update review

reviews/the-death-kiss-1932.md

@@ -5,22 +5,24 @@ grade: D
 slug: the-death-kiss-1932
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-The Death Kiss reunites three of Dracula’s principals, with David Manners playing a screenwriter investigating an on-set murder after his actress girlfriend finds herself under suspicion. Edward Van Sloan plays a director, and Bela Lugosi a studio manager.
+The Death Kiss reunites three of Dracula’s principals, with David Manners playing a screenwriter investigating an on-set murder after his actress girlfriend finds herself under suspicion. Edward Van Sloan plays a director, and Bela Lugosi is a studio manager.
 
 It starts awful, but this proves deliberate. After a scene featuring stilted dialog leaden with exposition, we witness an overwrought death scene.
 
 Then, off-screen, Van Sloan calls “Cut!” and the camera pans over to reveal the set’s artifice and the studio crew. Sloan orders another take. The crew resets, spouting professional jargon. “When we do it again, silk number ten,” says one crew member. “Up high, ninety-nine!” shouts another. It’s capped off with Sloan directing the dying man, “When you die this time, let’s have less gymnastics—and don’t spin like a top when you fall.”
 
 Then a scream as a crew member discovers the actor isn’t playing dead, and we get a dynamic tracking shot as Van Sloan crosses the panicked set to phone Lugosi.
 
-It promises a better movie than the one that follows. It’s not so much a bait-and-switch as false hope.
+This setup promises a better movie than the one that follows. It’s not so much a bait-and-switch as false hope.
 
 You see, despite this opening scene’s condescension to B-movie theatrics, the film wallows in them.
 
 Manners soon arrives, sporting an Errol Flynn-like swagger that’s miles away from his stiff turn in Dracula. Decked out in trench coat and hat, he plays amateur sleuth. He’s smarter than the cops because the script paints the cops as idiots who miss basic clues like bullets in walls.
 
-When William Powell does this in the Philo Vance movies, he charms, but Manners overdoes it. As he pick-pockets detectives, and utters ridiculous lines like, “You know as well as I do that the scribblings a man makes on a piece of paper are as identifying as his signature,” he comes across as arrogant.
+When William Powell does this in the Philo Vance movies, he charms, but Manners overdoes it, coming across as arrogant. He affords his girlfriend little agency, answering for her in interviews and dictating her legal strategy, as though he were a lawyer instead of a screenwriter. Indeed, he regards everyone with a patronizing smirk, as he pick-pockets detectives, and utters ridiculous lines like, “You know as well as I do that the scribblings a man makes on a piece of paper are as identifying as his signature.” 
 
-Lugosi, just a year removed from his star turn in Dracula, disappoints in his supporting role. He delivers his dialogue with mechanical inflection, as though reciting it phonetically, in a part that exists only to proffer another suspect.
+Lugosi, just a year removed from his star turn in Dracula, disappoints in a supporting role that exists only to proffer another suspect. His part as a Hollywood studio manager calls for a fast-talking operator capable of managing large egos. Lugosi’s capable of such a take-charge role—his turn as a detective in Tod Browning’s The Thirteenth Chair proves a good example. But his delivery here feels detached and uncomfortable, as though he’s reciting his lines phonetically, grasping for the proper inflection. While this same detachment aided the sense of “otherness” he brought to the supernatural Dracula, it undermines his credibility here.
 
-For fans of Dracula, this may prove an interesting curio. A onetime watch offering a surprising performance from Manners. But said performance’s novelty wears off fast, leaving you with an inane whodunit whose protagonist’s charm proves grating.
+Still, for Dracula fans, The Death Kiss may prove an interesting curio. Lugosi disappoints, but Manners surprises. 
+
+But be warned, the novelty of Manners’ performance wears off fast as his arrogant demeanor grates. And despite the opening scene’s promise of a more cynical, realistic crime story, the script devolves into an inane whodunit teaming with the same B-movie tropes its opening scene sought to satirize.