dan's rival, Fat Sam (John Cassisi), who owns the speakeasy where much of the action takes place.  Sam controls a gang of mostly lovable incompetents, most notably Knuckles (Sheridan Earl Russell), who earned his name by constantly cracking his knuckles.  Sam is also dating the film's family friendly femme fatale, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), who is the speakeasy's star performer.

Tallulah is not the speakeasy's only performer, though, so singer and aspiring Hollywood actress Blousey Brown (Florrie Dugger) arrives to audition for a role in the chorus,only to be told that Sam is busy and she should "come back tomorrow."  At the speakeasy she also meets Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), a struggling boxing promoter, and she finds him reasonably charming.  The pair strike up a low-key friendship.

Things are getting worse and worse for Sam. Dandy Dan is squeezing his business dry, and most of his men are lured into an ambush and splurged. Sam desperately tries to pretend that it's business as usual, and hires Looney, a hitman from out of town, to take down Dandy Dan.  He's going to need a driver, though, and Knuckles can't drive.

 Blousey is auditioning across town to replace diva Lena Morelli (Bonnie Langford), with Bugsy there to give moral support,but before she can sing a note Lena strolls in and takes her old job back.  Bugsy takes her back to Sam's place for another audition, and this time she gets her shot. She also spots Bugsy with Tallulah,and while there's really nothing going on there Tallulah still plants a chaste kiss on Bugsy's forehead.  (G-rating, remember?)  Blousey has had enough.

Bugsy needs to win Blousey back. He wants to take her to Hollywood, but to do that he'll need money. The good news is that Fat Sam is looking for a driver for a special job. And so begins Bugsy's G-rated spiral into a life of crime. The movie's only 93 minutes long, so there isn't much actual criming involved,and what little criming there is is directed at dandy Dan and his gang.

So, the movie is mostly a harmless ball of fluff with a bizarre premise. Why watch it today?  First, the songs, written and largely performed by Paul Williams, range from (in my highly scientific and impartial opinion) pretty good to great.

And then there's the acting. The assembled child actors are, for the most part, fine.  They're clearly having a good time, and that sense of fun counts for a lot, but they can't help but be overshadowed when they're standing next to Jodie Foster, who at this point had spent years honing her craft on TV and the Disney family film treadmill, as well as a few months of personal acting lessons with Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver, which came out earlier in 1976.  Tallulah is a relatively small part, but it's a good part, and Foster's careful craft shines next to the talented amateurs around her. I've never seen an actor stand out from the rest of the cast that much before.

 

August in Wonderland: Alice in Wonderland

The Alice books are a popular subject for the stage as well as film.  (Your humble scribe was once cast as the Caterpillar's butt.)  In 1983 PBS's "Great Performances" broadcast an adaptation of the recent Broadway revival of Alice in Wonderland, retaining Kate Burton as Alice but recasting most of the other roles.  And the end result is visually striking, recorded in a TV studio but with constructed sets and a light splashing of special effects and transitions, making it look like an enhanced stage play.

There is also a new framing device.  Rather than a bored Alice watching her sister read, Alice (Kate Burton) is an understudy for a stage production of Alice in Wonderland, desperately running lines as the rest of the cast and crew gossip about whether she's ready.  Alice flubs a recital of "Jabberwocky," then slips through the looking glass and meets a White Rabbit (Austin Pendleton.)  That is not the way this normally goes, but from that point onward it's a fairly faithful (if abridged) adaptation of the book.  Alice tangos with a Mouse (Nathan Lane), consults the Caterpillar (Fritz Weaver), argues with a Cheshire Cat (Geoffrey Holder), crashes a mad tea party (featuring Andre Gregory, Željko Ivanek, and Dean Badalto), plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (Eve Arden) and then interrupts the trial of the Knave of Hearts (Tony Cummings) before declaring that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards!" and returning to her dressing room.

Only for a moment, though, because this is an adaptation of both books.  Alice meets the Red Queen (Colleen Dewhurst) and eagerly agrees to become a pawn in the ongoing chess game so that she can reach the Eighth Square and become a Queen.  That means more episodic adventure, including dancing with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee (Andre De Shields and Alan Weeks) and assisting the White Queen (Maureen Stapleton).  

After a frustrating meeting with Humpty Dumpty (Richard Woods) Alice is on the verge of tears, and then the movie wheels out its secret weapon: Kate Burton's father Richard, playing the White Knight, riding on a pantomime horse.  There's a sudden shift from nonsense to sincerity, as Alice and the Knight have a brief but sincere conversation, the Knight sings a sad song, and then he goes on his way.  The two have managed to cheer each other up, and Alice is prepared for the madness of the finale.

The sudden shift in tone might be surprising, but it is exactly what happens in the book; in all of Alice's journeys, the White Knight is the one character who is consistently kind to her, and he is the one person she's said to remember fondly.

"Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half dream, to the melancholy music of the song"

 And the Burtons seem to be delighted to be on screen together.  It is a big shift in tone, but it works.

 Alice in Wonderland has a fabulous cast, and I haven't had time to mention them all.  While the whole production looks and feels stagey, most of the acting is understated and naturalistic, which really works; when the Mad Hatter isn't busy being flamboyant and wacky, for instance, the menacing tone of the text really comes through.  The one exception to this is, surprisingly, Kate Burton's Alice, who is almost aggressively chipper.  This is an Alice who is having a great time until she's not.

Finally, the costuming and scenery is gorgeous.  Everything is designed to look like a Tenniel illustration come to life.  Not inspired by Tenniel - the stage is made of black and white illustrations, and the costumes include cross-hatching and line work.  It's one of the best looking Alices I've ever seen, as well as a great performance.

August in Wonderland: Neco z Alenky

 Neco z Alenky (1988), known in English simply as Alice, is Czech artist and director Jan Švankmajer's take on the Wonderland story. Švankmajer felt that other Alice movies presented the story as a fairy tale, and he wanted to create a version that felt like "an amoral dream."  The Czech title is much better than the rather generic Alice; Neco z Alenky translates to "Something From Alice," and that's what we get.  It's a very carefully curated artistic presentation.

Right from the start it's clear that this Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) isn't the same as other Alices.  She's introduced in the traditional fashion, bored stiff as the sister next to her concentrates ona  book without pictures or conversations, but instead of musing about how to make a daisy chain without picking any daisies, Alice glowers as she tosses stones into the river.  A quick change of scenery and Alice is in the house, surrounded by detritus and clutter, throwing stones into a teacup instead.  And then things get weird.

A white taxidermied rabbit pulls the nails out of its feet, opens a hidden drawer to retrieve hat, gloves, and scissors, breaks free of its case, then runs across a field and disappears into a different drawer.  And Alice watches this happen and decides it's a good idea to follow this creature.  She slips into the drawer herself, and then things get really weird.

Of course that's more or less what happens in the book, and Neco z Alenky follows an abridged version of the plot of the book, though it's tilted to become more surreal and macabre.  Alice follows the White Rabbit deeper and deeper into  this found art Wonderland, always asking the Rabbit to wait, and the Rabbit either runs or responds with violence.  This White Rabbit isn't the same as other White Rabbits, either.  It's still a dandy, still perpetually late, but cuts a much more sinister figure and acts as the executioner for the Queen of Hearts, snipping off heads with an oversized pair of scissors.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Alice learns how to change size by eating small tarts and drinking ink; she becomes a porcelain doll when she's small, but doesn't seem to notice.  She nearly drowns in a  pool of her own tears and a rat tries to build a fire on her scalp.  She grows to giant size while in the White Rabbit's house, accidentally kills Bill the Lizard (he gets better) and is trapped in a plaster cast of herself.

And so it goes.  Alice meets a caterpillar made of socks, has tea with a puppet Mad Hatter and clockwork March Hare, and finally plays croquet with the King and Queen of Hearts, who get very annoyed when Alice refuses to stick to the script.

The movie is undeniably strange, and not just because of the visual style.  Kristýna Kohoutová voices all the characters (Camilla Power in the English dub) and serves as a sort of narrator; any time a character says something, there's a close-up of Alice's lips as she provides the dialogue tags.  On the other hand, we don't get to hear what Alice is thinking, and so the whole movie winds up feeling a bit more mundane than the books, since we're missing Alice's often bizarre musings on identity and biology and geography and Mabel's poky little house.  

More than anything else, Neco z Alenky reminds me of a pop-up book.  It delivers stunning and unexpected visuals, but there's story missing - it's something from Alice, heavily abridged.

August in Wonderland: Alice Through the Looking Glass

In "Through the Looking Glass", Alice has an actual motivation: she wants to reach the Eighth Square and become a queen.  It's still a hard plot to spin into a movie, though, because there's no actual antagonist.  Humpty Dumpty may be a pedantic jerk, and the Red Queen is bossy and rude, but they're not trying to prevent Alice from reaching her goals.  Nobody is!  However, Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966) solves the problem in a simple way, by ripping off "The Wizard of Oz."

Alice (Judi Rolin) is a bored early Sixties teenager sitting alone upstairs while her sitcom dad (Richard Denning) hosts a cocktail party downstairs.  She isn't bored for long, though.  Looking in the mirror she spots the Red King (Robert Coote), who is not asleep, which means this is already an incredibly loose adaptation of the book.

The Red King invites Alice to join him on the other side.  She does, and she's introduced to the Red Queen (Agnes Moorehead), the White Queen (Nanette Fabray), and the White King (Ricardo Montalban), and there is exposition.  The Kings and Queens don't really rule anymore, because the Looking-Glass Land has been conquered by the Jabberwock (Jack Palance), a creature so terrible that the cowardly royals don't dare say his name out loud.

Alice urges the royals to stand up and fight back, and together they come up with a plan.  Since Alice is enthusiastic about becoming a queen, she can follow the Yellow BrickBlue Road to the end of the board and earn a crown, and the Looking-Glass people will be so inspired by her example that they'll all rise up and overthrow the Jabberwock and live happily ever after.

It's obviously Oz inspired, but there is one key difference: Dorothy wants to go home, while Alice is determined to stay in Looking-Glass Land and rule as a queen, terrible and beautiful as the dawn.  Still, it's time to get on down the road, and so Alice sets out on her journey.

The Blue Road is really a trap.  The Jabberwock painted it blue so that it will be the same color as the sky, which means that careless travelers will go up rather than down and be lost in the air forever.  Alice passes the test, leaves the blue road behind, and walks down a different road, made of yellow brick.  She conquers the three fairy tale witches (Sara Taft, Georgia Simmons and Maryesther Denver) the Jabberwock sent to guard the path, meets the Jabberwock himself, and is saved by that beloved Lewis Carroll creation, Lester the Jester (Roy Castle).  

Despite the extended Oz riff, though, the movie does occasionally drift in the vague direction of the book.  In her wanderings Alice meets Humpty Dumpty (Jimmy Durante) and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (Dick and Tom Smothers), and she finds time for a long and melancholy conversation with the White King, who takes the White Knight's slot as "friendly older character who keeps alluding to aging and death."  (Montalban sells it; it's easily the most affecting part of the film.)  Still, Carroll's book is treated as more of an outline, and lines form the book are rare enough to be easily noticeable.

This version of Through the Looking Glass was made for TV, and the tone is set to "Sixties variety Show," though everyone is chewing so much scenery that it all comes across as a bit panto.  It's got a great cast, but Alice adaptations often have great casts; the books may not have much plot, but there are plenty of distinctive characters to choose from, and interesting scenery to chew.

This is not a great adaptation of "Through the Looking Glass."  It succeeds on its own terms, but those terms are very specific to its time and place.  Ricardo Montalban is great, though.

August in Wonderland: Alicja

 Alicja (1982) was a Belgian and Polish co-production, released internationally under a number of different titles; in English it's simply called "Alice," while in Germany the movie was released as "Alicija im Horrorland," which must have led to a lot of disappointed German horror fans; while it's weird and occasionally disturbing, this is not a horror movie.  The real terror here is ill-advised rebound relationships.

Alice (Sophie Barjac) leads a mundane life in an unnamed European city.  She used to be a stewardess, but now she works at a TV factory along with her three friends.  Turtle (Jack Wild) is bookish and completely smitten with Alice, but too shy to say anything.  Gryphon (Dominic Guard) is supportive. patient and sensible.  And Mona (Tracy Hyde) doesn't really have a Wonderland counterpart, but calling her Mabel would have been an excellent deep cut, since like Carroll's Mabel, Mona exists to define Alice by contrast.  Mona likes to go out and party, while Alice would rather stay home.  Mona is fine with dating married men, and Alice very much is not, especially since her separation from her philandering pilot husband Cheshire Cat (Paul Nicholas.)

One day Alice and her child friend (Julia Hubner) are in the park people watching, when Alice spots a masked man with a rifle take aim at a handsome older jogger.  He fires, the jogger hits, and Alice faints on the spot, but when  she opens her eyes the jogger is there and unharmed and very French and his name is Rabbit (Jean-Pierre Cassel).  Rabbit offers to give her a ride, she declines, and he leaves, because he's late for a very important date.

And then Rabbit shows up at the factory, ostensibly on business, but sneaks away so that he can follow Alice to the cafeteria and pretend to be a waiter, allowing him to flirt a bit and the audience to learn Alice's backstory.  The flirting doesn't take, so Rabbit shows up at her apartment and, during a charming song and dance number, bribes the concierge to find out more about Alice and exactly which apartment she lives in.

Turtle and Gryphon don't trusty Rabbit, and they are completely correct, because Rabbit has secrets.  He owes money to the wrong people, and he begs his wealthy friend Queenie (Susannah York), not realizing that Queenie is the wrong people he owes the money to.  

After permanently ending things with Cheshire Cat, Alice sings a duet about identity and change with a taxi driver who may be named Caterpillar (German Schlager and country singer Gunter Gabriel), convinces her child friend not to stab someone, then sings another song about love while walking for miles.  So she's in a more receptive mood when Rabbit shows up at her apartment disguised as a plumber, and agrees to join him at one of Queenie's parties, where she meets March Hare (Marc Seaberg) and Mad Hatter (Peter Straker.)

 

Alice dives headlong into a relationship with Rabbit.  Turtle and Gryphon once again warn her to be careful, and once again they are completely correct.  Queenie has grown tired of Rabbit, and she's dispatched a pair of bumbling but oddly effective assassins (Wieslaw Golas and Andrzej Wasilicz) to deal with the problem.  

 Rabbit breaks up with Alice, then goes on the run, and Alice swallows a handful of sleeping pills before slipping into a disco-fueled psychedelic nightmare which highlights her insecurities, makes some direct Wonderland references, and provides an excuse to but Sophie Barjac in a flimsy nightie with bright lights behind her.  And then things get weird.

Rabbit's characterization hasn't really aged well; the light stalking may have seemed romantic back in the early eighties, but from a modern perspective he's a singing and dancing collection of red flags in a nice white suit.  (Ladies, if you meet his friends and he has to assure you that they don't mean any harm, he is not for you.)  That said, the movie does seem to recognize that this is not a healthy relationship, and Alice traded one charming but secretive man with a tendency to abruptly vanish for another.

Still, the movie is consistently odd and entertaining.  The music is fantastic, with Scottish singer Lulu singing Alice's part.  Susannah York chews all of the scenery, Jean-Pierre Cassel dances brilliantly, and Sophie Barjac is by turns delightful and heartbreaking.

August in Wonderland: Alice au pays des merveilles

 Alice au pays des merveilles (1970) is a French TV movie that adapts Alice in Wonderland.  As an adaptation it's kind of surprising, combining fidelity to the original novel with a literally dizzying array of special effects, somehow taking one of the stranger children's books in English literature and making it even weirder.

 

The story begins on the island of Le Grand Jatte.  Not the actual island, though; instead Alice (Marie-Veronique Maurin) and her sister Lorina (Aimee Fontaine) are spending a hot summer afternoon inside the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grand Jatte" by Georges Seraut.  However, while Lorina is reading a book, Alice is bored, at least until she spots a white rabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch (Guy Grosso) run past.  She follows, only to fall down a rabbit hole and discover a strange new world underground.

From there the plot sticks very closely to Carroll's original story.  In other words, there's barely a plot at all.  Alice sees a beautiful garden and decides that she wants to visit it, but she spends much of the film just wandering around and meeting eccentric creatures who are varying degrees of rude and argumentative. 

There are changes, of course; the movie cuts out the sequence in which Alice meets a puppy (the puppy always gets cut), the White Rabbit lives in a house which is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the song the Duchess (Annette Poivre) sings to her baby has an extra gruesome chorus, but for the most part the movie plays the hits.  Alice has tea with the Mad Hatter (Hubert Deschamps), plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (Alice Sapritch), and so on.  

However, there are two reasons to watch this adaptation rather than just reading the book.  First, the special effects are, to use the technical term, bonkers.  The movie makes extensive use of blue screen, combining live action with animation that looks like it's been lifted directly from Sesame Street, combined with swirling colors and screensaver technology decades ahead of its time.  Sometimes the effects are just filler, but there's always something happening onscreen.

The second reason is Alice herself.  Because there's barely a plot and Alice spends most of her time in Wonderland wandering from place to place, Alice often comes across as kind of passive in movies.  Not here, though; this Alice is spirited.  Spunky.  Shouty and kind of bossy.  This is an Alice who gives at least as well as she gets, and she also tramples all over the fourth wall like Deadpool crossed with Godzilla.  Combine that with the aforementioned bonkers special effects bringing Alice's musings to life onscreen, and for once Alice is the most interesting person in her movie.

Saaptember: Cult of the Cobra

 (For whatever reason, my computer won't read this particular DVD, so no screenshots this time.  I'll have to settle for the movie poster.)

 

The plot of Cult of the Cobra (1955) sounds very much like an Indian snake movie: six men traveling in India anger a woman who is also a snake, and she follows them home and kills them one by one.  But it's not an Indian snake movie, it's a Universal horror movie, with all of the careful research that implies.

 

In 1945, six American airmen are exploring a city bazaar in n unnamed Asian country, though the set dressing, costumes and the matte painting behind them all strongly imply India.  The important ones are Tom (Marshall Thompson) and Paul (Richard Long), who are roommates back in America and are both in love with Julia (Kathleen Hughes), and Nick (James Dobson), who is an avid photographer and not very smart.  They meet a snake charmer (Leonard Strong) who poses for a picture with his cobra, and Paul takes the opportunity to expound on the mysterious Lamian cult, snake worshipers who are supposed to live in the area.  The snake charmer reveals that he is in fact a member of the mysterious Lamian cult, and he will sneak them into a sacred ceremony for a hundred dollars.  Everyone agrees, mostly because Paul keeps going on about it.

And it turns out the snake charmer was telling the truth! Fortunately the members of this particular snake cult all wear hooded cloaks, so it's easy to sneak in.  The snake charmer warns them, repeatedly, that they should not under any circumstances try to take pictures.  Cue the dance number (50s B-movie style, not Bollywood style) and Nick starts taking pictures, with a flashbulb.  There's a fight, the temple is set on fire, Nick tries to steal a basket containing a dancer, and the cult's high priest (Edward Platt) curses the intruders.

The airmen make their escape in a jeep, but Nick is missing.  They quickly locate him collapsed in an alley, suffering from snakebite.  They take him to the hospital and it looks like he's going to make a full recovery, but the nurse leaves a window open, and the snake returns and bites him again.  He's dead by morning.  

The rest of the men return to the US.  Julia and Paul become engaged, ending the love triangle pretty decisively.  Tom is devastated, but he gets over it pretty quickly when he meets the mysterious new neighbor Lisa (Faith Domergue).  He offers to show Lisa around New York, and things go . . . okay.  Lisa seems to like him, but she's determined to keep her distance.

And then the airmen start dying one by one, and it's Lisa.  Lisa is the snake woman.  The movie makes no effort to conceal the killer's identity form the audience (and it's just as well, because the movie poster shows Lisa turning into a snake) but the characters haven't figured it out yet, so Tom continues his pursuit of Lisa.  Honestly, he's coming on a bit strong, picking a  fight with an old friend who dared to dance with her at a party and breaking into her apartment.  And against all odds, she starts to fall for him as well.

Paul, on the other hand, is suspicious.  He's noticed that his friends have started dying shortly after being cursed, and while the police aren't willing to accept his "curse" story, they do run blood tests on the dead men and discover that they were all killed by cobra venom.  Lisa realizes that Paul is suspicious and decides to kill Julia for some reason, perhaps because she walked in on Julia reading one of Paul's many books on snake cults.  (Why does Paul have so many books on snake cults?)

In the end only Paul and Tom are left, and the police are starting to close in.  Lisa and Tom attend Julia's new play, giving her one last chance to try and kill Julia before meeting a rather undignified end; turning into a snake is great for stealthy kills, but there are some severe disadvantages when humans know you're there.

Cult of the Cobra does bear some slight resemblance to Indian folklore, but I think it's a coincidence rather than the product of actual research; even the snake cult always refers to Lisa as a lamia, which is the wrong mythology from the wrong continent.  That's just the tip of the iceberg, though; the obvious problem is that "Asia" is a sound stage filled with mostly white actors dressed as people from India; Rama Bai is the only Asian name in the cast list, and she played "Woman in Asian Market Square."  They did have Indian actors in 1955 - Bollywood was thriving at the time, and the highly regarded Shree 420 came out the same year.

However, location shooting and international actors cost money, and this was not a big budget movie.  It was originally released as part of a double bill with Revenge of the Creature, the first sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The low budget is Cult of the Cobra's secret weapon, because atmosphere is free.  The movie draws heavily from Val Lewton's work, and especially Cat People, relying on shadows and intimation rather than flashy special effects.  Lisa takes long walks through the darkened city streets, animals are terrified of her, the lighting shifts across her face as she's torn between her mission and her growing feelings for Tom.  To be clear, this is not as good as Cat People, but emulating Cat People is a great choice given the budget.

The budget means that the movie has one real advantage over India's later snake movies.  There are a few shots of actual cobras, but most of the time when Lisa is in snake form she appears in silhouette or is represented by an unconvincing rubber snake on a string.  Indian snake movies tend to use real cobras and a lot of them die.  I'm happier with the snake on a string.

A circus with bite.

 Vampire Circus (1972) is a movie that delivers on its promises: there is a circus, and there are multiple vampires.  However, if the title makes you think that this will be a lighthearted campy romp, think again; these vampires are specifically targeting children, and this movie gets dark.

Children have been vanishing from the village of Stetl, and village schoolmaster Albert Muller (Laurence Payne) is horrified to discover why.  His own wife Anna (Domini Blythe) has been luring the children through the woods and into the nearby castle, where Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman) feeds on them.  There's no real explanation given for why Anna is doing this; she just seems to be really into Count Mitterhouse, so much so that she spends most of her screentime naked.

Muller is a poor teacher from a poor village, so he has limited options, but you don't have to be rich and powerful to lead an angry mob, so Muller leads an angry mob to the castle.  There's a fight, many men die, but in the end Muller manages to stake the vampire, though not before he has a chance to curse the villagers, swearing that their children will die to bring him back from the grave.  The other villagers want to punish Anna for being an enthusiastic accessory to child murder, but Muller asks them to let her go.  This is a mistake; she runs back into the castle, where the Count revives just long enough to send her to his cousin Emil (Anthony Higgins) at the Circus of Night.

Fifteen years later, Stetl is in the grips of a mysterious plague.  People are dying in droves, and the neighboring communities have placed armed men at roadblocks surrounding the village, threatening to shoot anyone who tries to pass.  The influential men of the village gather to debate the cause of the plague and what can be done about it.  Some think it's the work of Count Mitterhouse and his curse, while others, particularly recently arrived Doctor Kersh (Richard Owens) believe it's a disease, and what the town needs is medicine.  And surprisingly, given that this is a vampire movie, we eventually learn that Kersh is right.  It's just a disease which responds to conventional treatment.  Of course, at that point in the movie, Stetl has other things to worry about.

Kersh breaks through the barricade with the help of his teenage son Anton (John Moulder-Brown.)  Anton asks his father to find Muller's daughter Dora (Lynne Fredrick) in the capital and urge her to stay where she is and not try to return to Stetl, because Anton is the only person in the movie with any sense.

Meanwhile the village has visitors!  The Night Circus has arrived, lead by a mysterious and apparently Romani woman (Adrienne Coeri.)  The villagers call her by a different name, but I am just going to call her Anna, because she is in fact Anna.  (It's possible that no one recognizes her with clothes on, but perhaps the fact that she's played by a different actress now has more to do with it.)  It's a small circus, but it hits most of the bases, with animals, a clown (Skip Martin), a strongman (David Prowse), and twin acrobats Helga (Lalla Ward) and Heinrich (Robin Sachs).  They are creepy as hell, but it's not like the quarantined villagers have anything better to do, so every night the show is packed.

And then things start to happen.  Dora shows up in the village, much to Anton's dismay; he loves her, but he would really rather she was somewhere less doomed.  The mayor's daughter Rosa (Christina Paul) is captivated by the show's black panther, particularly when the panther turns into Emil.  The mayor himself (Thorley Walters) collapses after a terrifying vision in the hall of mirrors.  And children start to vanish, because this is in fact a vampire circus.

We are not dealing with the cream of the vampire crop here - Mitterhouse may be a Count with his own castle, but he's also a doofus with bad hair who hangs out in his basement waiting for his girlfriend to bring him children.  Emil has the cool "turn into a panther" power, but he spends half the time lounging in his cage and the other half looking like he's late for Godspell rehearsals.  And Helga and Heinrich . . . well, they're pretty great actually, but they are evil henchmen and spend their time henching evilly.

On the other hand, the villagers are just villagers, without a Dutch vampire hunting scholar or cowboy to be seen.  Anton is brave and sensible and the closest thing the movie has to a hero, but he's just a kid and there's only so much he can do. In the end it's vampires versus villagers, and while most of the village is wiped out by the end of the movie, all of the vampires are destroyed.  Angry mob wins on a technicality.

Bela Lugosi's Dad.

1943's Return of the Vampire was a spiritual sequel to Tod Browning's Dracula, bringing Bela Lugosi back to play a legally distinct version of the vampire who made him famous.  Dracula's Daughter (1936), on the other hand, is the direct sequel to Browning's film, and begins just as the previous film ended, with two comic policemen discovering Renfield's body sprawled across a street in Whitby.  Soon after they find Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and the body of Dracula (a wax dummy), and Von Helsing is arrested, which means that both films revolve around characters being investigated for the murder of Bela Lugosi.

(And that's not a typo - it is Von Helsing in this movie, rather than Van Helsing.  Apparently the good professor changed his name between movies.)

Von Helsing proudly admits to driving a stake through Dracula's heart, but explains that it can't be murder when Dracula has been dead for centuries.  The police are skeptical, but Von Helsing refuses an attorney, instead asking for Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), a psychologist and former student, as he believes that Garth is the only man in London who could possibly understand what happened.  There's no mention of contacting any of the surviving characters from the previous movie, though Von Helsing should know by now that ignoring Mina is always a mistake.

As it happens, Garth is not in London.  He's on a hunting trip to Scotland complaining bitterly about the women in his life when he's interrupted by his secretary Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who's come up from London to fetch him.  Garth and Janet bicker on the way home.  They're clearly supposed to have a light-hearted and flirtatious relationship straight out of a screwball comedy, but it doesn't really land; Garth comes across as a sexist jerk, while Janet plays silly and sometimes mean-spirited pranks on him.

Meanwhile, Von Helsing's Dracula problem solves itself, as the Count's body vanishes form police custody.  No, Dracula has not risen from the grave; the body was taken by Dracula's daughter, the Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) and her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel.)  Marya hopes that destroying the Count's body will free her from the curse of vampirism and burns the body on a pyre, but Sandor is pessimistic, telling her that all he sees in her eyes is death.

Marya begins the next night still hopeful, proclaiming that "I can live a normal life now, think normal things.  Even play normal music." But Sandor is correct, as a heartbroken Marya realizes when the lullaby she's playing on the piano turns dark and spooky.  She resumes the hunt.

All murder and no play makes Marya a dull girl, though, so she also mingles with high society, and at a party she runs into Garth, who is expounding on psychological treatments for addiction and obsessive thoughts.  She's fascinated and even hopeful, and makes an arrangement to meet Garth the next night, while Janet and Sandor glower in the background.  

That night Marya tells a piece of her story, talking about dark thoughts and influences brought on by a dead man, and Garth suggests that she try confronting her cravings rather than hiding from them.  Marya takes his advice, and goes to her studio to paint.  Sandor collects a young woman named Lili (Nan Grey) on the street, dragging her to the studio to serve as a model, and Lili relaxes when she sees the Countess, despite the multitude of red flags raised by the situation.  Marya tries, she really does, but in the end she cannot resist and attacks Lili.

The young woman survives and is brought to the hospital where Garth works, suffering from anemia and amnesia.  Garth tries to treat her with hypnotism, but Lili dies after revealing just enough information that Garth realizes it was Marya who attacked her.  After Von Helsing explains things in very small words, Garth realizes that Marya is a vampire.  Marya, in turn, decides that there is no cure for her condition, and plans to go back to Transylvania with Garth; when he refuses she and Sandor kidnap Janet and take her to the old country, thus forcing Garth to follow.

Dracula's daughter is probably best known today for lesbian subtext, and there is definitely subtext.  Marya talks about Garth as her potential consort and companion through eternity, but she does not look at Garth like she looks at Lili and especially Janet; there's a long lingering shot of Marya slowly leaning in to a mesmerized Janet, a long prelude to a kiss that never happens thanks to Garth's sudden arrival.  And the movie is about a woman struggling to overcome or at least conceal her true nature so that she can live like everybody else, though that particular metaphor shatters when you remember that her true nature is "undead monster who must kill to live."  It's tangled and complex, making this a movie that people can and do write papers about.

Marya is also an early cinematic example of the angsty and reluctant vampire, more Louis than Lestat.  It's certainly a compelling performance; Holden's magnetic eyes draw the viewer in, inviting the viewer to sympathize with the monster.  

That said I still have questions about the "daughter" part.  According to Von Helsing, Marya's barely over a century old, while Dracula is well over five hundred.  is she supposed to be his biological daughter, or daughter in the sense of "vampiric offspring?"  Or both?  Either way, she certainly isn't shy about moving into Castle Dracula.