BEFORE: I'm done with another Comic-Con, at least this one was in New York and I didn't have to travel - but now I'm exhausted and I have a cold and I just want to sleep through all of Columbus Day. But with a little help from DayQuil and Mountain Dew I can stay up for a movie (after a little nap, of course) and thus stay on track.
I've got one more Dracula film tomorrow, made in 1970. This one was released in 1979, so I'm not going chronologically - but the 1970 film links to the next block, so it's got to come last. Anyway that puts this one next to the more famous 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, and both films were based on the stage version of "Dracula" rather than from the novel, so this should make for a logical side-by-side comparison.
THE PLOT: In 1913 the charming, seductive and sinister vampire Count Dracula travels to England in search of an immortal bride.
AFTER: While it's definitely the same plot as the 1931 film - Dracula hires a ship to take him and his many coffins to the U.K. - there are still some notable differences. For example, this film starts out on that ship, with Drac's voyage already in progress. Why waste time dicking around with exposition in his Transylvanian castle when we can get right to the action and the imminent threat of a vampire heading for a crowded, industrialized nation? The Count can catch up with Jonathan Harker in England when he moves into Carfax Abbey, the prime real estate that comes with its own cobwebs, so he should feel right at home.
This moves Renfield back to being introduced later in the story, just like in the novel. But he still ends up in the asylum that's run by Dr. Seward. Only here Dr. Seward is Lucy's father (in the book she's Lucy Westenra, which was always an odd last name, I thought) and to further simplify things, Mina Murray (later Mina Harker in most versions) becomes Van Helsing's daughter for this film. You have to remember that the 1931 film was made during very cheaply during the Depression, and there was also a notable recession during the 1970's, so it seems that the production company tried to save some money here by reducing the number of last names. For a story that only had about a dozen characters to begin with, they whittled the story down here to just about 7 or 8 major roles.
This does give both Dr. Seward and Prof. Van Helsing good reason to take an active role in battling Count Dracula - because their daughters are not safe when there's a horny vampire on the prowl. And even if they can't save their daughter's lives, they can at least save their souls with a stake through the heart. But in most of the versions I've seen so far, Lucy is Dracula's first victim and Mina is romantically involved with Jonathan Harker, but they flipped the script here and made Mina the first woman Dracula attacks, and Lucy Seward is engaged to Jonathan. I'm not sure why this changed, maybe some focus group responded better to the name Lucy, so they gave her the bigger role?
I'm also a little disappointed that they chose to set the action in 1913, where the 1931 film seemed to be set in the present - at least the scenes in London depicted a modern city of the 1930's. When I imagined the type of Dracula film that could be made in the late 1970's, I pictured Dracula grooving down a NYC sidewalk, like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" - it's not a big leap from that cape he wears to a disco outfit from that time. (And this film was directed by John Badham, who also directed "Saturday Night Fever"...)
But it's good to see that production values and special effects were much better in this later remake, at least compared with that 1931 version. Unfortunately a fake flying bat still looks like a fake flying bat, but at least there's some gore when Dracula bites a neck or tears open a throat, where the Bela Lugosi film had all that take place just out of shot. And it looked like they shot the sailing scenes on a real working ship, and not just a set.
Starring Frank Langella (last heard in "The Prophet"), Laurence Olivier (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Donald Pleasance (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Kate Nelligan (ditto), Trevor Eve, Jan Francis, Tony Haygarth, Teddy Turner.
RATING: 5 out of 10 communion wafers
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