VAMPYR: DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GREY (1932) **1/2 Generally considered one of the greatest vampire flicks of all time. That may or may not be true, but it's certainly among the slowest. It also has to be said that Carl-Theodor Dreyer was a director of the magnitude as to be interesting even without much going on. So, it's a matter of priorities-I'm not one to sit around marveling at the incandescent glories of halogen lights bouncing off of gauze screens back into cameras for the duration of a film. If's it's up to me I'd mix in some great actors, and a groovin' plot, maybe even a bottle of wine that's not just sitting on a shelf. Dreyer, working esoteric turf filtered through his Lutheranism as much as the gauzy light, has little time for such bourgeois trifles. Instead he creates a workshop of historic shadows, delivered with the feel of a light hallucinogen. It doesn't fail to move you, but not in the way that vampire films usually do, and not with the power that Dreyer was capable of generating. Unlike many, I don't see a problem for Dreyer working this medium: of everyone in the world you figure that the hyper-religious and the sincerely evil would probably know the most about vampires, and the evil generally being liars like Nixon, I'm happy enough to get my information from Dreyer. In a similar sense, I don't object to great directors dabbling in horror-it's a legit medium whether taken seriously or not. Dreyer's effects are understated, but effective. Obviously, he was working in black and white; what was it that Spinal Tap's guitarist said, "It wasn't Mozart's fault that he didn't have an amp. He played as loud as he could." Jan Hieronimko looks a lot like Mark Twain, but I don't think that was the point.
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