Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...part desperately inventive, as their makers sought to keep belief alive despite the strictures of the budget. And mind, this leaves aside discussion of higher levels of creativity that have occasionally been placed in Dracula's service: the stylish camp of the 1977 Broadway production, from which this film has borrowed Frank Langella for the title role, only to tune him down; or the wonderful expressionistic grotesqueries of that marvelous silent, Nosferatu...
...cannot entirely ground him. Not permitted to parody romantic menace as he was able to do on the stage, Langella shows himself capable of playing it straight and slightly melancholic. Kate Nelligan, as Lucy, the young woman who enthralls him and is herself enthralled, is superbly spirited. In the film's early scenes, she plays the part as a liberated lady, turn-of-the-century variety. Once Dracula has begun to work his will on her, she becomes a resourceful woman fighting boldly for her forbidden love. Laurence Olivier contributes another of his shrewd Germanic foxes to the proceedings...
...Wanderers is not just another urban gang movie; it is a little of every big, prominent gang movie made during the past two decades. Bits and pieces of this volatile film recall Clockwork Orange, Mean Streets, The Warriors and even West Side Story. Though the conflicting parts never mesh into a coherent whole, The Wanderers is always worth watching...
...film takes place in the North Bronx of 1963-a no man's land pockmarked by dilapidated apartment developments. The characters are the Italian American high school kids who belong to the Wanderers, a gang that is forever rumbling with black and Chinese rivals as well as with a grotesque bunch named the Fordham Baldies, led by the enormous Erland van Lidth de Jeude. Between the skirmishes, the movie charts typical teenage rituals. Even the Wanderers must cope, in their own semiverbal way, with parents, love, sex and the prospect of leaving home...
Certainly a film maker is entitled to alter a novel's text, but here both the choices and the motives are somewhat spurious. By grafting stylistic affectations onto an otherwise naturalistic movie, Kaufman blunts the raw power that, is The Wanderers' greatest asset. Like his characters, he would have fared far bet ter if he had stopped showing off and practiced a little self-control...