Word: bela
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is not the half-century-old dramatization by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, in which Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel was moved up to the 1920s--the version that brought fame to Bela Lugosi (whom I saw play it here in Boston near the end of his life) and is now doing the same on Broadway for Frank Langella. Nor is it the later adaptation by Crane Johnson, which I have never seen...
...going into unexplained comas during routine operations. When he explains why he's doing it--the unimportance of the individual compared with the advancement of science--to a drugged Genevieve Bujold, the young doctor who has stumbled onto the terrible secret, the scene rings familiar. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and a thousand others have been here before, and one wonders why Widmark isn't indulging in similar eye-rolling or stuttering. Crichton forces him to become a stoic zombie, as if to hide what this really is--a hokey mad-doctor scene--and thus robs...
...elliptically clear, whom only the Cross and the stake can bring to his apocalyptic destiny. Langella has always been a spectral, neurasthenic figure onstage with a temperament of icy disdain. For him this is a role of roles, one with which he will be linked in the future, as Bela Lugosi has been since the 1931 film...
...above all a book about people, a series of descerning and generous portraits of the individuals encountered throughout a lifetime. The great and lowly alike are brought to life with a few deft words: de Gaulle, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, Willa Cather ("Aunt Willa...a rock of strength and sweetness"), Bela Bartok ("a composer to bear comparison with the giants of the past"), the family's Italian cook, a hotel porter in Leipzig, Solzhenitsyn, Glenn Gould ("that most exotic of my colleagues") and Jacob Epstein ("like his sculptures, he seemed as if God had formed him with a few grand strokes...
...Including F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 Nosferatu, the celebrated 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, Roman Polanski's 1967 black comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, a 1970 skinflick called Does Dracula Suck? and the 1974 X-rated Andy Warhol's Dracula...