The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid

by Butler, Charles E.

  “There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word,

  DRACULA”

  -Bram Stoker 1897

  Contents

  Introduction 6

  Dracula: The First Date 11

  Chapter One: Max Schreck 38

  Chapter Two: Bela Lugosi 58

  Chapter Three: Charles Villar 78

  Chapter Four: Atif Kaptan 86

  Chapter Five: Christopher Lee 90

  Chapter Six: Christopher Lee 114

  Chapter Seven: Jack Palance 130

  Chapter Eight: Louis Jourdan 146

  Chapter Nine: Frank Langella 174

  Chapter Ten: Klaus Kinski 190

  Chapter Eleven: Gary Oldman 204

  Chapter Twelve: Leslie Nielson 238

  Chapter Thirteen: Patrick Bergin 254

  Chapter Fourteen: Marc Warren 278

  Epilogue 292

  A Departing Kiss 319

  Afterward 321

  Notes 324

  The Romance of Dracula

  A personal Journey of the Count on celluloid.

  Written and Illustrated by Charles E. Butler

  In memory of my mother and father.

  “I love and miss you both“

  Introduction

  The first horror film I remember seeing that scared me witless was Roger Corman's The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), when it was aired in the UK on BBC2 in the early 1970s.

  I can still see the eyes of the sexually repressed Madeleine Usher (Myrna Fahey), as she hunted her quarry in the blazing house of the title with telltale drops of blood streaming from her ragged finger ends.

  Iconic horrormeister Vincent Price portrayed the incestuously evil brother, Roderick Usher, whose senses were so acute he could hear his sister scrabbling out of her tomb in the crypt and screaming his name.

  Everything ended in the usual conflagration by fire in the very short running time allotted to such films, but the images stayed with me forever.

  Following hard on Usher's heels, I saw Lon Chaney play the Phantom of the Opera (1925) on a double bill with Fredric March in his Oscar-winning turn as both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932), again on BBC2. These weekly double-billed horror films acquainted me with all the Universal monsters of the 1930s and 1940s.

  I was hooked.

  The first vampire movie that lit the torch of wonderment in me was not a Dracula film in the accepted sense, but John Llewellyn Moxey's The Night Stalker (1972) had an unforgettable blood drinker in the shape of Barry Atwater's Janos Skorzeny that gave me nightmares for weeks.

  One could find further thrills on ITV every Friday night with the Appointment with Fear series generally showing re-runs of the Hammer and Amicus horror movies. It was watching these offerings that first introduced me to Christopher Lee as the star of this book: Count Dracula. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) had me literally hiding behind the settee as this disturbingly credible actor put forward his own ideas of the Count's power over men and women.

  House of Usher was scary. Phantom and Jekyll and Hyde were cool. But Lee's Dracula, like Janos Skorzeny and, a few weeks later, David Peel's Baron Meinster in The Brides of Dracula (1960), were selling something else. At six or seven years old, I wasn't exactly sure what I had stumbled onto, but it made a distinct impression that lasted long after the Lon Chaney and Fredric March creations had faded into monochrome obscurity.

  Over the years, I followed the Count's adventures in all forms: films, television, comic books - I even maintained scrapbooks! I read the original Bram Stoker novel in the mid 1980s and caught up with the American variations including, Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and Blacula (1972).

  As an avid comicbook fan, I collected numerous titles in the 1970s; among them, Dracula Lives, that reprinted The Tomb of Dracula (1972-1979) series by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. This put the icing on the cake when they proclaimed that Dracula was indeed the Lord of the Undead.

  Video followed and I find that my film collection consists of a higher percentage of vampire movies than any other genre. My expansive bookshelf boasts a third of vampire literature. When I began acting with local theatre groups in the early 1990s, I was ecstatic when offered the part of Drinkwater in Liz Lochhead's poetical version of the story. In addition, I put forward my own ideas on the theme with Deadly Therapy (2007), a self-written play that enjoyed a small run in my own hometown.

  Culturally speaking, the vampire has always been with me in one form or another. Dracula has been around all my life. That is the reason that this book is called:

  The Romance of Dracula.

  "Why do we need another book about Dracula movies?"

  It is a question I pondered as I watched a new DVD release of Nosferatu (1922) while taking notes just as Mina Harker had jotted down the horrors of Dracula.

  I came up with the very simple, but very careful answer:

  “I need another review of the Dracula myth“

  This book is subtitled:

  "a personal journey of the Count on celluloid."

  That is precisely what it is. With this volume, I am ignoring everything, save for the fourteen films exclusively based on Bram Stoker's creation.

  I discount - with reservations - the excellent ballet Dracula; Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2003); the inevitably titled Dracula Sucks (1979) and Ron Jeremy's take on the character in the skinflick, Dracula (1994), as being cinematic adaptations.

  Also ejected are the television movies starring John Carradine, Denholm Elliot and Norman Welsh, simply because I haven't seen them and they were made solely for screening in their own countries - unlike the Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Patrick Bergin and Marc Warren productions that enjoyed global viewings.

  But those major films that I haven't seen starring Charles Villar and Atif Kaptan do get a small chapter to themselves, as I am an incorrigible completist.

  The epilogue concentrates on a handful of those Dracula films in which the Count holds a key role. I apologize that they are films that have been reviewed many times before, but a lot of them are personal favourites of mine for one reason or the other. I think that I will be forgiven when you realize that they are probably favourites of your own.

  Each chapter is designed to be read in two parts. Part one consists of a scene-by-scene synopsis of the film under scrutiny; this can be consulted, in many cases, as the movie unfolds. Part two is an honest review of the same film; i.e: Chapter One deals with F W Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu (1922) starring Max Schreck.

  I apologise in advance for slating some of the films outright in some cases. Sometimes, even with the best movies, I found that there was also a nagging feeling of disappointment at the payoff.

  But, I do love the Dracula genre. And it is a separate genre. This volume is mainly to explore the reasons why I do love it so much. I'd like the book to give you food for thought and that you find it entertaining, stimulating, funny and accurate in its views.

  If you have this book then in all probability you also have the films mentioned. Once you have read the text I hope that it prompts you to re-view these films yourself in a different light than you've ever watched them before.

  Above all, have fun.

  As Dracula implores Jonathon Harker:

  “Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely and leave some of the happiness you bring.”

  Enjoy.

  Dracula: The first date

  (i) A literary phenomenon

  Count Dracula. Lord of the Undead. Prince of Darkness.

&nbs
p; Bram Stoker (1847-1912), created the character in the novel Dracula in 1897, hitting a literary bullseye after penning scores of long-forgotten short stories and a couple of horrific potboilers of their day. Alas, like many great inventors, he never lived long enough to see the impact that his creation would have on the world. I do suspect, however, that he knew the underlying qualities that the book held, simply because it was the only tale in which he chose to secure a copyright restriction. He gave a private play reading of the book at the Lyceum Theatre, London, where he was the theatrical manager to the greatest actor of the day, Sir Henry Irving.

  Many reviewers have criticized Irving's reaction on hearing the condensed play that Stoker put forth at the gathering. That he used the moment to, yet again, caustically berate his colleague and humiliate him in public. This may be so. In fact, I believe, like many others, that Stoker had written his opus to gain the actor’s respect and to show, like a child seeking a parent’s approval, that he also had the capacity to create.

  I have read portions of the play that Stoker, with a handful of the Lyceum's repertory players, bestowed on a nervous Victorian society. A five-act play titled Dracula: or the Undead and, in agreement with Henry Irving, found it to be

  "Dreadful!"

  It was proven, initially by Stoker himself, that great pains would have to be taken to translate the work onto the boards, and, in later years, onto the screen.

  (ii) The story of Dracula

  Much has been written about the actual research concerning Bram Stoker's greatest literary triumph. I'm not going to rehash romanticised facts about the author's favourite spot on a Whitby churchyard bench, or of his relentless researches in a coastal library concerning an unheard of land in Europe called Transylvania.

  I'm not even going to mention, more than once, his fictional creation having factual connections to a bloodthirsty tyrant in the 15th century province of Wallachia who ruled over his subjects with an iron glove; however, this same tyrant, Vlad Dracula, did furnish Stoker's Count Wampyr with a bloodthirsty history and the more recognizable moniker that he uses today.

  A lengthy explanation by Abraham Van Helsing in Mina Harker's typewritten diary testifies to the origin of Dracula:

  "But he is clever, I have asked my friend, Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University to make his record; and from all the means that are, he tell me of what has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of "the land beyond the forest." That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Dracula's were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil one. They learned his secrets in the Scholomonce, amongst the mountains of Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as "stregoica"-witch, "ordog" and "pokol"-Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as "wampyr", which we all understand too well."

  The manuscript in question is obviously a sly inference to the author's own work as it existed before his necessary corrections. Likewise, Arminius translates as Stoker's friend, the knowledgeable Professor Arminius Vambery, who first related the stories of Vlad Tsepesh III of Wallachia to the amazed Irishman and forever fused the two characters together, causing many film makers to seal the fates of their creative labour by purporting to give the true facts as Stoker wrote them. As Stoker bowdlerized The Impaler’s own historical facts, this quickly becomes a double condemnation.

  The story on inspection seems to suggest that it was actually written over a number of years, with incidents added or dropped whenever new material presented itself.

  That Stoker had enjoyed fellow Irishman Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla (1872), is obvious. The excised passage, published as Dracula's Guest after the author's death, shows that his original plan was to give his vampire connections in Styria, the home of the Karnsteins.

  He settled on the eerie landscape Transylvania after reading Mme Emily de Lazowkska Gerard's leaflet on popular superstition found in the "imaginative whirlpool known as the land beyond the forest." A couple of the best vignettes at the beginning of the novel are copied, unashamedly, from a short story titled The Mysterious Stranger (1860), an eerie blood and thunder addition to vampire literature attributed to that equally mysterious man of letters, Anonymous. I believe it is this story that first fired the 13 year old Bram’s imagination and began his literary affinity with the vampire.

  Delving further, we discover that through extensive revision, the novel was to be broken down into three sections:

  Book I - London, Midsummer; Book II - Tragedy; Book III - Discovery.

  Telling the narrative through firsthand accounts via letters, newspaper clippings and, in one case, a phonograph, was an idea cribbed from author Wilkie Collins, who had written the influential ghost story The Woman in White (1860). The epistolary novel does give an added authenticity to many of the character’s claims concerning the Count's evil deeds and researchers have devoted entire sections of their books to tracking down events described by utilising the chronology found in Dracula's pages - many probably coming away feeling a little bit discontented by the fact that the actual ship, said to be the inspiration for the grounding of the Demeter, didn't plough into the rocks and didn't have a dead sea captain lashed to the wheel.

  The book was originally titled The Undead, but was changed to Dracula just before it went to print. It boasts, like many Victorian novels, an incredibly large cast, but only the Count- whose first name is never mentioned - and Professor Abraham Van Helsing obtain identikit descriptions.

  The Count is described by Jonathon Harker as:

  “..a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.”

  Later, he recounts:

  “His face was a strong - a very strong - aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

  Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse - broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.”

  Mina Murray takes great pains to be precise in her description of Van Helsing:

  “...a man of medium height, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes one at once as indicative of thought and power; the head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large, resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy eyebrows come down and the mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart; such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set widely apart, a
nd are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods.”

  It has been stated many times that Stoker fancied himself as the vampire hunter, even down to naming the Count’s nemesis Abraham, the Christian name shared by himself and his father. Indeed, the description does read like an extensive narcissistic study. Unlike his camera-shy vampire, Stoker obviously enjoyed studying his face in a mirror, a habit he bestows on Lucy Westenra.