Faces of Bela Lugosi
More faces of Bela Lugosi from the Professor Kinema Archives…
Picture Show
Faces of Bela Lugosi
There are many faces to Bela Lugosi. Here are a few, courtesy of Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans, Professor Kinema (Bela the Gypsy), and eBay (Murder Legendre), to get your week off to a good start.
On the Set with Glenn Strange
as the Frankenstein Monster
Boris Karloff had the acting chops, but Glenn Strange had the look. His portrayal of the Frankenstein Monster is the one monsterkids in the 1960s saw the most on merchandise. He's my favorite Monster.
Photograph courtesy of Professor Kinema
Lugosi as Dracula
There are four actors I like in the role of Count Dracula: Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Louis Jordan, and Jack Palance. Palance played a tragic Dracula in Dan Curtis' 1974 production, Bram Stoker's Dracula, for television. Jordan played a more suave and sexier Count in the 1977 BBC production that aired here in the States on PBS' Great Performances. To most fans of the vampire mythos in modern cinema, it is either Lugosi or Lee as the definitive night-stalker.
It's a tough call, but my vote goes to Lugosi. Both in Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's novel, the Count is a noticeably different person from those around him, a difference that does not fit in well with the social scene. Lugosi made Dracula the evil that works among us easily. So easily. And but for one brief observation he makes regarding true death to be glorious, all those worse things than death seem to make him very content, indeed.
Keep your tragic vampires, your Goth vampires, your vegan munchers, your neutered vampires who imbibe synthetic or animal blood to get by, in an altruistic but vane struggle against the savage urge, hoping to retain their humanity as best they can.
I like my vampires to be deceivers in the night, stalking among us, ready to pounce and corrupt because they relish their evil without regret or angst.
Lon Chaney as the Frankenstein Monster
Lon Chaney Jr. as the Frankenstein Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein. Courtesy of Professor Kinema.
On the Set: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
Photographs courtesy of Professor Kinema: Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmeralda.