I’ve been spoiling you. Seven color updates in a row? Okay, four color updates, ten years, and three color updates. Still, I double-checked the math; it adds up. So you get to eat your veggies today with a film I was hoping to do back when I was updating this blog with some degree of regularity. It is one I patiently waited for to show up again on TCM, Dracula’s Daughter, and they never obliged. To borrow a phrase: obsessiveness finds a way. In a better resolution, too.
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Dracula (Dracula’s Daughter / Son of Dracula)
Genre: Horror, Mystery & Suspense
Format: Multiple Formats, Black & White, Dolby, NTSC, Subtitled, Full Screen, Dubbed
Dracula’s Daughter – The Movie
Calling this a rushed sequel to a movie (Dracula, 1931) that debuted five years before it was released probably doesn’t make much sense, but just read the Wikipedia article. Gloria Holden stars as Countess Marya Zaleska, daughter of a certain well-known vampire, alive and hating it. She tries to cure herself by torching pop’s body, then trying psychiatry. Conveniently, Dr. Jeffrey Garth is already on the case of defending “Von” Helsing from killing dad. Due to peer pressure, she reverts to her blood-sucking ways, kidnaps Dr. Garth’s main-squeeze/secretary, and tries to turn him.
Dracula’s Daughter – The Furs
It’s 1936, and workplace romance is not only acceptable; it’s the plot of hundreds of movies produced every year. Meet Janet Blake, a wealthy baroness’ daughter moonlighting as secretary to Dr. Jeffery Garth.
Played by Marguerite Churchill, she has arrived to retrieve her boss to return him to London to defend Von Helsing. She does so in a large, lynx fur collar, as any personal assistant of the 1930s is prone to do.
Garth delivers the line of dialog that establishes she is the daughter of baroness in this scene. Audiences were ready to accept vampires, not Janet’s somewhat lavish wardrobe for a personal assistant’s dime.
If you thought the titular character would be doing a lot of the fur fashion work in this flick, you would be wrong. Gloria Holden’s Countess Zaleska has only one fur, and it only appears for a few seconds before it’s gone.
On to the star of the show. About halfway through the film, Janet cruises around doing secretary stuff wearing this enormous white fox fur cape. Again, perfectly normal for 1930s secretaries, or so Hollywood has told me.
This beautiful cape gets a nice amount of screen time from all angles.
We are treated to several closeups of Miss Churchill framed by the white fox.
Janet is kidnapped at the end of the scene. Sadly, evil Countess Zaleska has no sympathy for her captives staying warm in a drafty Transylvanian castle, and the cape is never seen again.
That’s all for the fur, but wow, what a fur. I would have used this without the bonus lynx collar, but that was a solid value add. It would have been nice if Zaleska added more to the runtime, but that’s a minor quibble.
Film Runtime: 72 minutes
Fur Runtime: approx 3 minutes
Onscreen Fur Ratio: 4.2%
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