DRACULA & FRANKENSTEIN

We were lucky in Toronto:  after sobering weather Monday, Sandy largely passed us by.

Tonight being Halloween, I went to see the double feature of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN at the Fairview Cinema near Don Mills station. It was an event in the new Classic Movie Meetup.  The Fairview has a special screening room for small audiences, and they may be renting it for future events if enough people are interested.  In a few weeks they plan to show Hitchcock's VERTIGO; unfortunately, it's on the same day I'm going to an opera screening. (In theory I could attend the opera in the afternoon and the movie in the evening, but in practice I'd get a huge headache.)

The two movies we saw were restored versions of two Universal horror classics from the early '30s.  That was in the first years of talking pictures, and they're both a bit slow and talky like many films of that time, DRACULA especially.  But FRANKENSTEIN has some great set pieces (the birth, the fiery windmill climax), and they both have some good lines, like Dracula's "I never drink... wine." I spotted two actors who were in both movies:  Dwight Frye as Renfield/Fritz and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing/Baron Frankenstein.

On the way home I was chatting with Cecilia, a Brazilian who lives near my neighborhood.  She's been in Canada less than a year, but she already speaks pretty good English.