The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid

by Butler, Charles E.

  Am I being over-obsessive? Maybe too haemorrhoidal in my expectations? A cost of $40,000,000 that made an eventual $216,000,000, probably says that I am. I have to say that I've lost count of how many people have confessed that this is the best ever version of Dracula.

  Maybe a film crew had finally got it right? After all, Francis Ford Coppola had directed The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now! (1979). Maybe the Count was in the best hands after all?

  Maybe.

  In several interviews and coffee-table magazine articles, Coppola told how he followed his instincts when casting the vampire in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. He decided to do exactly what he had done with The Godfather and

  "Cast the greatest actor in the world."

  Coppola's words, not mine.

  At the time, Gary Oldman had just begun his rise up the Hollywood ladder after playing the doomed Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a small, but prominent part in the movie and in actual world events. Oldman physically resembled Oswald and his performance brought him excellent reviews.

  In Sid and Nancy (1986), directed by Alex Cox, he had remarkably similar features to the ill-fated punk rock icon, Sid Vicious. He had been equally outstanding in Alan Parker's The Firm (1988) as gangland crook Bex.

  Now, he was cast as Count Dracula.

  The sequences in the Castle are his best in the film. He fits the weird atmosphere of the cold outbacks of Transylvania described as the land at the edge of the World. He discards the obligatory black cloak for outlandishly garish costumes that seem to belong in pantomime or an extravagant ballet, the ornamental wig completing the image of an out-of-sorts pantomime dame!

  He is genuinely ruthless towards his enemies, not blinking an eye as he smashes their heads in with a mace or impaling them on spears that look as if they would snap inside the corpse. The prologue confirms his speech about bravery and honour amidst the warlike days. He doesn't need an eerie shadow that punctuates every bad feeling that he has, and signs his correspondence, very ominously, with just the letter, 'D'.

  When reprimanding his brides, he is suitably acidic in his rebuke, delivering Rumanian lines as to the manor born. This could actually have been the Count that everyone had been waiting for.

  Then he spots the photograph of Mina Murray and everything goes disastrously wrong.

  Rubber cheeks wash with tears and the Count begins to whine about his lost love, the girl who threw herself from the castle turrets at the news of her husband’s death.

  The film loses any credibility it may have held.

  After 400 years, he abandons everything to search for her reincarnation.

  His three female brides berate him for never having loved them. He keeps them happy, it seems, by furnishing them with midnight snacks of newborn babes and promising his guests to them, once their usefulness to him is ended. Trailing to London aboard the Demeter, he quickly becomes relegated to a guest starring role in his own movie. Turning him into an awkward romantic fop dissolves the audience interest in his character almost immediately.

  Maybe that is the reason that, with the bloodletting, he becomes very savage indeed? Casually nipping at the throat for the first two or three instalments and then, in the shape of a large man- wolf, tearing through the jugular leaving his conquest’s bedrooms simply running with blood. He rests in a box-like crate, half-kneeling in the earth with his head above the soil, always seeming to sense the air around him for new dangers. The crates themselves appear to be temporary locations as he has a habit of literally smashing through the wood and reducing them to splinters when he wakes up of an evening.

  In fact, watching his restlessness in the crates, I began to wonder if this super-hyped superman ever got any kip at all. When not watching for treachery, he was transforming into various werewolf derivatives, cocooned in a birth bubble full of gloop. Taking his transformations further, he faces his foes disguised as a large - maybe eight feet tall – man-bat. Obviously too big for his box crates as, when he wears this identity, he tends to snooze clinging to the rafters.

  "See what your God did to me?" he moans to Van Helsing, I suppose lack of sleep would make you feel irritable after 400 years, before literally falling apart and changing again into dozens of rats.

  He watches his conquests, like a pre-pubescent schoolboy, from behind closet doors as they indulge in innocent play. He then enters the young ladies’ boudoirs as a luminescent green mist. I wondered if he had a luminescent green smock to match!

  Then, like most men on a first date, that's when he becomes tongue-tied. First, he seems to lull them into submission with unintelligible dialogue. Cries a little. Then bites them on the neck with a swift penetration, before slicing open his chest to complete the process. With Mina, after only searching for her for the last four-hundred years, he loses his bottle and decides that he doesn't want to make her as he is after all. Mina has to take the bull by the horns and finish the blood communion herself!

  Watching Oldman perform, I got the feeling that the film needed the rubber bats and hairy wolves, because without them, as stated above, the Count simply loses all interest - unless you're a fourteen-year-old girl who has sneaked into the cinema on the front row.

  He claims to be descended from the proud Szekelys and to have commanded nations. We believe the second part after witnessing the bloodthirsty prologue.

  But, Gary Oldman - sans the age/wolf/bat make-up - just looks like ordinary Gary Oldman, without any air of aristocratic breeding behind him and, who would seem to be more at home cheering with the crowds in the stands at Millwall FC than living a supernatural existence in the bleak forests of Transylvania. His relentless search for his dead wife only adds an unkind naiveté to his character that comes across as very harmful, as it becomes the plot device situated at the core of the film. Coppola may have chosen the greatest actor in the world, but he could have found someone to emit more of a satanic aura.

  Why didn't someone give Udo Kier a stab at the role in a straight version?

  Finally, after an impressive chase across a Transylvanian soundstage, the end result takes us into territory belonging more accurately in The Neverending Story. Accurately cut down in his prime by Harker and Quincey Morris' blades, Dracula pleads to Mina to finish it. God's light shining on the fallen angel is more naff than anything found in the seventies The Omen series and the Cistine chapel-esque painting just adds to the nausea.

  Not the best Count Dracula, and, sadly, not the greatest actor in the world.

  However, I find that I can't condemn his professional abilities, when, in fairness, he was juggling with an absurd script tailored for the nineties pre-teens. In fact, Mr Oldman has done better work in films such as True Romance (1993), and Leon (1994). More recently, he has taken on the mantle of police lieutenant Jim Gordon in the new Batman franchise starring Christian Bale. His bravely attempted Dracula is tucked away as a lucrative, but painful memory.

  Which brings me to the Count's Dutch nemesis, Professor Van Helsing, a totally over the top, Anthony Hopkins.

  Called in on the case by his old student, Jack Seward, Hopkins goes on to chew every piece of scenery within reach. I remember watching the "Making of..." instalment at the time of the hype, as Coppola would shout 'Cut!', and then apologise to the rest of the cast for having had them exposed to Van Helsing's dark side.

  Having no redeeming features whatsoever, Van Helsing is a more frightening creation than Dracula, verbally bullying the students in his care to give him the answers that he wants to hear and playing mind games in cemeteries, as he disappears, suddenly leaving them alone in the dark. We never see any kind of bedside manner as, with all the coincidence worthy of a 1930s chapter play serial, he seems to arrive at the most convenient time, when his patients are thrashing about in their beds after a rigorous tussle with some unnameable creature of the night.

  With cross held high and bible in hand, he shouts down would-be satanic evildoers with dialogue liberally borrowed from Max Von Sydow in The Exor
cist (1973). Lucy's vomiting sequence is unforgivable. His work done, he prefers to attend lunch in an all night cafe, relaying every gruesome detail of their friend's death to his guests over a generous platter of roasted lamb.

  He puzzlingly names the Count as "... the foe that I've pursued all my life!" and collapses in a heap of forced laughter, supposedly illustrating his eccentricities. He becomes an irritant, as he casually asks Seward to obtain some post-mortem knives to perform the decapitation of Lucy, at her own funeral!

  When encountering the three brides asleep in their crypt, we see his most vicious streak, as he chauvinistically chops off their heads and throws them over the side of a mountain. Acting or not, it's unknown, but Hopkins' Van Helsing seems to harbour nothing but a deep contempt for the rest of the cast. Appearing himself to be undirected, he arms himself with fine cigars, tools stolen from nearby surgeries and probably the largest ego on set.

  A sequel, The Chronicles of Van Helsing, was also slated to star Hopkins, but, and this is perhaps due to untold problems faced in this production, it was never made. The Mummy (1999) director, Stephen Sommers, worked on the final script, with Hugh Jackman stepping into Hopkins' shoes as the Professor, for Universal's monsterfest, Van Helsing (2004).

  Sir Anthony had already assured himself a place in the horror hall of fame with his definitive portrayal of Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the inevitable sequels Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002).

  From one soulless, but overripe, characterisation, to another extreme case of artistic over-indulgence, we meet Renfield (Tom Waits).

  Employed by the solicitors firm "Hawkins and Tompkins", Thomas Renfield has returned from a trip to Transylvania a raving fruitloop. Mr Hawkins divulges the need for his incarceration to "personal problems" when briefing Jonathon Harker as his successor.

  Gabbling, sometimes incoherently, about the nutritional qualities of his disgusting collection of maggots and flies, Renfield has picked up an obsessional belief in a mysterious Master who promises him eternal life. The term was used so much in this film, I thought of Susan St James' response to George Hamilton in Love at First Bite (1979), as she likened Dracula to an insurance salesman.

  Astutely commenting on the failure of Seward's romantic frustrations, Renfield has the habit of attacking the hangdog doctor without the slightest warning, then pleading for a sleek, playful kitten, at the turn of a hat.

  Decked out with bifocals and a constant case of the shakes, he lets Mina in on the secret that she is the reason the Count has come to London, even though, Dracula himself only discovered that she existed when he saw Harker's photograph of her. Did Renfield also have a picture of her on his trip? Like the double O agents, is it standard kit? Curiously, the continuing movie obsessions with Harker's photograph of Mina are never mentioned in the novel.

  After more gratuitous ranting and raving, Renfield is repeatedly bounced off the bars of his cell by an unseen hand, for the false accusation that he tipped off Van Helsing to the Count's whereabouts.

  My own choice to play Renfield in this movie would have been Jay Robinson, demoted to Mr Hawkins, an actor who could rant with the best of them. Check out his Caligula in the classic biblical epic The Robe (1953) and its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954). Priceless.

  Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra are accurately positioned in life, if not in characterisation. Winona Ryder's trying performance as the doe-eyed young madam, becomes painfully difficult to watch, as she tries to convey the sensibilities of a prim Victorian miss with a laboured idea of an English accent. Typing her diary while sneaking looks at pornographic illustrations, she talks at length of her impoverished fiancé's decision not to marry her. In her frustration, she becomes a voyeur to her friend's promiscuous lifestyle; in fact, for most of the time, she seems to forget her own life while she baby sits her sulking playmate.

  She watches Lucy charm the men around her with a giggling complacency and shares harmless fun in the garden dodging light raindrops. When romanced by the Count, he punctures her innocence by introducing her to the delights of the amour philtre liqueur, absinthe. Not put off by his constant crying and soul-searching, she picks up on the thin assumption that they have met before, dragging us through even more boring scenes of Hollywood's idea of a romantic courtship.

  When informed that Jonathon is alive, she throws all ties to the Count over the side of the ship that she sails on to bring her disorientated suitor home. Once married, she continues her secret liaison however, because her new husband seems more interested in Dracula's capture than in her.Smitten and then bitten, she becomes confusingly schizophrenic as to which side to take. As Kate Nelligan's Lucy realised before her, she discovers that there are no decent men around when you need them; even Van Helsing only manages one lingering kiss before scoring her head with a holy wafer.

  When the Count is robbed of his supernatural qualities at the end of the film, she angrily rams the knife deeper and, with resigned tears, lops off his head for good measure.

  Winona Ryder had appeared as a tomboy teen in Tim Burton's devilishly funny Beetlejuice (1988) and would star opposite Sigourney Weaver as the robot Analee Call in Alien: Resurrection (1997).

  Lucy Westenra is portrayed by Coppola discovery Sadie Frost, who would go on to make more headlines as Mrs Jude Law. Her brattish tease is generally encountered behind many a school gymnasium during lunch hour sneaking cigarettes. How she becomes the object of the Count's interest is never explained in the film - maybe he smokes too?

  She decides that, of her three suitors, she will marry Arthur; more for the sounding of his name rather than for any screen time that they don't share together. She flirts with Seward while explaining her sharpened senses allowing him a chaste kiss to keep his interest. After her unions with the Count, she seems to come to terms with her foibles as she cautions Mina to stand by her man, before trying an orgiastic seduction on the remaining four males in her tomb.

  For the most part, both girls take up too much screen time because the life that the screenwriter has given them becomes increasingly tedious in the extreme. When they were running through the maze in the garden, I was unkindly wishing that they would lose themselves for good.

  Accent on accents becomes the thought as I watched Keanu Reeves mangle his own dialogue with more of a straight face than Bela Lugosi had in 1931. His Jonathon Harker has been sent to Transylvania to confirm the sale of Carfax Abbey to Count Dracula. Following in Renfield's footsteps, he must be very brave or very stupid, but the script does tell us that he is blinded by love and the urge to make money. He reports his progress in voiceover, as did John Van Eysson in 1958, by reading various passages from his diary.

  Sharing a briefer scene with the superstitious villagers than most Harkers, he soon finds himself bodily plonked in a mysterious coach by a driver who favours wearing armour plating that wouldn't be unusual in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Quickly veering on to the oppressive Castle Dracula, he doesn't seem shocked in the slightest by the obvious off-kilter happenings.

  He does turn out to be stupid however when he decides to laugh at the ravings concerning the bloody campaigns of the Count's family history. Apologising for his ignorance, he seals the deal for Carfax, and becomes a little put out when the Count requests that he stay for a month at the castle.

  He writes constantly in his diary of his general feelings and superstitions. Straight after the Count's warning that he shouldn't sleep in the wrong rooms, Harker is lured by Mina's disembodied voice to a dusty bedroom where he is preened and stroked by three breathtaking cover girls.

  Dracula's unexpected entrance causes him to emit the first sign of any kind of consternation as he gargles his displeasure at not being allowed to climax. When Dracula turns his sights on him, he mercifully faints away.

  Later in the film, despite describing the women as "Devils of the Pit," he spends a considerable amount of time with them, unlike his literary counterpart: laid half naked and, se
emingly half-drugged, lamenting on his bad luck, before trying more terse attempts at escape. Climbing down the wall that he witnessed the Count scaling, he slips and the hidden wire that holds him, drags him to the correct spot on the rigging to slide down and fall into the clean-looking waters of the Castle moat.

  After these first scenes, that takes up nearly 70 minutes of the movie, his character blends into the background with Holmwood, Seward and Morris. He marries Mina in intercut scenes with Lucy's death, and, accurately, is the first to name the Count as being the vampire, informing Van Helsing that he resides at Carfax. At the end of the film, he leaves his wife to make her own choice as to which man she wants: himself, or Dracula.