Word: lugosi
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...World inflation has reached crisis proportions, only we do not realize it," says Deak, his Bela Lugosi accent echoing his native Transylvania. The demands for federal spending on welfare and defense are so intense that "various measures taken by Government can affect inflation and the dollar, but only very little. I'm afraid that inflation will increase, and eventually our monetary system will collapse and our social structure will change. I went through all this before-in Hungary, Austria and Germany hi the 1920s-and the trend is inevitable...
This is not the half-century-old dramatization by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, in which Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel was moved up to the 1920s--the version that brought fame to Bela Lugosi (whom I saw play it here in Boston near the end of his life) and is now doing the same on Broadway for Frank Langella. Nor is it the later adaptation by Crane Johnson, which I have never seen...
...stage before. Not surprisingly, he moves on stage exceedingly well; also not surprisingly, he is vocally deficient. His diction often lacks conviction, and the combination of Latin and Transylvanian accents and some scanted syllables does not help intelligibility. He brings to the role neither the hypnotic power of Lugosi nor the sensuous elegance of Langella...
Kaye-Martin's portrayal of the master of the house was not masterful, but good--he had the job of portraying the banality of evil in a high-faluting style, but overdid the banality a bit. He rants and demands and insults with all the consummate evil of Bella Lugosi and Martin Bormann fused; Kaye-Martin overplays his role just so much, just so much that despite his overkill in the sexist-megalomaniac-asshole department, the crowd still takes his character seriously, according his work with all of the hisses and spittoons given the villain in any old time movie...
...into unexplained comas during routine operations. When he explains why he's doing it--the unimportance of the individual compared with the advancement of science--to a drugged Genevieve Bujold, the young doctor who has stumbled onto the terrible secret, the scene rings familiar. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and a thousand others have been here before, and one wonders why Widmark isn't indulging in similar eye-rolling or stuttering. Crichton forces him to become a stoic zombie, as if to hide what this really is--a hokey mad-doctor scene--and thus robs...