Word: draculas
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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...
...figure of Dracula himself, not the book, the play, or the movies, that has endured. If Superman is the fantasy figure of sandy-haired, scrawny, neo-Nazi Kansas farmboys, then Dracula is for the urban or suburban adolescent: chubby, acne-ridden, excrutiatingly lonely, the boy with nothing to do after school but tear the limbs off Barbie dolls and masturbate. Girls laugh at him, or, worse yet, ignore him altogether...
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...
...SCREEN'S greatest Dracula? Not Bela Lugosi, who gave a lugubrious performance in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, which was utterly ruined by its failure to abandon the Deane-Balderston play. F.W. Murnau's German silent Nosferatuwas a good deal better, and even today provides one or two chilling moments, but Max Schreck's strutting rat did not have a whole lot of dramatic stature...
...vote goes to Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer films and one independent production. Lee is not a very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable...