![]() Heather Angel is surprisingly good as Rosa, though David Manners, in his last film role, is monotonous as Drood. Declaring his passion for Rosa, held in check for many years, he bursts out with "I love you! I love you! I love you!" an unintentionally hilarious moment uncannily similar to one in Singin' in the Rain parodying early talkie melodrama. Best playing cool-under-pressure sinister or morally ambiguous types, his lovesick choirmaster isn't exactly outside his range, but the character's rash, emotions-driven behavior isn't a good fit, especially with the sometimes-horrible dialogue given him. Instead the part went to Claude Rains, to complete a two-picture deal with Universal. Karloff, as one might have suspected, was the first actor approached to play Jasper given Karloff's desire to expand his repertoire, it's surprising he didn't accept. In Drood, Sullivan has one almost good scene with Neville following a quarrel with Drood, but otherwise Crisparkle is merely fat and properly moral, a two-dimensional character. Sullivan in that film, like a dozen or more other characters, is unforgettably realized, a marvelously droll characterization. I've not seen that film version, but Sullivan again played Jaggers in David Lean's 1945 version, one of the greatest films of all-time. Jaggers, the lawyer overseeing young Pip's mysterious but bountiful allowance in Walker's earlier Great Expectations. Mister Crisparkle, played by fat British character actor Francis L. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Rev. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is completely lacking the flavor of the best Dickens adaptations, even the Hollywood-ized MGM David Copperfield. Jasper, however, takes an immediate dislike to Neville, and since he's unaware that Edwin and Rosa have recently called it quits, plots to get rid of both men. Neville is immediately smitten with Rosa as well, and she with him, which is fine with both her and Edwin as they recognize they're more like brother and sister than husband and wife, calling off their impending wedding. Into this mix arrive yet more orphans: part Ceylonese twins Neville (Douglass Montgomery) and Helena Landless (Valerie Hobson). Jasper secretly loves Rosa, who is increasingly uncomfortable with his vague advances. He is also guardian and uncle to handsome Edwin Drood (David Manners), orphaned in childhood, and teaches music to Drood's fiancée, orphan Rosa Bud (Heather Angel). In the film, Cloisterham Cathedral choirmaster John Jasper (Claude Rains) secretly visits an opium den to feed his drug addiction. The story partly revolves around Drood's disappearance and possible murder, resulting in much speculation through the decades about the identity of his assailant, though it is widely assumed, based on solid evidence, that Dickens from the beginning had intended a leading character named Jasper to be Drood's killer. Dickens had planned 12 installments for Drood, but he died in June 1870 after finishing only the first six. As he had done before, it was originally published in multiple installments over many months. The film adapts Charles Dickens's unfinished novel. The period flavor it strives for seems archly artificial, and the acting is all over the map: English actors speaking with English accents, American actors mostly speaking with American accents with a few godawful attempts at cockney and other, indescribable accents. Almost embarrassingly vying for respectability, it tries too hard to look classy, instead coming off stiff and forced. Indeed, it's a real slog getting through it. Quite unlike Mystery of the Blue Room, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not entertaining. That film had big money behind it, just over $1 million, which made Universal's Drood look cheap by comparison, even though the company augmented its backlot (near its Notre Dame set) just for this production. Both films seem to have been made to cash in on the publicity surrounding MGM's all-star David Copperfield, released after Universal's Great Expectations but before Drood. (By way of comparison, The Raven, made that same year, cost half that amount, even with Karloff and Lugosi headlining the cast.) Universal and director Stuart Walker were coming off another Charles Dickens adaptation, Great Expectations (1934), which like Drood, also flopped. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, on the other hand, was quite expensive ($215,000) for the then-undernourished Universal. ![]() ![]() When Kino simultaneously released two wannabe classic Universal Horror films, The Secret of the Blue Room (1933) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935) I watched and reviewed the former first, delighted to discover this modest thriller, the lowest-budgeted feature on Universal's slate that year, was in fact pretty nifty, a cracklin' good mystery film with very slight horror elements, buttressed by an excellent cast. ![]()
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