Wagon Tracks (1919)

Director: Lambert Hillyer

Cast: William S. Hart, Jane Novak, Robert McKim, Lloyd Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I get it. I’m supposed to like every silent film equally, owing to the fact that the most nostalgic one person can be is being wistful for things that happened decades before their own birth. That’s why I’ll show up to pretty much any silent movie projected for a crowd…

But this? I don’t know. I really don’t. The few westerns I’ve seen from the era at the very least are possessed of the breathless action that can make silent films just as watchable today as it was when they were released. Here, though, the proceedings are glacial. One might be able to forgive that, but the cardinal sin in this film is that for some reason its nearly obsessively talky. Why make a film at all prior to The Jazz Singer (1927) if you’re just going to talk to me the whole time? Were people just so starved for entertainment immediately after World War I that they would take just anything? No wonder we couldn’t just keep things together for more than a few years.

All right. Maybe this film isn’t for me. There are going to be any number of westerns that fail to garner my interest. If you’re one of those types that… I dunno… do the absolutely insane thing of purchasing a horse, you may be prepared to dismiss my opinions and seek out the film for yourself. I’m sorry for most of your life choices, but I’d be remiss to not tell you that this film is only barely a Western. Most of the first hour is obsessed with a murder mystery in which even the characters themselves are not all that interested.

Do better, the past. I keep trying to defend you, and occasionally you make it more difficult than you need to.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Director: Lambert Hillyer

Cast: Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Edward van Sloan

Have I Seen it Before: I acquired a big box-set containing as many films featuring the classic Universal Monsters several years ago. It took me a number of years to get through all of the films featured—indeed, every sub-set focussed on a particular monster had a copy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—but as this came right on the heels of Dracula (1931), I watched it very early in the process.

Did I Like It: It is a slight movie, and yet more cinematically inventive than the original. That’s not hard, as the original Dracula—despite it’s seminal image of Lugosi as the Count—has all of the inventive camera work of a C-SPAN marathon.

Lugosi is long gone by this point—indeed, he only ever resumed the role in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—and the real heat in the monster movie was on Frankenstein, as the superlative Bride of Frankenstein (1935) had thoroughly dominated. We’re stuck with some follow-up to the original story, and that legacy is largely put on the shoulders of Professor van Helsing (Sloan).

And from there, the story unfolds largely the same. There’s a square jawed hero, a damsel in distress, and more than enough flimsy looking bats on wires. Holden provides a suitably spooky image as the new vampire, but as memory fades after just a couple of years between screenings, even that can’t lift the film up like the original.

One can’t imagine why they didn’t resurrect the Count for this story. Maybe there was a problem with Lugosi, but even still, so many people have played the role, and it wasn’t like Universal was squeamish about recasting Frankenstein’s Monster after Karloff swore the part off. They could have still used the daughter. Use both of them!