Word: badham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only other thing worth mentioning about Dracula--aside from the terrible Latex, greasepaint and collodion jobs on a few of the vampires, and the turn-of-the century, tradition vs. modernism theme Badham and Richter apparently tried to concoct in the visuals--is the great love scene that stopped the show on Broadway. As Dracula and Lucy begin to embrace, their figures dissolve into multi-colored silhouettes and recede into the distance, whereupon a bunch of shapely limbs wind and unwind to John Williams' less than austere music. The whole thing is modeled on the title sequences in the Bond...
...Badham obviously knows that horror movies are only fun when they run the risk of being silly. So his camera tracks all over the place, with insects and spider webs and skeletons in the foreground, and massive, Gothic, bat-like sets or magical, panoramic English cliffs and countrysides in the background. The bulk of the action occurs inbetween, and Badham reaches it by cutting rapidly or tracking or literally walking up to it, camera jiggling subjectively. Very little happens outside the frame, so we rarely worry about what we can't see, only about how vivid and nauseating what...
Individual shots are often quite striking, although they have their share of phony backdrops and obvious bits of processing. But nothing really propels the images into each other. It's not the editor's-fault; Badham just never bothered to devise a cutting style, so special effects pop out at you mechanically, unsurprisingly, without the right build-up, like creaky hobgoblins in a decomposing funhouse. And because his close-ups are so brief and his cutting so nervous, we're never close to any character for long enough to build up any identification. The movie is thoroughly uninvolving...
Which is odd, since Langella looks as if he's been preening before one for the last 20 years. For Langella, Dracula is a haunted lover, a slave to his lust. He brings off the concept, while Richter and Badham whip up blood squalls around him. But the performance is a fraction of what it could have been. Maybe Langella is too good an actor to be frittered away on the screen. I don't mean that as an insult to films, but where else can an actor with no technical resources--a Jack Nicholson (good...
Olivier has much the same problem, only much worse. He comes on with his elaborate fussing and bogus accent, and just as he begins to work his magic, the way he did under the sluggish lenses of Daniel Petrie (The Betsy) and Franklin J. Schaffner (The Boys From Brazil), Badham cuts away. Olivier is a man of the stage, and cold entrances don't suit him; it takes him awhile to warm up. The only time Badham holds on him for any length of time is after he's just rammed a stake through his daughter's heart, at which...