Continuing with our Halloween-inspired "Universal Monsters"/"A Christmas Carol" thing, we sneak back to 1936 for "Dracula's Daughter."
The star of that film is Otto Kruger, whom we heard as Scrooge in that U.S. Navy "Joy to the World" AFRTS radio show from the mid-1950s!
Mr. Kruger's role in "Dracula's Daughter" is a bit unusual for him, as he's the hero/romantic lead and even has the two female leads fighting over him!
As I mentioned before, he was really good at playing suave villains hiding under an air of respectability. This kind of leads to being a good type for "mad scientist" roles in horror movies, but he only played that type of role a couple of times, including Universal's 1945 " The Jungle Captive."
This is more how I think of him, as he seems to be a respected scientist on the surface, but is secretly carrying out crazy experiments! He lends a much-needed sense of professionalism to this flick!
I think the only other time he got to play such a role was much later in 1958's "The Colossus of New York." Check out the awesome trailer on the IMDB:
Fun!
You may recall that the host of that AFRTS show was Robert Paige, former Universal contractee. He had perhaps his best role ever in 1943's "Son of Dracula" and he makes the most of it:
Since no one's asking, I'll throw in my two cents on the unusual casting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as Dracula: I agree that he's not really right for the part, but I'm a fan and think it's cool that he got to play all of the classic monsters in one movie or another!
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