Photo courtesy of moviemorlocks.com
Over the past couple of days, I’ve watched two famous Dracula productions I’d never seen before. One was Count Dracula (1977), a two-and-a-half hour British television movie that some Drac fans consider the most accurate and best onscreen translation of the book. (Yes, even more than the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version, which introduced a reincarnation/romantic storyline that doesn't exist in Bram Stoker’s novel.)
The other production I viewed was the once-famous 1979 John Badham film, Dracula, starring Frank Langella as Drac and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing. This film received a lot of buzz when I was in college and I can’t believe it’s taken me almost 40 years to get around to watching it. Of the two, it's the 1977 production that I prefer, although the later film has its good points. Here are my reactions to the two versions:
Directed by Phillip Saville, Count Dracula stars Louis Jourdan as Drac. Jourdan was a former French pretty boy who was imported by Hollywood to provide Continental eye candy for big-screen rom-com fluff like Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). In the 70s, he did a ton of television guest spots and tv movies, as big-screen roles dried up.
Jourdan spoke fluent English but never lost his heavy, very elegant French accent. Jourdan brings a unique Continental gloss to his portrayal of Drac that American and British actors can’t quite match. He’s handsome, seductive, and exquisitely polite. But there’s no attempt to make Drac a romantic hero in this production, unlike in subsequent portrayals of the iconic bloodsucker.
Jourdan’s Drac is Evil with a capital E, and we know that from almost the beginning, when we see him hand an infant over to his three creepy “brides” for a snack. (That lone, baby-munching scene will stick with you for a long while, guaranteed. Creep Factor 10.)
The only significant changes from the book are making Lucy and Mina sisters instead of BFF’s, and merging Lucy’s two suitors, Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris, into one person. Otherwise things proceed in orderly fashion according to the novel: Jonathan Harker (Bosco Hogan) visits Drac in Transylvania and is imprisoned there (where he witnesses the infamous baby-snacking incident, among other terrifying sights.) Drac has his body shipped to England and a storm causes the ship to run aground, but Drac and his cargo of 51 boxes of Transylvanian dirt are recovered.
He goes after Lucy first, killing her and turning her into a vamp; then Van Helsing is called in; Harker escapes and returns to England to marry Mina, etc. Many details that don’t appear in other oncreen portrayals are shown here, such as Van Helsing cutting off the dead Lucy’s head and stuffing garlic in her mouth after staking her (another super-creepy moment.)
The negatives include an over-reliance on “special effects” that are now extremely dated and a sad reminder of just how ridiculous fancy camera tricks could be in the days before CGI. This movie also switches from film to videotape halfway through, which is a bit jarring, but doesn’t mar the quality too much.
The acting by Frank Finlay as Van Helsing is very good, if a bit eccentric; Susan Penhaglian is particularly effective as Lucy. But it’s Jourdan’s serpentine glamor as Drac that carries the film. This film is recommended especially for accuracy freaks, or for anyone who wants to know the “true story” without reading the book. I give it a solid 8/10, which is close to how it's rated by IMDb voters.
Dracula (1979), directed by John Badham; starring Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier, Kate Nelligan, and Donald Pleasance. At the time this film was released, much was made of Langella’s performance as a “sexy” romantic Drac, and of the fact that Van Helsing was portrayed by Lord Olivier, considered the greatest actor of the English-speaking world in his day. All the ingredients for a great film are there, including wonderful cinematography by camera legend Gilbert Taylor, and a score by John Williams. There are a lot of great Gothic sets; the castle that Drac rents in England is wonderfuly atmospheric, full of black walls, bats, spiders, cobwebs, and huge rats.
But it just doesn’t come together in the end. Dracula looks very Gothic, but it just doesn’t feel Gothic. There’s something missing. And it’s ultimately rather dull. Langella is an actor I consider to be seriously underrated, but I didn’t like his portrayal of Drac at all. He’s too low key and matter of fact. His attitude seems to be: “Yeah, I’m a bloodsucker, get over it. Be tolerant!” I didn’t find him particularly sexy either.
Olivier is good as Van Helsing, but nothing special. His portrayal of the vampire hunter just seems to be yet another old-man-with-a-weird-accent role, similar to the ones he played in Marathon Man (1976), The Boys From Brazil(1978) and The Jazz Singer (1980) in the twilight of his career.
Dracula is not particularly accurate to the book, either. The film opens with the shipwreck delivering Drac to England, eliminating entirely Harker’s midnight carriage ride through the Carpathian mountains to Drac’s Transylvanian lair. Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and Mina have switched places, and it’s Lucy who’s engaged to Harker, not Mina. (This pointless exchange is mystifying.) And it's Lucy that Drac focuses on after killing Mina, who in this version is also Van Helsing’s daughter.
One of the worst revisions is making Lucy’s former beau, Dr. Seward, her father instead of her ex-suitor. The new Seward is not at all a sympathetic character, which makes rooting for him hard when he teams up with Van Helsing to vanquish Drac. As played by Pleasance, Seward's a slob who runs a filthy, medieval-looking mental asylum on the bottom floors of his large manse. This not only makes Seward look bad, it makes Lucy look bad also, as she swans about in genteel, upper-middle-class comfort on the top floors of the house while pathetic wretches screech and writhe in chains below.
Consistent with the romantic storyline that this version pushes, Lucy falls in love with Drac, dumps Harker, and runs off with the bouffant-haired bloodsucker. Seward, Van Helsing and Harker fight Drac for her life and soul. But you don’t know whom to root for. Is it Drac and the unsympathetic Lucy? Or slobby Seward, cuckhold Harker, and their weird Dutch friend? It's this scattered point of view that leaves a hole in Dracula's dark heart.
This film does feature some great scenes, so I wouldn’t give it a pass. Drac’s death scene, for example, is impressively different and ferocious. Although, I’m not sure how original it is, since it’s virtually the same scene that kills off Dr. Polidori in Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), an excellent miniseries starring Michael Sarrazin, that premiered to rave reviews six years before this film was released. But overall, it doesn’t satisfy the viewer as much as it could have. IMDb fans have rated this film a 6.5/10, which I think is about right, although I might rate it a little lower at a 6/10.
