Sunset Boulevard (1950)

  How do you classify a film that is equal parts comedy and tragedy? Can you even call it comedy if you cringe a bit after the laughter dies out? With Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder utilizes his acerbic wit to knock down the glamour mask of Hollywood and show it as the grotesque and decaying whorehouse that it really is. Of course Wilder knew that by taking on Hollywood he would basically be biting the hand that fed him. A hand that had garnered him several Oscar nominations, a very healthy paycheck, and also the resources to create his brilliant pessimistic work. Yet as caustic as Sunset Boulevard is one can't help notice that the film is not so much an attack on the entertainment industry, but rather it is a dedication to all the shattered dreams that Hollywood has left in its wake.

  As broad a topic as Hollywood is Wilder concentrates his story on two people, a once great silent screen actress and a down on his luck screenwriter. These two couldn't be any more different from each other, but they do accurately represent a majority of people in the entertainment industry. You are either trying to get your foot in the door or struggling to not get pushed out.

  The silent screen actress, Norma Desmond, is played by Gloria Swanson who in real life had enjoyed success as an actress during the silent era and although she did make the transition into talkies her career never did take off like it had before. Swanson's portrayal of Norma Desmond is a combination of vampire, self-delusional actress, and possessive lover. Desmond lives in a mansion gaudily decorated and surrounded with constant reminders of her days as a star. Norma is careful to always surround herself with people and things that reaffirm her belief that she is still a star. Her self delusion is a means to protect herself from the reality that she is now merely a footnote in Hollywood history.

  William Holden, on the other hand, plays Joe Gillis as a man of desperation who exploits Norma from their very first meeting. Gillis is a man that has been chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine and sees Norma as a means to get back at least some monetary recoupment for all the indignities he has suffered. Yet his plan to milk Norma for all he could quickly falls to pieces. The longer he stays in her mansion as a pawn in her delusions of stardom the tighter Norma's insanity coils around Gillis till finally there is no escape from the inevitable.

  Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond's co-dependent affair as twisted as it was had started out as a mutually agreeable arrangement. Their affair did not grow so much from an emotional need to be together, but rather a more down to earth reason. Joe needed cash and Norma was starved for attention and companionship. Their arrangement could have technically continued for an indefinite amount of time. It is only when Joe starts to spend time with Betty Schaefer, a script reader played by Nancy Olson, that there affair starts to crumble. Joe's feelings for Betty although sincere can never be fully realized because he has entrenched himself so deeply in Norma's reality that Joe has become a male version of Norma. Whereas Norma deludes herself into believing that she is still a star; Joe pretends to stick around Norma for the money but in reality he sees his situation with Norma as an escape.

  Like many of Wilder's protagonists Joe Gillis is trapped in his job. His arrangement with Norma maybe yet another trap but at least he can wear the best suits, take a refreshing swim in her pool whenever he wants, and Joe Gillis is basically the center of Norma Desmond's world. He only leaves its comforts after having to admit to Betty and subsequently himself just what type of man he really is. And although Norma shoots Joe due to the threat of her having to face the sad truth of her situation if he left her; Joe goads her to shot him because of his unwillingness to go back to the harsh reality of the world outside of the mansion.

  Sunset Boulevard tackles as its subject opportunism and the consequences of trying to have a career in an industry that feeds on desperation. Billy Wilder knew that all success is fleeting, and in a business where you are only as good as your last film anybody who congratulates you on all your success today maybe clutching a knife ready to stab you in the back the next day.

Double Indemnity (1944)

"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?"

  The allure of tabloid scandals and media sensationalism has now become the norm. So-called journalists spend entire days sifting through the refuse of human society trying to find a story that will keep viewers glued to their TVs. This insatiable hunger is fed by a constant flood of celebrity updates and lurid tales of human death and degeneracy.

  For James M. Cain when he was writing his book, Double Indemnity, he looked back towards his previous life as a news reporter to help spark an idea in him. The story he would use would be that of Ruth Snyder, an icy blonde, who had managed to convince her lover, Judd Gray, to bludgeon and strangle her husband to death. She was caught though and put on trial. The press labeled her a "Tiger Woman", a derogatory term used to describe the new type of woman springing up in society that shunned house work and embraced the flapper lifestyle. Cain was fascinated by her story and used it as the basis for his novel.

  In 1943 Billy Wilder was primarily known as a screenwriter. Although he had directed a few films that were considered financially successful he had not yet established his rightful place as one of the preeminent American directors. Wilder's risk to take Cain's sleazy novel and turn it into a film alienated him from many in the movie industry who thought that the story and characters would never pass the censor boards. His gamble paid off though and Wilder accomplished the impossible by turning a trashy cynical story about adultery, corruption, and murder into that rare thing called art.

"It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle? Maybe you would have known Keyes the minute she mentioned accident insurance, but I didn't. I felt like a million."

  Wilder's penchant need to work with a writing partner may ultimately have contributed to making him such a great director. When it came to making films Billy Wilder always tried to surround himself with the best. During pre-production for Double Indemnity Wilder looked towards Cain to help him adapt the book, but since Cain was already contracted out to another studio Wilder turned elsewhere.

  Raymond Chandler had made his name writing detective fiction and gained a reputation for crafting tough and fast stories about tarnished knight errants. Although Chandler had no experience in screenwriting Wilder was confident that Chandler's way with words would elevate the film's dialogue. Chandler's stylized dialogue moved at machine gun speeds and never shied away from sexual double entendres.

"That was all there was to it. Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked, there was nothing to give us away. And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it's true, so help me. I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man."

  Because of the unsavory subject matter that the movie deals with, Wilder had a lot of trouble finding actors to be in the film. Wilder was so desperate that he turned to actor George Raft for the part of Walter Neff. During there meeting though Raft refused to read the script and ordered Wilder to tell him the story. As Wilder dictated the story to him, Raft eventually ordered Wilder to "get to the lapel scene." Confused by Raft's request Wilder  asked him what "lapel scene" was he talking about. Raft, apparently believed, that by the end of the story the audience would find out that his character was really a cop and arrests Phyllis Dietrichson. After that meeting Wilder felt completely dejected and believed that the movie would never get made.

  The part of Walter Neff would eventually be played by Fred MacMurray, a sometimes musician and actor who made his name in Disney comedies. MacMurray's non-threatening good looks work to the advantage of the story. Neff is not an inherently evil character, but rather just a bored one. He decides to help Phyllis kill her husband not because he needs the insurance money, but rather because he is tired of the daily grind.

  Phyllis, on the other hand, is a killer. Phyllis ensnares men into her trap and manipulates them to do her bidding. Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis is a powerful character. Wilder and Chandler arm her with typical garish female visual signifiers; e.g. anklet, lipstick, angora sweater, wig; but it is Stanwyck who makes it all work and also imbues the character with a strength that most of the male characters in the story lack.

  The only real friendship that Neff has in the story is with the claims manager, Keyes, at the insurance company. Edward G. Robinson plays Keyes as a man who lives and breaths facts and statistics; unlike Neff he does not allow his emotions to make decisions for him. Thus it hurts even more by the end of the story when he finds that Neff, his only friend in the company, is Phyllis's accomplice.

"Just like the first time I came here, isn't it? We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet."

  John Seitz, the film's director of photography, was integral in establishing the look of the film. He had the idea to mix silver dust with some subtle smoke effects to create dramatic shafts of light that cut through the Dietrichson home. Also with this film Seitz establishes the use of "Venetian blind" lighting giving any room the appearance of bars which seem to trap the characters in their schemes.

  Double Indemnity elevated Billy Wilder's status in the film industry, yet the film is really a product of many artists not just one person. The very casual way in which sex and death are so entwined was quite ahead of most of the film's being made back then. The film doesn't ask you to like any of the characters, instead it challenges you to realize that every person is susceptible to corruption even those with the best intentions.

City for Conquest (1940)

  As the infrastructure of New York City is in a constant process of evolving, one thing that it never runs a risk of having too little of are wide-eyed hopefuls. There is something about the city that draws people onto that thin strip of land and endure the kind of hard scrabble living that has crushed many a weak individual. It may be that the hardships one has to bear to just survive in that town fuels the type of art and artists that can define a specific generation or movement. When you come to New York the goal is to make it big; wanting anything less would just be cheating yourself out of a God-given destiny to be a star.

  In Anatole Litvak's film City for Conquest not only is New York City elevated to the status of being the only American city that matters, but it also offers us a window into the lives of three of its most ambitious inhabitants. James Cagney plays Danny Kenny, a boxer, whose talent for fighting is matched only by his love for the girl of his dreams, Peggy Nash. Ann Sheridan, in the role of Peggy, is the girl next door who wishes to see her name in lights. And finally the third character is Danny's brother Eddie, played by Arthur Kennedy, who tries to parlay his musical talent into a viable career.

  The great debate within the film is the struggle of values vs. ambition. Each of the three main characters starts the film off with a certain set of ideals. Danny only boxes so that he can pay for his brother's tuition, Peggy is content dancing in neighborhood contests, and Eddie quietly works on his own musical compositions while giving piano lessons to neighborhood kids. As the film progresses each of these characters runs up against an individual who exploits their ambitions and each of them gets corrupted by their own personal desires.

  Although Peggy is content to dance in small dance halls she dreams of seeing her name in lights and the pull of celebrity soon corrupts her till she eventually goes from having her name at the top of a marquee to dancing for a burlesque show. Eddie works at being a legitimate composer, but the desire for recognition has him churning out Broadway pop songs. Danny, on the other hand, is the most unambitious character in the story. All he is after is a simple life with Peggy and sees being at the top of his sport as the only way to get her back.

  Each of the three characters sells themselves for transitory pleasures, and in the case of Danny and Peggy are left with nothing. The only good thing to come from all their suffering is that Peggy finally returns to Danny and he, in turn, is granted what he had originally wanted, a simple life with Peggy. Eddie is the only one who comes out of the story relatively unscathed and also triumphant. His brother's brutal beating and subsequent blindness in the ring causes him to reassess exactly what his real priorities are.  

  The film's use of process shots and on-location footage of New York creates a very romanticized view of the city. Anatole Litvak, with some uncredited work by Jean Negulesco, presents a city where even if your dreams don't come true you can at least fall back on your friends for support. The New York in this film may not have ever really existed, but you can't fault them for tapping into the audience's belief that even if you don't achieve the goals you have set out for yourself, by the mere fact that you have survived is an achievement unto itself.

Romance & Cigarettes (2005)

  The story is simple. Told and retold by various artists from every country and decade. Romance & Cigarettes is about the folly of the male libido. It charts how one man's sexual proclivities drag him deeper into humiliating circumstances till finally the specter of death grants him one chance to repent. Nick Murder, played by James Gandolfini, is a man who cheats on his wife for the most common reason their is, boredom. Nick's home life is relatively uncomplicated and Gandolfini eschews the obvious masculine trotting that many actors in that role would have played up, and instead brings out the comic pathos of a man suffering from the insecurity that the measure of a man's virility is the number of women he can bed.

  Nick Murder is a character that wouldn't be uncommon in a Greek tragedy. He is doomed even before the story has started. As his wife and mother remind him, he comes from a long line of whoremasters. He is a man with compromised values believing in the idea of love, but not quite able to express his love in a proper way. Nick is drowning in his own vulgarity; reducing romance into a few sexual acts. It is interesting to note that his wife, Kitty, played by Susan Sarandon, and his mistress, Tula, played by Kate Winslet, are both redheads, very outspoken, and each has a job connected in some way to the making and/or selling of female garments. Tula works in a lingerie shop and Kitty is a seamstress who specializes in wedding gowns.

  Although Tula is shown to be crude, cheap, and unrefined she is really more of a victim of her emotions. For Nick, being with Tula fulfills in him a typical male fantasy of being with a woman more than willing to fulfill every sexual fantasy he could think of. She's willing to talk dirty to him, contort her body into whatever sexual position he wants, and even more importantly she seems to want nothing for it, or at least that's what Nick thinks. For as we see in a flashback sequence Tula expresses to Nick her sincere feelings for him. She genuinely loves him; she isn't naive and her attraction towards him is not so much based on his physical appearance. Tula mistakes Nick's amorous intentions and his circumcising his penis as declarations of his love for her. The reality of the situation though is that he is merely doing what he believes will keep her from getting bored with him.

  In a completely opposite spectrum Kitty is Nick's long-suffering wife. She is neglected and relegated to household chores. She has given up much of her own life to basically take care of Nick and their three daughters and although she hates him for what he has done to her Kitty can't just throw all those years away. For Kitty, it's not so much that Nick had sex with Tula, but of all the attention he shows her. It might have been in bad taste to write vulgar personal notes to her and get himself circumcised, but it is more attention than Kitty has received from him in years.

  John Turturro, the film's writer and director, came up with the idea for the film more than ten years ago when he was working on the Coen brothers film Barton Fink and over the years built the script up slowly working on scene after scene till they all fit beautifully together. Turturro has labeled his film as a "musical of the common man" and, in my opinion, more aptly as a "homemade musical" since the soundtrack for the film avoids the usual orchestral or composer specific score. The soundtrack instead reads like a mixtape proudly flaunting songs by Englebert Humperdink, Dusty Springfield, Connie Francis, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and many more. And even during the musical sequences Turturro has the original song recording mixed in with the actor's voices; making it seem like we are catching the characters in a cathartic moment trying to exorcise their emotional demons through song and dance.

  The characters in the film express what they feel through the only way they can, through pop songs. Music is a form of transportation for them because they can't afford to go and travel. They must use the materials of television, movies, music, and pop culture to manufacture their dreams. With this film Turturro is commenting on the fact that we are all guilty, to varying degrees, of viewing reality through the prism of pop culture. The people and products that the media and advertisers bombard us with on a daily basis form our own ideas about who we are. To prefer one type of food snack over another, to idolize over a specific band, or praise a film that many people have ignored is making just as powerful a personal statement as saying you were a Democrat or a Republican.

The Apartment (1960)

  When using the medium of film to explore an idea or to tell a story an obstacle that can trip up many directors and screenwriters is how to not get stuck in cliches and to capture something as transitory as the truth. Billy Wilder built a career as a dissector of American social norms and taboos, and in the process gained a reputation for making entertaining films that had an acerbic bite.

  After challenging the censors with his gender-bending comedy, Some Like It Hot, Wilder decided to take on corporate culture with The Apartment. Combining comedy with drama Wilder not only makes the bittersweet film more palatable to an audience not accustomed to his brand of cynicism, but he also upturns the ingrained belief that the main prerogative of getting ahead supersedes our duty to be a mensch.

  The genesis for the movie can be credited to a one-act play by Noel Coward entitled Still Life which was later made into a film, Brief Encounter, by David Lean. Wilder took a minor character from the story, a man who loans out his apartment to the couple in the film so that they can continue their affair, and builds his own unique story from it.

  Like many of Billy Wilder's best films The Apartment opens with a voice-over narration by C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, who rattles off a few facts about his job, his life, and more importantly his apartment. This narration plays over a beautiful aerial shot of Manhattan which is eventually interrupted when the camera cuts to the offices of Consolidated Life.

  The first image we get of C.C. Baxter is that of a worker bee trapped in a cold, cavernous, and antiseptic hive. This shot was done in homage to King Vidor's silent film The Crowd, which is also about an ambitious office worker that struggles to not get swallowed up by his soul crushing job.

  Throughout most of the film Jack Lemmon portrays Baxter as a quiet unassuming milquetoast. You can't help but feel bad for a character who lives the bachelor lifestyle but enjoys none of its amenities. The office managers on his floor dangle the executive wash room key in front of him as a way to gain access to his place for their sexual dalliances but all Baxter is ever left with is an apartment littered with empty liquor bottles and neighbors who look upon him with an equal measure of disgust and jealousy, believing that Baxter is some sort of playboy bedding a new woman every night.

  As pathetic as Baxter is, it is impossible to ignore the fact that he is a willing accomplice to upper management's abuse of power. His shortcut to the executive wash room may yield him a few pats on the back, but ultimately he is the main culprit for all his misery. The main reason why the character escapes complete derision from the audience is because of Jack Lemmon's performance. Billy Wilder looked to Lemmon to play the role of C.C. Baxter because he exuded an "average but mischievous" vibe. When you watch Jack Lemmon on screen as C.C. Baxter you aren't seeing an actor plying his trade but rather a man just being.

  Another very important element to the film's success is Shirley MacLaine who plays Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator and love interest for C.C. Baxter. Described by I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder's co-writer on the film, as being "sexy, funny, sad" MacLaine never takes the easy route by portraying Fran as a victim. Unlike most of the female characters in the film Fran is not a caricature. You don't objectify her like you do the women that Baxter's bosses bring to his apartment. Both Fran and Baxter suffer from the pangs of loneliness. While Baxter tries to fill that void with delusions of corporate advancement Fran hitches her wagon to Jeff D. Sheldrake, portrayed by Fred MacMurray, who she engages in an illicit affair with before the start of the film.

  By the start of the film though their relationship is already at its death throes. Fran's later suicide attempt is incited not so much by her relationship with Sheldrake being over, but by her realization that she allowed somebody to exploit her need for sincere human contact.

  As Fran recuperates at Baxter's apartment they unwittingly start to play house. They fall into their roles quite easily and both characters seem to finally let down their guard. Their game of house shatters Baxter's misplaced belief that attaining the props of success, e.g. a big office, access to the executive wash room, will guarantee him happiness. This epiphany of course comes at a very big price. Although Wilder gives us what we want at the end, Fran and Baxter together, the last line of the film leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Since happiness in all its forms is fragile their future together is uncertain, but maybe they can make it work. 

Some Like It Hot (1959)

  Marilyn Monroe was the preeminent sex symbol of an America where any hint of sexuality was stamped out by so-called decency groups that regularly condemned people or work that did not tow the group's initiative of protecting society from salacious subject matter. When she was alive many in the press reduced her to the dumb blonde stereotype and after she died Marilyn couldn't escape from the public's need to turn her into a martyr, an angelic beauty struck down by the harsh realities of the film business. Many cling to the myth of Marilyn; they relish the less savory aspects of her life and pour through all sorts of material that they can find, looking for a juicy piece of gossip not yet mined by the tabloids or the press. In truth it is the public's failure to give her career some serious thought that contributed to her death. The characters Marilyn played were rarely dumb blonde stereotypes, but because she was beautiful and not ashamed of her body she became a threat to respectable society and as such was denounced as indecent.

  Over the decades, since it was first released, Some Like It Hot has gained a reputation for being one of the greatest film comedies of all time. Yet to label it merely as a comedy does the film a great disservice. Billy Wilder, the director of the film, takes elements of the Prohibition Era gangster picture and uses it as the foundation to build the comedic story from.

  Wilder opens the picture in Chicago 1929 right in the middle of a police chase. Bullets fly as a police car catches up with a fleeing hearse. The hearse gets away, but the casket inside seems to be leaking. When the casket's lid is lifted open there is no body to be found though; rather we, the audience, are shocked to discover that it is a coffin filled with bootleg whiskey.

  One remarkable thing about the film is how Wilder takes his time to establish the story and most of the characters before he gives us the very first joke. For the first thirty minutes we are basically watching a story about two down on their luck musicians, Joe and Jerry, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. And unlike what many directors would probably do today he punctuates the end of the first act not with a big laugh, but rather a mass murder; a reenactment of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, in itself an event which marked the end of the Roaring Twenties.

  After this grisly event we cut to a train station with both male leads already dressed as women, Joe becoming Josephine and Jerry changing his name to Daphne. It is a testament to Wilder's abilities as a screenwriter and director that he never underestimates the audience's intelligence. Where most director's would have placed a montage sequence showing how Joe and Jerry transform into women Wilder wastes no time and just shows us the end result. Instead of completely relying on the one-note joke of two men dressing in drag he makes the movie into a sex comedy; exploring what was then mostly unchallenged ideas about gender roles, sexual identity, and attitudes about sex.

  The scene at the train station is also important because it introduces the third major character in the story; Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe. Like many films which feature Marilyn, various parts of her body are called attention to; at the train station Lemmon's character refers to her rear as "Jell-O on springs", when Josephine and Daphne formally introduce themselves to Sugar the camera is carefully framed to show Marilyn's exposed thigh and garter belt, and during the scene where Marilyn sings "I Wanna Be Loved By You" she wears a sheer see-through gown that teases the viewer as to what might lay underneath.

  Although there has never been a shortage of horror stories about working with Marilyn, especially during this movie's production, she is without a doubt at the top of her game in this film. The part of Sugar could have been easily played as a cliche gold digger type or as the usual victim of circumstances, but Marilyn doesn't allow the character to fall into simple generalizations. In the film Sugar Kane is a gold digger, but Marilyn charms us and we root for her to break from her usual role as an emotional punching bag. When she appears onscreen we practically forget about Joe and Jerry.

  With a story about two men who dress in drag it is practically mandatory to address the issue of gender roles. The film does this in several ways. First is Sugar's preference for men who aren't just millionaires but also wear glasses because to her they seem "much more gentle, and sweet, and helpless." Her character, unlike many typical female characters in movies then and now, rejects the usual protector type and opts for security instead. Sugar wants a man to depend on her instead of being dependent on them. Joe, believing he now has all the information he needs to win Sugar over, invents a new identity for himself as an effeminate millionaire who speaks with a Cary Grant affectation. All of this culminates with a seduction scene where it is Sugar who plays the aggressor and Joe is the passive one; pretending not to react to all of Sugar's attention.

  Of course the comical side of the gender role issue is explored by Jerry who gradually blurs the line of gender itself. At first when Jerry puts on her Daphne costume he relishes the idea of being in an all girl band, thinking of himself as a kid in a candy store, but he eventually starts to fit in as "one of the girls." A reason for this maybe due to how Wilder establishes that Jerry is more weak willed than Joe is; the scenes in Chicago clearly show that Joe is the dominant one in their friendship. And so it is quite believable that Jerry would begin to buckle under the strain of having to maintain a completely unfamiliar identity. A perfect example of the battle between Jerry's male and female side is during the tango-dance sequence between Jerry as Daphne and Osgood Fielding, a millionaire himself who tries to seduce Daphne. Throughout the scene Osgood complains to Daphne to stop leading and although the look on Daphne's face is that of annoyance they continue to dance and with each step and spin she takes Daphne sinks deeper into her new identity till finally all that is practically left is Daphne.

  Some Like It Hot has rightfully earned its place as one of the greatest film comedies of all time by never opting to go for the easy joke. Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond took the time to create a well crafted story and interesting characters and so they didn't need to bombard an audience with joke after joke to keep their attention. They realized that the best jokes come from the situations that characters get themselves into. To sustain laughter you cannot always cater to audience expectations, instead you must peel away the layers of a scene and find the unexpected areas where no one thought laughter could come from.

Dracula (1931)

  The resurrection of the dead is a well-mined topic utilized by countless storytellers from every society on the planet. It may well be that stories of the undead were told to explain phenomena that they observed yet did not have full comprehension of, either way these stories eventually moved away from being credible explanations for external phenomena, due to the elevation of the scientific method, and evolved predominantly as social tools to educate people on various social norms and taboos.

  Tod Browning's Dracula is not merely the first supernatural horror film of the sound era but it also has the reputation of establishing many of the cliches of the horror film. Browning, a director of silent pictures who earned the reputation of being a man who made movies about the dark side of humanity, treats the supernatural in an understated way. He cuts away from any violent action allowing the audience to fill in the missing shot with an even more gruesome scene then what Browning could have come up with or the censors allowed him to shoot. A good example of this is during the sequence where Renfield and the Count get onboard a ship and travel from Transylvania all the way back to England. We are never witness to Count Dracula's carnage rather we are only allowed to see the aftermath, a ship filled with corpses, the captain lashed to the wheel, and finally the only survivor being a cackling lunatic. 

  With the help of his cinematographer, Karl Freund, Browning creates a very atmospheric film about vampires that never veers to far from reality. An example of this is the Count's introduction in his castle cellar, which begins with the camera moving towards several coffins on the ground. Followed by a cut of a hand slowly reaching out of a coffin lid. Then Browning cuts between several shots of rats crawling on the cellar floor, possums creeping around on the dirt, and even a bug which emerges from its own coffin. Finally the Count appears standing upright, his black cape draped over his body, and then Browning pushes the camera towards the Count's face, drawing the audience's attention to his eyes which appear to be looking right at us as we sit and watch him. With this short and relatively simple introduction the viewer quickly understands that Count Dracula is one of the "Children of the night" who, like the vermin that scurry on the floor, hunts his prey in a cold and calculating manner so that he may feed on them.

  Much of the film's popularity is due to Bela Lugosi's performance. Lugosi, a Hungarian expatriate, had played the role on Broadway and although the film's producer thought him ill-suited for the part, all the reasons why Lugosi shouldn't have played the role contributed to creating the most well-known portrayal of Count Dracula. Unlike Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lugosi is suave and good looking. Although he knew very little English Lugosi learned his lines phonetically and combined with his thick accent gave a concentrated performance. He spoke his lines in an elongated manner, stretching syllables as he spoke them. The gestures he made did not just terrify the audience and his victims but also exuded a sexual charge that attracted and repelled those unfortunate enough to get in his way.

  When Dracula was first released the Great Depression had just begun and its box office success may be due in part to the public's desire for entertaining distractions, but even if that was the case it is not such a stretch to read the film as an indirect comment of what was going on in the country at that time. Count Dracula representing the corrupt and gluttonous mass of people, denizens of the Prohibition era nightlife, had become less than human after spending an entire decade indulging in the short term pleasures of the flesh. With their fangs stuck deep into the country's jugular they bled the nation just as the Count does his victims in the film.

  The undead are the last vestiges of the superstitious world that many still cling on to. Tod Browning understood that the reasons why we fear these monsters is that they played on our basest fears of death and the otherworldly. None of us are sure what waits for us after we die but a simple glance at the mirror can be a reminder for many that death is always at work. By not completing the transition into the afterlife Count Dracula has regressed into an animal that lurks in the dark, incapable of seeing what he has become. The film doesn't treat the monsters as a separate species, but rather a possible offshoot of humanity; those tainted by a fear of letting go. They skulk waiting for the right time to strike their victims, but what few battles they win are bitter sweet for they are resigned to live in cold damp earth separated from many of the things that had made life worth living.