...the film manages to convey its violence without resorting to much blood or gore and without the graphic brutality so commonplace in more-modern movies.
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Surprisingly, anything approaching the original plot of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, "Dracula," has only been attempted on the screen several times. The first, of course, was F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" in 1922, remade by director Werner Herzog in 1979 as "Nosferatu, the Vampyre." The most recent was Francis Coppola's 1992 version, "Bram Stoker's Dracula," which attempted to be as faithful as possible to the text. In between, the only other renditions more or less based on the book were a television production with Jack Palance and the realization we have here, "Horror of Dracula." Every other movie Dracula is a variation on the idea, sometimes quite a far-out variation, and there have been hundreds of them since Max Schreck first made his mark in the Murnau classic. This 1958 Hammer Film production is not quite in the same league with Murnau's or Coppola's versions, but it can hold its head (and fangs) high among the rest of the breed.
Starting in 1957 with "The Curse of Frankenstein," Britain's Hammer Films would begin to resurrect most of the old thirties' Universal Studios monsters, "Horror of Dracula" being the second in the series. Eventually they would include a host of sequels, as well as reinventions of the Mummy, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and others, many if not most of the films, like "Horror," made under the functional but uninspired direction of Terrence Fisher. In America at the time, Roger Corman and Vincent Price would be doing much the same thing with low-budget renderings of Edgar Allan Poe stories. This resurgence of interest in horror in the late fifties and sixties would eventually peter out in the early seventies, to be replaced by a new wave of horror--slasher movies--that would dominate the late seventies and eighties. So swings the pendulum of public taste.
Admittedly, many of the old Hammer films appear to us today as corny, flat, and dated. In some ways this is the case with "Horror of Dracula," too, its set designs looking like every set Hammer ever used for its subsequent productions, its lighting plain and decidedly non-atmospheric, its pacing sometimes leaden, and its supporting cast largely forgettable. The film is resolutely fifties in style, its bright colors never seeming to be touched by the flickering of a candle or the dancing flames of an open hearth. I kept imagining what a few imaginative camera angles or eerily lit rooms could have done for the film's mood, but it was not to be.
What sets "Horror" apart from the rest of the crowd, however, and makes it a recommendable entry in the Dracula canon is the work of its two stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, names that would be forever associated with the Hammer legend. That Mr. Lee is still going strong in things like "Star Wars" and "The Lord of the Rings" after nearly half a century of screen villainy is a tribute to his enduring power to convey some really serious malevolence. It was in "Horror of Dracula" that Lee finally got to show the world his chops after various small parts for most of the previous decade. From then on he never had to look back and thereafter became one of the screen's premier evildoers.
Yes, Christopher Lee is truly a top-notch villain, even if he has only a few lines to speak here. Yet these are more lines than I remember him saying in the later installments. He creates a count at once ominous and aristocratic, a demon who's scary and noble at the same time, far more dreadful and frightening than his competition in the role: the patrician Lugosi, the ill-chosen Chaney, the movie-star handsome Langella, the bizarre Carradine, or the purely weird Oldman. When Lee bares his fangs, he is the ultimate Count Dracula, which is why for so many people he is the only Dracula who, uh, counts.
Cushing, who plays the indomitable Professor Van Helsing, fearless vampire hunter, is also well suited for his part. He exudes confidence and authority at every turn. He's the vampire hunter you want on your side when the blood suckers start threatening you. He's far more commanding, for instance, than the estimable Laurence Olivier in the 1979 Frank Langella version, a Van Helsing fearful and cautious; or than Anthony Hopkins in Coppola's version, a doctor eccentric in the extreme. Cushing is sensible, smart, and efficient. He knows what he has to do to stop the Count and he does it.
The rest of the cast is, as I've said, forgettable. The women in Dracula's life, Lucy (Carol Marsh) and Mina (Melissa Stribling), are there mainly there to offer their necks to the vampire and little more. Their characters are never plumbed to any depth, nor, I suppose, should they be. Michael Gough plays Lucy's brother and Mina's husband, Arthur. You remember Gough as the butler in the "Batman" series, where he was allowed to have more personality than here. As Arthur, he's at first a doubter of vampires and then a stalwart assistant to Van Helsing. John Van Eyssen plays Jonathan Harker, who is engaged to Lucy; unlike the character in Stoker's book, the poor guy is killed off early on and good riddance. Eyssen is quite wooden in the part and pretty much stops the movie dead in its tracks every time he's on screen. The only supporting player showing any flair is veteran actor Miles Malleson as a chatty old undertaker in a single, brief scene. Happily, he would appear in several more Hammer Films before his death and lend them his brief but captivating liveliness.
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