Dracula (1958)

Posted on July 12, 2015 at 4:27 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Dracula

If there is one film which defines Hammer horror, it is Dracula (1958). It was the natural follow-up to the company’s successful, X-certified The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which brought back Gothic horror with a vengeance – that is, with full-color gore and shocks, handsome production design to hide a modest budget, and impeccable performances. All the key players were brought back: stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, director Terence Fisher, composer James Bernard, cinematographer Jack Asher, and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster. But Hammer’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel wasn’t just some more-of-the-same cash-in; instead, it was a perfection of the studio’s approach to horror. Even more than Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula set the template for all that followed. It was released in the U.S. as Horror of Dracula, partly to reassure American audiences that it wasn’t just another reissue of the Bela Lugosi film, and partly because the title made it pair well with Curse of Frankenstein on a double bill. (A famous poster declares, “Frankenstein Spills It! Dracula Drinks It!”) But the film quickly separates itself from the Universal monster-mashes of the 30’s, even though Universal distributed the film in the U.S. as part of a deal to grant Hammer rights to the Dracula character. Christopher Lee’s Count was younger and sexier than Lugosi. Terence Fisher’s direction was considerably more dynamic than Tod Browning’s. And Peter Cushing was a sympathetic and athletic Van Helsing, in contrast to the professorial Edward Van Sloan.

Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.

Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.

Both a Dracula and a Frankenstein series followed in the wake of the two films’ success, each running well into the 70’s. Peter Cushing fronted the Frankenstein films (with one exception), and Christopher Lee the Draculas (with at least one exception*). It’s interesting that Lee came to be most associated with the Dracula franchise, considering that he’s hardly in this first film. As with Stoker’s novel, the Count makes carefully rationed appearances, and thus doubles his impact when he does appear, blood on his mouth and eyes bloodshot. Lee only has the first act of the film to present the more civilized side of Dracula, offering the use of his library to the visiting Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen, Quatermass 2), and presenting his guest handsomely furnished quarters that include a stained glass window, a chess set, and a fireplace. Later he will provide the film’s sex appeal, kissing Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stribling, The League of Gentlemen) up and down her sensual features before biting her neck. But Peter Cushing is really the star of the movie, and although this is the one that made Lee famous, it’s appropriate that Cushing’s name is above the title on most posters. Sangster’s script condenses Stoker’s plot and abandons or combines some of his characters, but his most inspired move was to make Van Helsing the film’s protagonist. Van Helsing was always an important catalyst in the plot, but never as centralized. Sangster even kills off Jonathan Harker at the end of the first act, which means that Harker’s only function in this version of the story is to introduce Dracula, his castle, and the idea of a vampire slave (Valerie Gaunt, The Curse of Frankenstein), as well as to leave a diary which will ultimately convince the skeptical Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough, Horrors of the Black Museum) that vampires are real. Meanwhile, Cushing is the audience surrogate: the one who knows the threat Dracula poses, who asks the right questions and brings the right equipment. He also gives the film some heart. When young Tania (Janine Faye) is trembling in a cemetery after an encounter with a vampire incarnation of her Aunt Lucy (Carol Marsh), Van Helsing takes a pause from his hunting to kneel before her, gingerly give her his coat and crucifix, and distract her with a line that reveals his inner optimism: “If you look over there, you can see the sun come up.”

Van Helsing comforts Tania (Janine Faye) in a graveyard stalked by a vampire.

Van Helsing comforts Tania (Janine Faye) in a graveyard stalked by a vampire.

There’s also quite a bit of Terence Fisher in that line – Fisher excelled at presenting the battle between Satanic evil and a Christian good, as in The Devil Rides Out (1968), because he really believed in it. His Dracula films, such as his excellent follow-up Brides of Dracula (1960), are propelled by that conviction. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of macabre humor lurking throughout Dracula. When Lucy is holding Tania’s hand in the graveyard, her promise of “I know somewhere nice and quiet where we can play” is both menacing and a bit of a sick joke. There’s more than a hint of incestuousness to Lucy’s smile when her brother Arthur visits her crypt: “Dear brother, why didn’t you come sooner? Come, let me kiss you.” Even when we first see Lucy preparing for Dracula’s midnight visit, it’s easy to smile at how overt is the film’s “subtext.” She readies the room for her favored lover, and arranges herself seductively on the bed, all set to be ravished. A joking undertaker (Miles Malleson) offers a strong dose of gallows humor – to an awkward Van Helsing and appalled Arthur – and there’s even some (unsuccessful) slapstick late in the film, but Dracula is at its best when it’s delighting like a libertine at the fresh explorations of the novel’s blood and sex. Sure, women swooned at Lugosi’s Count too, and Dracula’s Daughter (1936) played with the theme of lesbianism, but Dracula feels like a kid discovering a new playground – even if it comes in the shape of a decrepit graveyard. What would become stale in vampire films of later decades was fresh in 1958, and still feels fresh on each revisit, thanks to Hammer’s commitment to the material.

Publicity still showing the disintegration of Dracula (Christopher Lee).

Publicity still showing the disintegration of Dracula (Christopher Lee).

In 2011 Simon Rowson, a Hammer fan living in Japan, was able to uncover a Japanese print of the film which contained footage censored from all other prints, including a slightly extended version of Mina’s seduction, and, most remarkably, a longer death scene for Dracula, with unique makeup effects including the Count peeling off his own face. Hammer had previously restored the film in 2007, and proceeded to acquire and incorporate the uncovered footage into a new 2012 restoration. Both versions are available on the 2013 Blu-Ray/DVD set, for now only available in Region 2. The Blu-Ray has proven controversial, with many vocal fans deriding the restoration’s slightly darker and bluer palette. Even tainted by all that discussion, in (finally) viewing the Blu-Ray I find the change less objectionable. (I’m inclined to believe those experts who state this grading is not what the film originally looked like. Personally, I wasn’t alive when the film was released theatrically, and I’ve only ever watched the film on home video or cable TV.) All things considered, the Blu-Ray is still a significant visual upgrade from the old Warner DVD, and it’s a lot of fun to watch it with the reintroduction of the censored footage. Accompanied by multiple documentaries, the 2007 BFI restoration, and even the unrestored Japanese reels, this is currently the best and most thorough presentation of Hammer’s Dracula available. It remains to be seen if an American release will be forthcoming, and if so, whether the presentation will be superior, inferior, or just a port of the same disc. Warner previously released Horror of Dracula as part of a Hammer box set (and two subsequent Hammer-themed DVD compilations); some of those films will be released in October on a Blu-Ray set, but not Dracula. With the recent passing of Christopher Lee, one would imagine that demand has never been higher for the definitive release of his most famous film. If the British Blu-Ray isn’t 100% perfect, at least it’s very close.

*Brides of Dracula (1960) featured Cushing but not Lee (nor a Dracula). The other possible exception is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) if you consider it part of the series. As for the Frankenstein films, Cushing did not appear in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), which featured a younger Baron played by Ralph Bates.

Dracula

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The Final Programme (1973)

Posted on July 9, 2015 at 9:19 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Final Programme

“…Cornelius enjoyed [technology] for its own sake. Aesthetically. He had no interest in its moral significance or its utilization. Computers and jets and rockets and lasers and the rest were simply familiar elements of his natural environment. He didn’t judge them or question them, any more than you or I would judge or question a tree or a hill. He picked his cars, his weapons, his gadgets, his clothes – for their private meanings, for what they looked like… He had all the primitive’s respect for Nature, the same tendency to invest it with meaning and identity, only his Nature was the industrial city, his idea of Paradise was an urban utopia…”

“He was a snotty-nosed little back-street nihilist,” [Miss Brunner] said. “There’s no point in dignifying his attitude.”

-Michael Moorcock, The Condition of Muzak (1977)

Of all the novels to adapt into a science fiction film, Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme, written in 1965-66, was a peculiar choice. Even in the 1970’s it was a peculiar choice, but perhaps there was no other time when it could come into existence, in that hovering period between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977), when science fiction actually stood a snowball’s chance in outer space of being taken seriously. Moorcock’s novel was a psychedelic funhouse masquerading as a James Bond-themed science fiction tale. It was the first of a quartet of novels starring Jerry Cornelius, an easy-living playboy with a penchant for fast jets and Rolls Royces, who uses his needle-gun to kill without hesitation, who seduces anything that moves but is only in love with his sister Catherine. Moorcock’s postmodern approach satirized both his own fantasy and SF novels and Britannia as a whole. The books send up imperialism, war and espionage, the sexual revolution, psychedelics, and the music industry. Far from being linear, the plot continually resets itself. Characters die and are resurrected without explanation; Jerry himself is a corpse for much of the series’ third volume. His world is in a state of entropy, and Moorcock cuts from one parallel universe to the next, giving us several versions of Cornelius as well as the recurring supporting cast, until, in the final novel, the characters are revealed as archetypes of the Commedia dell’Arte, playing their parts in an endless cycle while the world falls to pieces and rebuilds itself, over and over again. The novels strike an aloof balance between black humor and resigned melancholy. They’re also collage-like, some of the books scattered with found obit clippings. Sounds like a good time at the movies, doesn’t it?

Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) strides through a pinball arcade.

Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) strides through a pinball arcade.

So perhaps the ideal director for such a daunting project was Robert Fuest, who made the Polanski-esque thriller And Soon the Darkness (1970) as well as a pair of stylish and black-humored horror films that injected some much-needed dazzle into Vincent Price’s late career, The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). For The Final Programme (1973) – released in the U.S. as The Last Days of Man on Earth – Fuest receives a “designed by” credit as well as writing and directing. Indeed, it’s a film with a unique look. One early scene takes place in a pinball arcade with human pinballs and giant bumpers. The opening credits sequence is a funeral for Jerry’s father in the desert; the coffin is set ablaze on a pyre while Jerry looks on in a thick fur coat, looking a bit like a Neanderthal that will be appearing at the end of the film; the whole setpiece feels like an echo of 2001. The house of Jerry’s father is like Alice’s Wonderland collapsed inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory – but with more overt psychedelics and a lot more hard drugs. One shootout takes place in the Turkish wilderness, with stark widescreen to set up the duel of Jerry and his brother Frank, and swooping helicopter shots over the landscape. The finale takes place in an underground cave excavated by the Nazis, side-by-side with a modern, antiseptic laboratory replete with brains floating in jars (as Jerry notes, “Brainwashing!”). It’s not an expensive film. The special effects themselves are not very special, with the exception of the film’s final, and most brazenly bizarre, shot. Until then, Fuest helps us coast on the strangeness of his stream-of-consciousness spy story, his sharp dialogue playing up the non sequiturs and jokes inherent in Moorcock’s original.

Dr. Powys (George Coulouris), Dr. Lucas (Basil Henson), and Dr. Smiles (Graham Crowden) solve a puzzle inside the booby-trapped home of Jerry’s late father.

Best of all is the casting of Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius. Finch, a stage actor, had appeared in bit parts in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), sadly underutilized until taking starring roles in two major films: Polanski’s grim, bloody masterpiece Macbeth (1971), and Hitchcock’s uncharacteristically gritty thriller Frenzy (1972). Here, the versatile actor embraces every last peculiarity of Jerry Cornelius. Jerry worships his sister Catherine (Sarah Douglas, Superman) – a plot thread that’s dropped too soon, alas – and kills his druggie brother Frank (Derrick O’Connor, Time Bandits) with pleasure; he is quick to plead for help when he begins to lose a fight against a maniac; he is indifferent as he learns that his business partner, “freelance computer programmer” Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre, The Canterbury Tales), appears to be absorbing people for food. Jerry is the center of the story only because he must be – there is nothing about him which is particularly heroic or admirable. When his Hindu friend Professor Hira (Hugh Griffith, The Abominable Dr. Phibes) predicts the end of the world, he also prophecies the arrival of “a new messiah, born of the age of science” – and we have no doubt this will be Jerry Cornelius. What we can’t see coming is exactly how that messiah will come about. It’s all wrapped up in a computer program, “a program for the sum total of all human knowledge,” as Miss Brunner puts it, “a program for immortality.” It’s her own ambition, and she needs microfilm from Jerry’s late father, hidden somewhere in his house, only Catherine is being held hostage there, doped-up by Frank Cornelius – look, it’s pointless to describe the plot. Things happen because they happen. Nuns are lined up playing slot machines. Miss Brunner absorbs the wild-eyed Patrick Magee from A Clockwork Orange (1971). Colored gases are pumped from the ceiling. The story is not altogether important, at least not as a story.

Jerry and Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) inside her secret laboratory.

Jerry and Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) inside her secret laboratory.

Whether or not the film is successful depends on your expectations, of course. I can’t imagine what someone would think after picking up the third Jerry Cornelius novel because of its genre-standard title The English Assassin. It’s probably the same reaction as American moviegoers drawn to this film with its Last Days of Man on Earth poster, featuring a gun-toting ape-man like another entry in the Planet of the Apes saga. (“The Future is Cancelled!” it declares.) But walk into it with Kurt Vonnegut on the brain and it’s a thoughtful and enjoyably odd satire. As an adaptation it’s surprisingly faithful, although certain elements are given short-shrift in the rush to fit it all into 90 minutes – such as the incest subplot, but more importantly the meaning and impact of the ending. It may be that the best Jerry Cornelius adaptation would take on all four books at once (the quartet was a few years away from completion when this film was made) – if only to capture the Commedia dell’arte finale, with the cast revealing themselves as Pierrot, Harlequin, etc. Certainly Fuest’s film was all-in, so why not? But by the time the quartet was completed, Star Wars was turning science fiction back toward Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon’s a character in Moorcock’s books, by the way. He’s paunchy and wears a raincoat – thus the “Flash” pun. Yes, The Final Programme made its window, and was free and gone from the asylum before anyone could blow a whistle.

Final Programme poster

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

Posted on July 3, 2015 at 7:57 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Valerie 1

“Is there some secret in these earrings?” asks Valerie, dangling them in front of her over breakfast. She has long brown hair, so long that it becomes almost a secondary character in the film, splaying about her while she lies in a white bed in a white room, dreaming; or as she makes a mustache for herself while being burned at the stake as a witch. The earrings keep coming back, too, trading hands, envied by a monstrous, vampiric figure which she calls the Polecat, who may or may not be her father. Like a pearl necklace which her fanged cousin Elsa drapes around her sleeping head, they seem to be symbols of adult sexuality. Because more than anything else, the Czechoslovakian film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) is about Valerie’s passage out of childhood, from the moment she accidentally drips menstrual blood on daisies, to later in the film when she walks through the town square plucking petals off daisies in a variation of He Loves Me/He Loves Me Not, the blood still fresh on them.

Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) is tied to a stake by the villagers.

Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) is tied to a stake by the villagers.

Adapted from the 1945 novel by Vítězslav Nezval, the film is part of the Czech New Wave of the late 60’s and early 70’s, but it’s also clearly influenced by the Surrealists, and fits snugly alongside director Jaromil Jires’ contemporary, Luis Buñuel. Refreshingly, the film’s Surrealism doesn’t feel academic or obscurely intellectual, but earthy and erotic, persuasively following its own internal logic to its natural endpoint, as dreams do. There are chickens (and chicken feathers) everywhere. The Polecat – or weasel – hunts among the chickens, slaughtering them casually. He’s a vampire with makeup reminiscent of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu – tall ears, skull-like features, hideous teeth – but he’s also “The Plague” (a la Werner Herzog’s later take on Nosferatu), and he’s a Catholic bishop, and he’s a seducer of women. He stalks about the town with a frightening weasel mask, coquettishly flaunts a purple fan, wears white gloves like an orchestra conductor and the black robe and wide-brimmed hat of a cleric, and carries a tail-wagging white Maltese at his belly. Sometimes he cracks a whip, much like a number of shirtless men who chase Valerie throughout the village, whipping, whipping. Her grandmother is pale as a corpse and lusts after the Polecat, seeking the gift of youth. And Valerie flaunts her youth among all the corpses and chicken-filled coffins, skipping, smiling, swimming in the fountain with her hair floating around her. She lives in a house with chicken coops in the attic and a vampire’s crypt in the basement. She’s well suited to dance between both worlds, as a perverted priest attempts to ravish her, as she witnesses dark visions of a wedding, as she accepts the kisses of a handsome young missionary named Eaglet, who resembles The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, who plays instruments that can conjure any kind of music, and who may or may not be her long-lost brother.

The Polecat (Jirí Prýmek)

The Polecat (Jirí Prýmek)

All of these elements swim around each other like Valerie drifting in circles in the village fountain, and in the film’s last stretch, the various characters are storm-tossed in the woods, and ultimately parade around Valerie as she dreams in her bed. The only narrative to speak of is her quest to uncover her true parentage, but she doesn’t seem particularly interested. All the characters insist that she is now a woman, but, like a true adolescent, she hasn’t noticed yet, and treats even the sinister Polecat with a certain amount of amusement and affection – which, I suppose, is how he convinces her to bite a chicken’s neck like a vampire, until it ceases quivering and the blood paints her lips like lipstick. Given that my last viewing was on an old and very unsatisfactory DVD transfer, Criterion’s new Blu-Ray is very welcome, restoring the film’s lush country sensuality and allowing the viewer to pick out every little bizarre detail in the set dressing. A particularly nice feature is the option to watch the film with an alternate 2006 soundtrack by The Valerie Project (think The Alloy Orchestra by way of Ennio Morricone), with a short documentary about the soundtrack’s creation included. The disc also has three shorts by Jires, and interviews, including one with the film’s star, Jaroslava Schallerová, who confesses that being burned at the stake wasn’t as much fun as she made it appear.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

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