The Ron Review: Count Dracula (1970)

First of all, this is a rather obscure and not widely seen movie, and it is only recently that it has even become available on DVD. Although it stars Christopher Lee, in the role for which he is best known, this is NOT one of the Draculas made by Britain's Hammer Studios. So if you're only familiar with Lee's Dracula through his Hammer work, there is a good chance you've probably never seen this movie, which is markedly different in terms of style, production design and even Lee's appearance and approach to the character.

The novelty of this project, as conceived, was that it would be the first time Bram Stoker's original novel would be filmed exactly as he wrote it, without any liberties being taken with the source material. In terms of Dracula's physical appearance, they got it right -- he starts out as a very old man who gets progressively younger as the story unfolds. But the screenplay is not quite as faithful to the book, sometimes for reasons that are perfectly understandable. The "faithful to the novel" concept was what attracted Lee to the movie in the first place, as none of the Hammer films could really make that claim. (I'm surprised Hammer allowed him to play Dracula for a rival filmmaker; maybe his contracts were negotiated on a film by film basis.)

For perhaps the first half-hour, the film follows the book closely -- even masterfully. Up to the end of the initial Transylvania sequence involving Dracula and Jonathan Harker, this is a well made, atmospheric, creepy movie. Once the movie shifts back to London, the story begins to stray away from Stoker's prose. First off, Dracula's entire voyage to England by sea is omitted, no doubt for budgetary reasons. Ditto the climactic pursuit of the Count back through the Transylvanian countryside. One key character, Arthur Holmwood, is not in the story at all -- he appears to have been folded into the character of Quincy Morris, who was an American in the book but is played by an Englishman in the film.

Van Helsing, well played by Herbert Lom, is unable to partake in the final battle because he suffers a stroke -- something that does not happen in the book. And his one scene with Dracula makes it obvious that Lom and Lee filmed the scene separately; they never appear in the same shot, if you watch very carefully. Mina does not make the final journey either; she stays in London with the professor. And rather than her giving the crucial clue as to where Dracula is going, that piece of information instead comes from Renfield. A lot of these changes are baffling, because they don't seem to serve any purpose in terms of the interior logic of the story, nor do they cause the filmmakers to say anything new about either the Count or the Dracula legend.

The film obviously was made on a very low budget, at times to its detriment. The "wolves" in Transylvania are clearly German shepherds. There is a bat seen through a window at nighttime that is obviously just a prop. When Harker and Morris push large "boulders" down on the Count's gypsy servants near the end, one of them bounces off a horse without causing the animal to do much more than whinny. Dracula's death is lame -- they merely set him on fire while he is in his coffin, then throw the coffin over a cliff. Couldn't they afford to stage a decent staking? And the most laughable scene in the whole movie comes when the Fearless Vampire Hunters invade Carfax Abbey after Dracula is gone. In the book, they were greeted by a horde of rats. The movie substitutes stuffed hunting trophies that are made, not very convincingly, to growl and move.

A lot of these things could be forgiven, individually, but they're all symptomatic of the big, overriding problem with the movie: its director, Jess Franco, is basically a hack filmmaker. In the hands of someone like Mario Bava, this could have been a masterpiece, but Franco is no Bava. Hell, he's not even Rob Zombie.

The camerawork is very poor; many of the shots are wobbly, clearly taken with handheld cameras. The day-for-night shooting is fairly obvious. And the overuse of the zoom lens is maddening. On the other hand, the film does have lots of well done Gothic atmosphere. The scene where Mina follows a sleepwalking Lucy to her midnight rendezvous with Dracula is just about perfect, marred only by the shoddy special effect of Dracula's vanishing shadow. I like the score, which also adds to the atmosphere. And the cast is great. Lee turns in a powerhouse performance as always, made even better because he actually has a fair amount of dialogue here, unlike in many of the Hammer films. Klaus Kinski as Renfield gave me pause; he has not a word of dialogue and never appears in any scene with Dracula, yet he seems so perfect as a madman that any criticism is rendered moot. Soledad Miranda as Lucy is gorgeous, even though the character has very little to do as either one of the living or one of the undead.

Sadly, because the "faithful to the book" argument really holds no water, and because of the shoddy filmmaking and production values, this is more of an interesting "what might have been" rather than a great Dracula movie. But if you're a Christopher Lee fan, it's worth a look.