Wednesday, May 31, 2023

No, the one with Jack Palance.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974) opens just as the novel does, with solicitor Jonathon Harker (Murray Brown) visiting the Transylvanian estate of one Count Dracula (Jack Palance), who is interested in buying real estate in England.  Dracula is brusque, rude even, though he is intrigued when he glimpses a picture of Jonathon's fiance Mina (Penelope Horner), her good friend Lucy (Fiona Lewis), and Lucy's fiance Arthur (Simon Ward.)  Jonathon cheerfully tells Dracula where they all live, because Jonathon is an idiot.


This is a TV movie, though, so they don't have the time or budget for a carefully crafted mood o0f unease and Jonathon's slow descent into inescapable horror, so things move fairly quickly.  Dracula quickly tires of pretending to be human, so when he chases his vampire brides (Sarah Douglas, Virginia Wetherell, and Barbara Lindley), he isn't afraid to show the fangs.  He forces Jonathon to write a letter to his employer, finalizing the sale of the Carfax Estate, and another to Mina saying that he'll be traveling in Europe for a time.  Then Dracula leaves, and Jonathon tries to escape but is caught by Dracula's brides.  RIP Jonathon.


After a quick and atmospheric shot of the wreck of the Demeter, the scene shifts to Mina, arriving to visit an ailing Lucy.  No one knows why Lucy is wasting away, but Arthur has called in another doctor, one Abraham Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport) to help.  Van Helsing has a very surprising theory (it's vampires!) and he is of course completely correct, as events follow the general outline of the book, only on an accelerated timeline and with a smaller cast.  (There's no Renfield, and Lucy is stuck with the most boring of her suitors.  No cowboys here.)


But there is a twist, or at least it was a twist at the time.  This is the earliest example I can find of a Dracula motivated by the search for his reincarnated love.  (To be fair, Blacula got there first, but Blacula is not Dracula.)  This time the reincarnated love is Lucy, and it works much better than a Dracula pining for Mina.  Dracula transforms Lucy, but once she's destroyed he's furious, and only attacks Mina out of spite.


This is an angry Dracula in general.  Jack Palance is perhaps not the best choice for suave and seductive, but he's great at smoldering menace.  This is also the first movie I know of that explicitly makes Dracula the same person as Vlad Tepes, and he brags about his martial exploits.  he also gets a few tacked on action scenes, wading through faithful household servants and an entire hotel's worth of men who try to stand in his way.  


Columbia Pictures and Francis Ford Coppola actually purchased the rights to use the title "Bram Stoker's Dracula," so these days this movie is usually billed as "Dan Curtis's Dracula" or simply "Dracula."  If anything, it's "The Cliff Notes to Bram Stoker's Dracula," but Palance's performance makes up for a lot of literary sins.



2 comments:

  1. No Renfield?! He's the true protagonist!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not this time! It's all up to Mina . . . and I guess the other guys.

    ReplyDelete