Blackula (1972) The Cabinet of Dr. Berry Gordy Part I

 Blackula (1972)

The Cabinet of Dr. Berry Gordy

    Reviewers Note:  Some of you may remember Mike as one of our guest editors from this summer. When he offered to do a guest review of Blackula I was interested but this review has blown away my expectations.  So I'm posting it first and my own review will be posted on Saturday.  

Author’s note: A few of you may remember me from a series of reviews covering Disney’s animated sequel machine that ruled the direct-to-DVD market in the early- to mid-2000s. This review will be a little bit different - This movie is more watchable, and I believe it also deserves more respectful consideration given its location in place and time. 

I

Political economist and certified cool guy Karl Marx observed that “capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction” - That given sufficient time, the internal contradictions contained in the existing order would give birth to a new synthesis better-suited for survival. While not as geopolitically fraught, movements in the arts have undergone similar cycles of decline and replacement; audiences and tastes change, or world events make certain forms of expression gauche. In “classical” music, the decline of the patronage system in the late 18th century and the rise of egalitarian and nationalist political movements at the start of the 19th helped bring about the rise of the romantics - Composers who wore their hearts on their sleeves and could appeal to mass audiences instead of the courtly realm of the Great and Good. In the visual arts, Art Nouveau spoke to an optimistic, rapidly industrializing world at (relative) peace with a burgeoning and increasingly sophisticated middle class, right up until the Kaiser learned that the mass of trains filled with stony, grim-faced men heading west to the French frontier could not be recalled. And, more relevant to this story, the Hollywood of big studios and the Hays code was an extremely successful system that exercised autocratic control over mass culture... Until bored audiences, foreign films, TV, and antitrust laws blew it apart.

The studio system of the 30s, 40s, and 50s was successful but fragile, relying on a lack of competition from other forms of media and a relatively stable clique of top-tier players (Warner, MGM, Fox, etc.). It also relied on anticompetitive business models and a deeply unequal relationship with theaters - If those theaters weren’t outright owned by the studios themselves. Bundling distribution deals (studios selling movies to theatres in packages of five) meant that quality often took a back seat to quantity for the three to four “B-movies” in the package - Films more likely to be skewered by unpretentious midwesterners and their robot pals than to appear in Criterion box sets. Actors themselves had little choice but to commit to a particular studio for multi-picture deals, and extracting yourself from a contract for a passion project or change of career direction was difficult at best (all other thoughts about the modern film aside, it’s unlikely that Robert Pattinson would have been able to pivot from Twilight to The Lighthouse in the 1940s). However, for the most part, the system worked: Prestige films brought middle and upper-class audiences to theaters and earned the industry credibility, while low-budget monster films and westerns made money through sheer margins. 

As mentioned before, numerous forces came together to topple the studio system and create a new environment for filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond. The bundling distribution scheme came to an end shortly after 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled against Paramount (and the anti-competitive business model of the industry more generally) and affirmed the need for a wall between film producers and theaters. Television began to cut into audiences; after all, why go to a drive-in to watch a crappy western when an equivalently crappy western was on at home? Of course, an attempt at reinvention was inevitable, and Hollywood’s answer was the epic picture, a cinematic experience on ultra-wide film that could not be duplicated at home. To the industry’s credit, some of the greatest films of all time emerged from this period, films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia among others. However, these expensive films were financially risky, and even ambiguously successful outings like Cleopatra could not be brushed off as easily as an underperforming B-movie. Finally (and most relevant to our story), audiences were becoming weary of movies operating under the stifling moral strictures of the Hays code - They wanted something more real.

II

The Hays Code was Hollywood’s attempt to make an end-run around looming federal regulation of films in the early 1930s. Lawmakers and moral leaders were becoming increasingly hostile to films that, in their minds, could usher in moral degeneracy and societal breakdown (as an off-the-cuff example, the 1925 adaptation of Ben-Hur has a lot more boob than the 1959 adaptation). Rather than face the real possibility of government censorship (the Supreme Court having ruled in 1915 that films were not protected by the first amendment), the film industry created a self-censorship system that they hoped would mollify critics. First, a list of “do’s and don’ts”, followed by the more formal and legally binding Hays Code, put strong limits on what could and could not be shown in movies. The penalties for violating the code were severe, and even otherwise-disreputable Poverty Row studios bent the knee. 

The code can be shocking to a modern reader; only portrayal of “white slavery” is mentioned as taboo, and “miscegenation” is forbidden. Drug use could not be portrayed, and the use of alcohol was permitted only when essential to the plot or characterization. Crime and criminals could not be portrayed in a sympathetic light - The good guys always won, and lawbreakers always got their just desserts. Films had to be morally unambiguous, patriotic, and while not explicitly religious, had to be properly god-fearing. The actual code is reproduced here.

As the studios declined in the 1950s, the code began to decline with them. Foreign films did not operate under the same rules, and could portray much more nuanced and “adult” versions of life. Television was also outside the code. The censors had been largely discredited when the second Red Scare crashed and burned, and as studios ceded more and more ground to independent producers, the code became a dead letter. Directors began to push against the boundaries of the code earlier in the 50s, but by the end of the decade the rules had changed entirely, and audiences were more than willing to follow. Whole new genres emerged, revisionist takes on old subjects became dominant, and the broader counterculture could count on another medium of expression to overthrow the old order.

Indeed, as the Hays Code passed into history, filmmakers and independent studios began to question whether realism was enough to keep audiences in seats. Instead, they asked, could we succeed by going beyond realism, offering a lurid world of sex, drugs, and crime that was only adjacent to reality? Such films had appeared before 1930, but it was in the 1960s that the true exploitation film came into being. Cheap, shocking, and sexy, these movies could claim a niche where they were unlikely to be supplanted by TV and could draw large audiences looking for a more downscale alternative to director-driven art films. These films would also start reaching audiences once ignored by Hollywood, including Black audiences. The stage was set for the rise of Blacksploitation as a genre.

III

Author’s note: This section draws heavily on the excellent essay “The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation” by Ed Guerrero. If you’d like to read it yourself, check your local library or a certain… hub. Of sci. Also, I feel like it should be said that the author is a white millennial from a very white state; do with this what you will.

The relationship between Hollywood and Black audiences before the 1960s was one of marginalization and explicit racism both in production and finished product. Roles for Black actors were limited to insulting archetypes lifted straight from the minstrel shows of the 19th century; these archetypes persisted well into the 1940s and beyond, even into children’s animated entertainment (in the long arc of me reviewing stuff everything cycles back to Disney, although as far as I know “Song of the South” never received a direct-to-DVD sequel. Well, maybe in Europe). The black actors that did find work faced a difficult choice - Work within the system and face disapproval in their own community (as an example, the Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel), or take a less conciliatory tack and risk being shut out of the industry entirely (Paul Robeson). Black directors were unheard of, and studio leadership was entirely exclusionary; movies were not marketed to Black audiences and their place in the viewing market was incidental.

As the civil rights movement began to pick up steam and as a Black middle class began to emerge across the country, Hollywood slowly took notice. The minstrel archetypes that had dominated film were no longer acceptable in light of increasingly vocal and visible protests and demonstrations across the country. Black audiences were certain to reject these stereotypes and even white audiences started to cringe at portrayals that had been standard 20 years prior. Movie ticket buyers were becoming more diverse, and (cynically) the film industry realized that its growth would have to account for this new viewership. The answer at first was a new Black archetype, most notably given form by Sidney Poitier. This new Black man was confident, erudite, and morally upstanding, a complete 180-degree turn from the old stereotypes. The audience's response was initially positive, and it seemed like a corner had been turned.

Author’s note - While his place in film history is complex, Sidney Poitier is an outstanding actor and I believe his work speaks for itself. I highly recommend “In the Heat of the Night.”

Returning to Marx’s adage, the problems with this New Man were apparent almost immediately. Black audiences questioned the integrationist position of Poitier’s characters, who could succeed as a Black man in a White man’s society but not exist outside of that society (black separatism had started to gain real credibility in the late 1960s as the classic civil rights movement collided with an increasingly-strident white backlash). There was also the question of his character’s chaste relations with female characters - The New Man was still constrained by White fears of Black virility and was thus consigned to sexlessness in films where white co-stars had romantic relationships (A more thorough and sophisticated analysis of this subject is given by James Baldwin - The essay Baldwin wrote about Poitier, partly an interview with the actor, appears in the book “The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings”).

It was only a matter of time before the exploitation fad would shamelessly cross over to Black audiences. By the end of the 1960s, the movie industry was in a moment of crisis, with expensive failure after expensive failure leading to the near-collapse of big names like MGM, Columbia, and Fox. Tastes were changing, and exploitation films were cheap money makers that could buy time for studios to recover and regain relevancy. Black audiences made up larger portions of movie audiences and tended to be younger. At the same time, Hollywood had come under increasing pressure from the civil rights movement to diversify its hiring practices behind the camera. For the first time, Black directors would direct largely Black casts and could operate largely independently from studio interference during production (instead, studios would purchase independent films for distribution). The stage was set for Sweet Sweetback.

1970’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was the first major hit in the genre that would come to be known as Blaxploitation. Directed by Melvin Van Peebles (who sadly passed this year), the film was a lightning bolt that immediately changed the American movie industry. Filmed for a production cost of less than $500,000, the movie had all the tropes that would come to define the genre: A confident, potent black man defying white power structures, comfort with portraying sex work and the drug industry, and shocking levels of violence. Reactions among the Black intelligentsia were equivocal at best, but the film was an undeniable commercial success; indeed, such a success that even major studios took notice. MGM quickly retooled an action movie they had in production (replacing the white lead with Richard Roundtree) and released Gordon Parks’ Shaft a year later. Shaft was a more conventional and less transgressive film; the titular character was not as morally ambiguous as Sweet Sweetback, although still possessing a bad-ass attitude and masculine coolness unthinkable for a Black role only a few years before. The film was a huge success, even among white audiences. The blaxploitation gold rush was on, as studios and distributors searched manically among independent Black directors and actors for the next big hit.

Thus, Blacula. Directed by William Crain, the film starred TV actor William Marshall (interestingly, Dr. Richard Daystrom on “Star Trek,” among other roles) as Mamuwalde, an African prince turned to vampirism by Count Dracula himself in the 1780s, then sealed away until reawakening in Los Angeles in 1972. Reviews were (and still are) mixed, but the film succeeded financially and maintains a cult following to this day. It also exists at an interesting crossroads - The collision of 19th-century gothic horror with the hip and funky metropolitan culture of the early 1970s.

Now we ask - Is this film an underrated gem of the post-Universal vampire film library? Or is the film more notable as a historical artifact, with its scares somewhat toothless? Let’s dive in.