Dwight Frye gave one of the greatest performances in cinema history, and you've never heard of him. It's Frye on screen in the opening minutes of 1931's Dracula, playing the mild-mannered lawyer who has traveled to Transylvania to deliver papers to the eponymous count and becomes his first victim in the movie. It's Frye's degeneration from upright young man into a gibbering, bug-eating schizophrenic that gives Dracula its horrific punch, not Bela Lugosi's cape and glare. When Frye breaks out into the slow, long, braying laugh that is his character's signature, a chill goes up your spine even now, nine decades after the movie was filmed. And it's because of Frye that his character's name has become a way to refer to slavish, insect-like followers of a charismatic monster—Renfield.
The very...