If you're looking for an actual street address for Hollywood's Poverty Row, we nominate 4516 Sunset Boulevard. Its history was grand: Reliance-Majestic Studio was built at that site in 1914, and D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation there. Within a few years, though, the property had been acquired by Tiffany Studios, a small production company whose big star was Mae Murray. When sound came in, Tiffany offered westerns with Rex Lease, Bob Steele and Ken Maynard; by 1932, however, the studio -- renamed for a time Tiffany-Stahl, after head of production John Stahl -- was in serious financial trouble. The solution? The Death Kiss, a cheap (0,000 budget) mystery thriller with three of the stars of the previous year's hit Dracula, played up big-time as a Bela Lugosi horror film (it isn't). What it IS is a low-budget murder mystery taking place at a movie studio: 'Hey, we don't need to build sets or go on location, we'll just shoot the movie right HERE!' sounds an awful lot like a plan that Spanky & Alfalfa or Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland would've been making a few years later. Thankfully, Kino's recent DVD and Blu-ray release will open this mystery up to a new round of Lugosi completists.

The film can't live up to its socko opening: a well-dressed gent exiting a swanky club is kissed on the stairway by a gorgeous dame he doesn't know. She's doing the Judas bit for a carload of torpedoes, though, and fingering the chump for rub-out, ya git me? (Sorry, I always write like that when discussing gangster pictures.) They open fire, the guy falls dead, and the director yells 'Cut!' as the camera pulls back to reveal we're watching a scene from a movie in this scene from a movie. The actor playing the victim responds to the director's admonition to use 'less theatrics when falling' by bleeding all over the sound stage; turns out one of those guns had genuine non-prop bullets in it.

The two no-nonsense cops who arrive quickly focus on leading lady Adrienne Ames, and not just because she's gorgeous and sexy: she just happens to be the ex-wife of the dead actor and beneficiary of his 00,000 life insurance policy, and considering Tiffany was probably paying her 50, tops, to make this film, that ain't hay. Her boyfriend, mystery scenario writer David Manners, is going to snoop around and figure out who REALLY done it: Edward Van Sloane, director? Bela Lugosi, studio manager? Alexander Carr, studio head? Or...someone ELSE?!?!?

The fun in the picture doesn't come from Mr. Lugosi, who has little to do and not much screen time. There are three good reasons to watch The Death Kiss:

--David Manners is way better than he was in Dracula or The Mummy, smirking his way through the film and making the cops look like idiots (but using funny studio head of security Vince Barnett, an able-bodied security guard in the Gomer Pyle tradition, as his sidekick) and uncovering clues and suspects the cops ignored, all while romancing Miss Ames.

--The art deco design of the offices and sets is mouth-watering; look for the phony Academy Award-type statuettes in the boss' office (as well as a bust of Napoleon!).

--The film is a nice peek at what a small movie studio looked like in the early 1930s, including the screening and projection rooms and a glimpse at how early talkies were made.


'We nailed together crude, overhead moveable arms, made from 2x4s and counter-balanced by sandbags. These permitted us, after a fashion, to follow actors as they moved about the set, recording sound. These rough gadgets eventually led manufacturers to design the mic booms which came into use.' --John A. Stransky, Jr., recording engineer at Tiffany quoted in Gene Fernett's book Hollywood's Poverty Row.

By 1933, Tiffany was gone; the original Monogram Pictures (the one that became part of Republic) would take over the lot, and then, much later, Columbia Pictures until the facilities burned in the mid-1960s. It's a supermarket parking lot now.

Needless to say, Bela Lugosi's career was spotty, but he was busy in the early 1930s (well over a dozen films and a serial in the couple of years after Dracula) and The Death Kiss is more interesting than most of them. Its long been just a curiosity for Lugosi fans and no good print of it surfaced until a few years ago when most of one was discovered at the Library of Congress. The new Kino Classics Blu-ray of the title is from those 35mm elements, with original color highlights as tinted by hand by Gustav Brock in 1932. Most of the film looks great, although the second reel is clearly from an inferior print and later in the film there's a reel with spotty sound. The disc includes commentary by Video Watchdog's Richard Harland Smith, who tells us everything about every player in the film in such detail I was surprised he didn't reveal whether the men in the film preferred boxers or briefs.

Bottom line, The Death Kiss is a pretty good picture with an historical interest, but don't go looking for a Bela Lugosi horror show.

Thanks to our friends at the Greenbriar Picture Shows for the illustration.

Clifford Weimer is a writer and film historian in Sacramento, CA. He can usually be found lurking about the dark corners of a movie theatre at inthebalcony.com.