Drac to Basics

You have to admire the nerve shown by the producers of Mystery and Imagination in doing adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula in the same year, especially when the year in question was 1968. If that wasn’t quite the point of peak Hammer Horror, it was certainly thereabouts: the company released Dracula Has Risen From the Grave that year, while it was also the off-year between Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Beyond the marquee value of the names of these two most well-known Gothic novels, one wonders if there was any further motivation for doing them – some puritanical impulse to strip them of their Hammer trappings and restore them to their place as Classic Literature, perhaps?

There have been a fearful number of Frankensteins and a dreadful number of Draculas down the years, so the same question applies to the Mystery version of Dracula as to their Frankenstein – how to justify it? What makes it a worthwhile addition to the canon? Doing it as a largely studio-bound, black-and-white video-taped production also brings with it a set of additional challenges. Perhaps because of this, this hardly qualifies as an attempt at doing the novel faithfully – but there is a certain fidelity to Stoker, as we shall see.

The play (directed by Patrick Dromgoole) opens in an asylum somewhere in the Whitby area, where a mysterious inmate (the actor Corin Redgrave in a fright wig) is pleading for water from the attendants. But this is just a ruse, and the madman breaks free from his straitjacket and crashes a party being held upstairs by the proprietor, Dr Seward (James Maxwell). Present are local grande dame Mrs Weston (Joan Hickson) and her strikingly nubile daughter Lucy (Susan George). Less nubile and more noble is another guest, an exiled Eastern European aristocrat who has recently arrived in the area – Count Dracula!

Dracula is played by Denholm Elliott, who would normally seem to be cast against type, were it not that Dracula here is to some extent written against type. Eloquent, bearded, and occasionally wearing dark glasses, such is Elliott’s charisma that his sway over weaker-willed locals seems entirely understandable. The madman is packed off to his cell and Dracula continues to charm his hosts, especially Lucy. Seward remains somewhat sceptical about this new figure on the local scene.

However, the mystery of the lunatic deepens with the appearance of Mina Harker (Suzanne Neve), whose husband Jonathan has disappeared while on a business trip to Transylvania to visit Castle Dracula. Seward has called in his old mentor Doctor Van Helsing (Bernard Archard) to consult, and it transpires that the madman in the asylum is indeed Harker, left unhinged by his experiences abroad (there is a brief, filmed flashback to the goings-on at the castle, and very evocative it is too). But why does Harker call Dracula ‘Master’? Why does Dracula profess not to know who the inmate is? And could it all have anything to do with Lucy suddenly coming down with a bad case of anaemia?

As you can perhaps surmise, Charles Graham’s adaptation performs brisk, reasonable surgery on the sprawling source novel, limiting the setting almost entirely to Whitby and the time period to a few nights. (You do miss the London scenes a bit, to say nothing of Transylvania, but the budget is clearly demandingly limited.) The roles of Renfield and Harker are combined, which makes a certain sense as Harker rarely gets anything interesting to do, while Quincey and Arthur are dropped from the story entirely; I have to confess I didn’t miss them at all.

So it’s a cut-down Dracula but still a surprisingly effective one. What we are left with is a potent brew of graveyards, sex, and outraged Victorian sensibilities, so you could certainly argue that the essentials of the story have certainly survived. This could never have been as lavishly lurid as one of the Christopher Lee movies Hammer were doing at the time, but then for all their definite pleasures those films are so often a kind of schlock pantomime. Bereft of eye-catching production values, this version of Dracula is obliged to dig down into the text and actually engage with it in order to work.

But does it succeed? It is certainly a strikingly different version of this much-told fable. Elliott is certainly a very distinctive Dracula, employing his legendary scene-stealing abilities to full effect. You can imagine Christopher Lee grinding his fake teeth in fury as Dracula is actually given dialogue drawn from Stoker’s novel to deliver, which Elliott does with predictable aplomb. Whether the decision to give him rat-like incisor teeth rather than the traditional canine fangs is justified is probably a question of personal taste; the way that Dracula summons up his mesmeric powers by basically just screwing up his eyes and squinting at people is the only real element of Elliott’s performance which definitely feels a bit dud.

You would expect him to have a formidable opponent in the form of Bernard Archard: an actor capable of being mesmeric himself, given the right script and direction. Here, though, Van Helsing’s fake beard is the least of his problems. Rather than the smooth, unflappable savant that Peter Cushing invariably played, Archard’s Van Helsing is a bit rough around the edges and eminently flappable. The play decides to stick with Van Helsing being Dutch, but the good doctor’s battle against the undead is nothing compared to Archard’s struggle to get the accent right. We end up with another one of those vocal Grand Tours: Van Helsing may start off coming from Amsterdam, but at various points in the play he seems to be a native of Pontypool before finally settling on being from somewhere near Karachi. But on the whole Archard is quite acceptable despite this.

The play is mostly well-performed, anyway, especially by Susan George and Suzanne Neve. It is they in particular who make you realise just how bland and inappropriately bloodless most of the sex in the Hammer Dracula movies feels: the women tend to do a lot of limp sighing before quietly yielding to Christopher Lee. Here, there is a genuine erotic charge to the scenes between Dracula and his victims: in this sense at least, the play is a lot more explicit about the nature of the metaphor, for all that it contains no nudity and relatively little gore. The women are given real agency, too: Lucy is clearly dead keen on having a fling with their new neighbour, while Mina likewise seems almost to be an active participant, consciously choosing to become undead.

It all builds up to a final semi-twist in the tale – I say semi-twist because it is so understated, or perhaps just slightly fluffed by the script and direction, that it’s not entirely clear whether this is an intentional thing or not. It’s certainly not enough to spoil one of the better adaptations of Dracula that I have seen. Most attempts just take the premise and ditch as much of the plot as they feel they can get away with, but this one does seem to be making a genuine effort. It keeps enough of the traditional trappings to be recognisable and familiar, but isn’t afraid to try new and different things – even when being new and different means going back to the original book. A worthwhile piece of vampirology.

Read Full Post »

Being Double

Arriving back on a high-number channel like something out of the dark age (a previous one, not the current one), it’s Mystery and Imagination, an anthology series adapting classic horror and supernatural stories. This series was made from 1966 to 1970, so it comes as relatively little surprise to learn that most of the episodes have been junked, with only the last couple of series still surviving. Still, there is some interesting stuff here, such as the series’ take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This was originally shown in November 1968 and directed by someone billing himself as Voytek (which sounds a little pretentious until you learn his real name was Wojciech Roman Pawel Jerzy Szendzikowski, at which point it starts to seem like an eminently sensible idea).

There have, obviously, been very many adaptations of Frankenstein over the years, and this is before we even contemplate the colossal influence the novel has exerted on the science-fiction genre of which some would argue it was the main inaugurator. The question is, how do you make your own version of it stand out from the rest of the crowd? The obvious answer is also a very strange one: do the story from the actual novel, as it has never actually been properly attempted.

Well, the Mystery and Imagination adaptation isn’t exactly this, but it does come closer than most. All the material on the ice sheet at the North Pole has been cut, no doubt for budgetary reasons, but Victor Frankenstein is a relatively youthful student in early 19th century Geneva, not a baron with his own castle. Frankenstein is played by Ian Holm, whom I would suggest is not the most obvious choice for the role, but as he is Ian Holm he gives a strong performance (or set of performances; stay tuned). As he is supposedly a student of philosophy, the medical faculty can’t quite figure out why he is always lurking near the post mortem slabs, but the play quite sensibly doesn’t hang around and quickly confirms that Frankenstein has his own hubristic little project in mind.

Shelley, wisely, does not go into detail as to how Frankenstein achieves the thing he is most notorious for, but the play is sort of obliged to, and here we do find some of the stock features of Frankenstein-as-it-is-popularly-perceived starting to appear: Frankenstein acquires a hunchbacked assistant, Fritz (played by Ron Pember), who obligingly robs graves for him. No-one is attempting to do a Swiss-German accent, thankfully, but it is still slightly odd to hear the cor-blimey-guv’nor delivery of the members of the lower orders – then again, this is practically a genre convention of Hammer Horror films, so one should not cavill too much about it here.

Soon enough the lightning crackles (another inheritance from Hollywood Frankensteins) and Frankenstein’s creation twitches into life. (He is billed as ‘The Being’, rather than ‘Monster’ or ‘Creature’.) As the bandages come off, two things rapidly become apparent – firstly, the play’s fidelity to the novel is going to be moderate, at best, for rather than the almost-beautiful giant that Shelley describes, the Being is another patchwork man, heavily stitched together. He is also a bit on the short side, for the second thing to become apparent is that someone in the production has had a Big Idea: the Being is also going to be played by Ian Holm.

While the viewer is still digesting this, the play continues with its somewhat mediated take on the events of the novel. I have to say that there does seem to be some merit to this approach, as there are elements of Frankenstein which frankly strain credulity to the limit – most obviously, the sequence where the Creature learns to speak and read by hiding in a shed and spying on a peasant family living in the hovel next door. Nevertheless, the bit with the Creature and the blind man is one of the things everyone has come to expect, and they duly do it here.

With this out of the way, the play continues to be relatively faithful to the book, up to a point: the murders of William (known here as Wilhelm) and Justine are retained, and the Being does make its usual demand of Frankenstein that he provide it with a female counterpart – although they don’t set this part of the story in the Orkneys. The big question is, with the frame story concerning Captain Walton cut, how are they going to conclude the story?

Well, the ending isn’t awful, but then nor is it fantastic, either. This seems to me to be a reasonable description of Mystery and Imagination‘s take on Frankenstein as a whole. You can tell it’s a fairly lavish production by the standards of 1960s TV, with a reasonable amount of filming included, and Voytek’s direction is capable. You do get a sense that they really did want to do the book by-the-book, but the budget just wasn’t there for all the stuff with sailing ships at the North Pole, and that they may also have had half an eye on meeting audience expectations – hence the scarred, bandaged Being and the use of elements from other adaptations.

Then again, there is the oddity of the double-up casting of Holm as both Frankenstein and the Being. You kind of have to have a Big Idea if you’re going to do Frankenstein nowadays – sometimes the big idea can be interesting (exploring the story’s connection with Romanticism), but all too often it turns out to be dreadful (turning the Creature into a superhero, or making Igor the hunchback the main character). The big idea here at least has the virtue of virtually guaranteeing the Being has a strong level of articulacy and agency within the story – the story is, after all, ultimately about the relationship between these two characters, and by turning one of them into a mute brute you lose most of the potential for subtlety and thoughtfulness inherent in that. I suppose that in the end it does work and has a certain power to it, for it certainly plays up the notion of Frankenstein playing God, making his creation in his own image. Holm’s performance as the Being is okay, although the script requires him to go from being icily articulate to sounding like someone recovering from a stroke seemingly at random.

Unfortunately the double-up casting is about the only really distinctive thing about this version of Frankenstein. It’s well-made and well-performed, but it feels like the story is being treated as a rather grisly costume drama rather than a genuine piece of horror or science-fiction. It could use a few more ideas, and a bit more willingness to explore them. Its very respectfulness towards the source makes it a little too cautious to completely succeed.

Read Full Post »