The Vampire’s Ghost (1945)

“You are seeing something that doesn’t exist; you are looking at a legend&#148. That’s how the vampire of this very different little vampire picture from the 1940s, Webb Fallon, describes himself. I have wanted to see this picture for years and I finally have. It is currently available via streaming only on Netflix.

The story and the screenplay (in part) for The Vampire’s Ghost were written by Leigh Brackett. Leigh Brackett reputedly finished the screenplay for the Bogart and Bacall classic, The Big Sleep, when the nominal writer, novelist William Faulkner, fell into a bottle. She later wrote the screenplays for the John Wayne-Howard Hawks collaborations Rio Bravo, Hatari, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo and finished her career by writing at least the draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strike Back. If you’ve ever wondered at the similarities among those John Wayne-Howard Hawks pictures, it’s no accident.

The Vampire’s Ghost is a vampire picture made by lowly Republic Studios before the genre had degenerated into a dreary (if gory sameness. It is a moody, languorous vampire movie without bats, capes, castles, counts with Eastern European accents, blood, or even a great deal of action, in some ways reminiscent in tone to Cat People (the original) or I Walked With a Zombie. This material might have turned to gold under the hand of an artist like Jacques Tourneur. Alas, that’s not the case.

English Shakespearean actor John Abbott’s Webb Fallon is urbane, lonely, world-weary, even rather charming. Abbott (at one point blacklisted, apparently by mistake) portrays this very different vampire with precision and restraint. He, the concept, and the screenplay are the highlights of the picture.

The Vampire’s Ghost takes place in Africa, at least in the Africa of Poverty Row soundstages and backlots. Unless you are very tolerant of stereotypical representations of Africans, it is unwatchable.

Low points:

  • The weak acting of the ingenue leads
  • Uneven direction
  • Very low-budget costumes, sets, effects
  • The appalling pidgins used by the poor actors playing Africans

High points:

  • John Abbott’s solid acting
  • Intriguing idea
  • Adele Mara. This former Xavier Cugat singer and dancer was really quite pretty as a dancer in Fallon’s bar. Her dance routine early in the picture, while tame by today’s standards, was undoubtedly hot stuff in 1945. She died in May of last year, BTW.

I’m glad to have seen it at least although I probably won’t bother watching it again. This picture is mostly a curiosity, a nostalgia piece.

4 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    Sounds like something I would enjoy, and I’ve also been told that pulp fiction fans like myself would enjoy Brackett’s early science-fiction stories.

    I re-watched White Zombie a few months ago, which was somewhat better and worse than I recalled for a lot of the same reasons you cite here.

  • I recommend her science fiction. She was one of the very best writers of the “space opera” style. White Zombie features a good performance by Lugosi and great set decoration. I find it excruciatingly slow (and I have a pretty good stomach for slow).

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  • sam Link

    A story I read about Faulkner on The Big Sleep was he asked the studio head if he could work from home. Sure, he was told. So he went back to Oxford. (Oh, and he called Chandler up and asked him who killed Owen Taylor. Chandler said he didn’t know…)

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