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

by Butler, Charles E.

  Chaney's Count Dracula is played as a belligerent thug and he suffers deterioration by the sun’s rays, when an irate love rival sets fire to his coffin, after he has totally decimated the family unit. The same prop skeleton would be used in Universal's next two monster marathons providing quick and cliched death scenes for the next famous face to climb into the distinguished plimsoles.

  The Count that prefers a tip of the top hat is John Carradine. Born Richmond Reed Carradine in 1906, he had entered films in 1928, making his horror debut in The Invisible man (1933). I believe that his first Draculoid character shone in John Ford's classic western Stagecoach (1939), as the deliciously ambiguous gambler, Mr Hatfield.

  His first official Dracula, going under the guise of Baron Lattos, is wasted in Universal's monster extravaganzas, House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). Carradine, at his own insistence, is the first actor to make himself up to resemble Stoker's vampire on the screen. His segments, in both films are by far the most interesting.

  In the first, he is revived by mad scientist, Dr Neimann, played by Boris Karloff, who pulls the stake from his heart and threatens to replace it unless Carradine's Count serves him (?). Agreeing all too easily, Bram Stoker would have spun wildly in his own grave at this ridiculous plot device, Dracula swings into stately action with Carradine relying on his magnetic, Shakespearian gait and deep-velvet tones to breathe a new kind of life into the Transylvanian dandy.

  Promising the ladies a new start in a world that is magnified in his jewellery, he is forced to fend for himself when the rhubarbing villagers chase Karloff's circus of horrors out of town. His coffin is slowing the troupe down and is discarded. Dracula doesn't make it in time and, like Lon Chaney before him, is destroyed by the sun.

  The sequel has Dracula turning up unexplained at the home of Dr Edelmann (Onslow Stevens), even moving his coffin in to ensure his room and board. He is looking for a cure to his bloodletting and hopes the doctor can help him out. Interest in this angle is dropped when Dracula begins his old tricks by romancing a pretty hunchbacked nurse (Martha O‘Driscoll). He infuses the doctor with his own blood and the medic - now transformed into a pastiche of Mr Hyde - takes revenge by exposing him to the sunlight.

  At least he was spared the horrors of having to meet Abbott and Costello! Carradine would go on to play Dracula in the silly and unintentionally funny, Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966), in the vein of a lecherous old man and interpret the role on stage. He is also the first actor to bring the Count to life on television in 1956. Unfortunately, this little gem seems to be as elusive as the Count himself.

  Bela Lugosi was handed the cloak again for the inevitable, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948) aka Abbott and Costello meet the Ghosts, but they didn't meet the mad doctor himself. However, Dracula is treated with more respect and Lugosi is able to infuse his old role with some entertaining changes from man-into-bat.

  The film itself was meant to be a sequel to House of Dracula called, The Brain of Frankenstein, but this was dropped when Abbott and Costello were brought in to burlesque it. It is the second and final time that Bela Lugosi got to play the original Count, but his CV is littered with variations on the theme. My own favourite is the Columbia wartime pot boiler, The Return of the Vampire (1944), which plays out the original drawing room melodrama of Dracula (1931), and gives Lugosi's Armand Tesla a shaggy werewolf sidekick in Matt Willis. There was worse to come as an ailing, morphine-addicted Lugosi, became the drawing power for the films of the talentless visionary, Edward D. Wood Jr.

  The Fantastic Disappearing Man, could describe this film that is more recognisable under its original title, The Return of Dracula (1958). Borrowing from the plot device of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the Count, in the form of Francis Lederer, infiltrates a small mid-American town disguised as an artist whom he has disposed of on a train. Calling himself Bellac, he has the habit of laying on his bed all day or slumbering in a smoke-filled coffin.

  He is artistic, preferring to paint his new conquests as imagined in their coffins. But he is also rather clumsy and just a little stupid. He leaves his own coffin in a mineshaft right next to a pit primed with wooden stakes and he evokes suspicion when he vampirizes a young blind girl named Jenny. The girl then begins terrorizing the small town disguised as a large white dog.

  In original prints, the screen would turn into glorious Technicolor as the Count's bride was staked. Cornered by the juvenile leads waving a cross, Dracula slips and lands on a convenient stake in the pit, withering away to a prop skeleton.

  Apart from Lederer seeming to possess no supernatural aura, the film has a creepy underbelly, and is a good indication of what was possible and what was to come; namely Hammer's superior Dracula, made a few months later. Lederer would play Dracula again in a TV version of Manly Wade Wellman's 1943 tale, the first short story to utilize Dracula as the vampire since Stoker, The Devil is not mocked (1971).

  After his success in Dracula (1958), Christopher Lee wouldn't officially rise as Dracula until 1966, as the titular Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Shunning more scenes and even his dialogue, his performance seems to be little more than a repeat of the original. Renfield is added in the shape of Thorley Walters as Ludwig. Four English travellers are forced to spend the night at Castle Dracula and are picked off one by one. Dracula is aided by Philip Latham as Klove who resurrects his Master with the blood of Charles Tingwell.

  The Count also opens a vein in his chest for Suzan Farmer and turns prim Victorian Barbara Shelley into a raging demon who is metaphorically gang-banged by a bunch of sexually frustrated monks! The ever-dependable Andrew Kier substituted for Peter Cushing as Dracula's foil, Father Sandor.

  Lee claims that Hammer pleaded with him to return for Dracula Has Risen from the grave (1968), with the result that the movie became the highest grossing Hammer film ever. Unfortunately, it didn't deserve it as, apart from Lee's usual professionalism and interesting filter effects betraying the director’s past as a cinematographer, it was the first film to concentrate on the bloodless antics of the young leads.

  Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), was a big improvement and the best of the sequels. With Lee asking Hammer for a gross percentage of the profits as opposed to a fee, the studio toyed with the idea of finding a younger - and cheaper - Count. Ralph Bates reanimated the red powder and Dracula ravaged his way through the Victorian hopes and ideals spoken about in the original. Favourite part: Roy Kinnear as a snow globe salesman who finds the corpse of Dracula.

  Finally, Scars of Dracula (1970) starred Christopher Lee and highlighted the Jonathon Harker episodes of the novel. Given more screen time, dialogue and the ability to crawl down walls, Mr Lee names this disappointing film as being his best Hammer outing.

  The directors in order were: Terence fisher, Freddie Francis, Peter Sasdy and Roy Ward Baker.

  Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), were Christopher Lee's final Hammer showcases. He had appeared sending up his Dracula image in The Magic Christian (1969), a dire British comedy starring Peter Sellers, and would go on to make his final vampiric bow in the winsome French farce, Dracula Pere et Fils aka Dracula and Son (1976), directed by La Cage aux folles' Edouard Molinaro. In my opinion the actor's best performance for Hammer was yet to be realised; the satanic Father Michael Rayner in the troubled To the Devil, A Daughter (1976). But in these final two Dracula stories, he does at least retain his dignity as Hammer exploits some of the best flesh of the seventies for him to sink his teeth into.

  Alan Gibson directed both films from scripts by Don Houghton. In the first, the Count is rejuvenated by his descendant, Johnny Alucard, played with a slimy conceit by Christopher Neame. His first offering to his great-granddaddy is the delectable Caroline Munro in a great fanging sequence. Her corpse, unearthed on a building site by playing children, is an unforgettable image. Drac's real prize, however, is Van Helsing's granddaughter, Jessica (Stephanie Beacham). As we know by now,
the Count has no chance when Peter Cushing's Professor Van Helsing is around - or even his grandson - and, convincing a Scotland Yard detective of the evil of Dracula, he destroys his nemesis in a deconsecrated church. But nothing else in the film tops their duel to the death struggle in the opening sequence on a runaway coach.

  The Satanic Rites of Dracula is a sequel of sorts, with more emphasis on the The Avengers and James Bond thematics than Dracula, as Christopher Lee now resides as owner of a tower block called the D D Denham group of companies, puzzlingly hiding his true identity behind a Bela Lugosi impression. Cushing's Van Helsing returns and seems unperturbed by the fact that his granddaughter has changed considerably in the past year. Now she resembles Joanna Lumley. But Michael Coles is back as the detective and even ropes in William Franklyn as a terse commander.

  In a story that deals with Satanists and talk of a clumsily inaugurated Armageddon, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had. My favourite character is Freddie Jones' brainwashed Professor Keeley, waiting for the end of the world, while nonchalantly growing the bubonic plague in his fridge. After much Avengers' style derring-do, Van Helsing is forced into another standoff with Dracula and stakes him with wood salvaged from a picket fence.

  Ironically, these films were made primarily in answer to the American independent thrillers, Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and Blacula (1972). Scorned in the shade of these American outputs, I think that over the years, the Hammer films fare best because, overall, they are a lot more fun. Viewed today, despite some admittedly frenzied vampire attacks, Yorga is very slow and Blacula is held back by a script that just follows the numbers. The lost love motif throws it straight into the loser's box.

  Incidentally, Mel Brooks should have used the Satanic rites original title for his 1995 spoof: Dracula Is Dead - and well - and Living in London!

  Satanic Rites of Dracula would not be seen in the USA until 1979, when John Badham's Dracula caused a mini vampire revival. To add to the confusion, it was again re-titled as Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.

  To keep interest in their products, Hammer made a deal with Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw productions. This culminated in two films before the language barrier and lack of ideas forced everyone to throw in the towel. The first film was a thriller starring Stewart Whitman called Shatter.

  The second film, when watched without any prior knowledge of the previous seven Dracula films, is actually a lot of fun. Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) starred Peter Cushing as anthropologist, Lorrimar Van Helsing, being escorted to the land of Ping Kwei to destroy the fabled vamps of the title, by seven martial arts experts, a wimp of a son and the fabulous looking Julie Ege.

  On their travels, they are met by bandits in the daytime and vampires at night. For some reason, Dracula prefers hiding in the body of a determined slave for most of the film, probably to hide the fact that it is John Forbes Robertson acting out scenes that were written for Christopher Lee.

  Whatever the reason, it turned out to be Hammer's last Dracula film.

  A film that slips by the wayside in chronicling the Count's filmography is the oft quoted, but often mis-viewed, Roman Polanski's Dance of the Vampires, aka The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967), concerning the mis-adventures of Professor Abrontius and his faithful, nerdy sidekick, Alfred (Polanski), as they travel to a mid-European castle to drive out the threat of vampirism forever.

  Dance does exactly what Tom Holland's Fright Night would later do with homage to the Dracula myth. Polanski takes everything one can remember having read in the Stoker novel: the wolves baying outside the Castle; Count Von Krolock; Ferdy Mayne's finest fifteen minutes, being viewed by the prisoner through a keyhole as he disappears down the dank corridors waving his keychain over his finger.

  In make up resembling Albert Bras as the familiar in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), Jack McGowran's energetic performance as Abrontius - "The Nut!" - skulks, Max Schreck-fashion, over craggy battlements spouting "end of the world" eulogies, with Polanski, a dead ringer for Gustav Von Wangenheiem in Nosferatu, trying to keep up.

  I watch this film and constantly wish that Roman Polanski had played it straight. His unerring eye for sets took him out of Hammer's cardboardian jungle and into a storybook land beyond the forest that harks back to Emily Gerard's original mapping document. Alfie Bass' lecherous landlord is funny, but the constant one-liners that fall clunkily to the ground, become tedious even before the punch lines are delivered.

  What works for me in the film is the eerie atmosphere straight out of the first four chapters of Stoker's novel. The crawling camerawork lends a nod to Polanski's favourite film, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), and two references point to Olivier's Richard III: an oil painting of Prince Crookback and an extra, made up to look exactly like Olivier in the 1955 film. The scene in which Sharon Tate is vampirized in a bath is still to be bettered forty years on.

  "I'm frightened," states Alfred, hopelessly matter-of-fact, as he stares down onto a scene of tombs laid out in the same manner as Graf Orlok packs his coffins onto a coach to leave for Bremen. When these tombs open and the corpses walk, we realise that we are frightened too. It's an incredibly charged scene, but is immediately undercut by the corpses having to dance the, supposedly, funny minuet of the title.

  At the end of the film, all the cast are thrown into an Abbott and Costello farce with the heroes, on the run with Tate, being pursued by the inhabitants of the castle. As a final punch to the nervous system, we see that Tate has already been turned and puts the bite on Polanski himself, while Abrontius blithely steers the coach out of harms way and

  "Spreads the disease across the world".

  The news that Polanski asked for his name to be removed from the credits is now in the annals of movie mythology. Polanski hated his partnership with Producer Martin Ransohoff and disagreed with his final cuts to the film - adding a new score and an animated title sequence.

  On reflection, however, I stand in Ransohoff's corner and wonder if he missed the joke like the rest of us?

  Roman Polanski turned up again with Udo Kier and they are the best reasons to watch the depraved mess, Andy Warhol's Dracula (1973), known as Blood for Dracula on the DVD market. A slumming Antonio Margerheriti with Paul Morrisey actually directed this and its companion piece, Flesh for Frankenstein, in the same year. The Count moves to Italy and vomits every time he takes impure blood - which he does regularly as the randy gardener, Joe D'allesandro, is deflowering every virgin in sight!

  AIP’s Blacula (1972) followed in the wake of Shaft (1971) and the new wave of films that gleaned strong central performances from African/American actors, forcing them to be dubbed blaxploitation thrillers. Blacula was the first blaxploitation horror directed by William Crain.

  An interesting prologue featuring a scenery-chewing Dracula in Charles Macauley, shows Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall) asking for the Count’s help in combatting the slave trade. Dracula wastes no time in insulting his guest and his lovely young wife (Vonetta McGee) and raises Mamuwalde’s hackles. A fight ensues and the African Prince is bitten by Dracula and, cursed with his name Blacula, is left in a tomb to rot whilst his wife sits by his coffin to listen to his moans.

  Cut to present day Los Angeles and Blacula is revived by two stereotype gay antique dealers. There are many shocks along the way as Mamuwalde/Blacula searches for his lost love. Elisha Cook jr as a hook-handed morgue attendant has a great death scene and Blacula out-numbers Los Angeles finest in many vigorous fight sequences. But when the vampire finds the reincarnation of his dead wife (McGee again), the film abandons all nods towards it’s promising beginning and becomes a typical fatuous romance. As McGee is staked by the constabulary, we are given the cop-out ending of Blacula walking into the rays of the rising sun.

  A more rounded premise was pursued in the sequel Scream, Blacula, scream (1973) as Blacula is revived by a voodoo shaman who feels that he has been cheated out of the family inheritance. The vampire takes up re
sidence in another Old Dark House and begins to fang the local community while enlisting the help of a Voodoo priestess (Pam Grier), to help him find a cure for his malady. Robert Kelljan, director of the Yorga movies, injects some frenzied vampire attacks into the film that finishes when Grier stakes Blacula’s mojo through the heart causing him to wither back to bone and dust.

  Both films are memorable for the towering performance of Shakespearian actor William Marshall as the doomed Mamuwalde. He would continue to fight demons in his next movie Abby (1974) as a black Exorcist.