IFG 13: Dracula (John Badham, 1979)

by

32

 

Director: John Badham

Cast: Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier, Donald Pleasence, Kate Nelligan

Release Date: 13th July 1979

Worldwide Box Office: $31,200,000

Trailer:

Interview:

 

IMDb Rating: 6.5

What the critics said:

“The new “Dracula” is a dazzler, a classic retelling of a classic text. From opening wolf howls through ominous, ambiguous concluding images, it sustains an exciting, witty, erotically compelling illusion of supernatural mystery and terror.

Director John Badham, screenwriter W.D. Richter and a superlative Anglo American cast and crew must have been sky-high over this opportunity. They’ve achieved a “Dracula” of unprecedented pictorial richness and sensuality, compared to which previous film versions are strictly bag-lunch diversions.

Although the script displays a cunning sense of humor, “Dracula” is not the kind of vampire movie an audience can feel superior to or safe from. Richter’s ironic style tends to intensify the threat of corruption through seduction embodied so effectively by Frank Langella as the Count, who adapts his theatrical impersonation to the screen with admirable finesse and superbly devious sexual charm.

[…]

The result is a handsome production that beguiles the eye and excites the senses, while also churning up subconscious feelings, leaving a Freudian aftershock similar to the effect achieved by Brian De Palma in “Carrie.”

Badham and his crew have succeeded at a number of spectral illusions evidently beyond the means or ingenuity of earlier film versions. The most spectacular effect is the image Stoker conveyed of Dracula scaling walls. Badham has improved on Stoker’s original vision by having the camera pan up to the rooftop, from which Langella then descends on his initial attack against Mina.This fabulous vertiginous shot is then given a witty kicker by shifting to the interior of Mina’s bedroom and showing Langella peering at her through the French doors while still upside-down.

[…]

In fact, with the possible exception of Roger Vadim’s “Blood and Roses” – a movie version of the other great Victorian vampire story – there has never been a more beautifully visualized horror movie.”  Gary Arnold, ‘Stunning, Stylish Cinematic Horror Is Not Dead – It’ undead; Chilling Cinema Isn’t Dead – It’s Undead’, The Washington Post, July 13, 1979, E1

 

“Frank Langella was the brilliant star of Edward Corey’s elegant, witty, and scary stage variation of “Dracula.” The play has rightfully enjoyed a Broadway success and was a total triumph for Langella himself. Unfortunately, he is also the star of the leaden, humorless and unscary movie, likewise called “Dracula.” The film is faithful to the Bram Stoker novel and the John Balderston-Hamllton Deane adaption of it, but it appears as if the new film had been made in 1931, with Langella pinchhitting at the last moment for Bela Lugosi. That version, in its time, at least frightened its audience, just as its many variations have amused them across the years.

[…]

It’s hard to believe as well that W.D. Richter, who wrote “Slither,” is responsible for the witless, pedestrian screenplay. It looks as if vampires drained their blood before they went to work on the movie. “Dracula” is now simply the literal retelling of how a hungry, thirsty Transylvanian count comes to England in a coffin in which he might sleep through the days while waiting for the nights. The nights bring him the sustenance he requires to live fresh blood, preferably from pretty women.

[…]

All of this should either make us shiver or giggle or both, but it doesn’t do anything. Something has been lost not only on the road from Transylvania, but on the road from Broadway to Hollywood.”  Bernard Drew, ‘’Dracula’ won’t scare you half to death’, San Bernardino Sun, July 15, 1979, E5

 

IFG Ratings:

Film Reel 5  Donnie

Film Reel 6  Razvan

Film Reel 6Film Reel Half  Dominik

Film Reel 7  Arpatilaos

Film Reel 7  4Porcelli

Film Reel 8  Debbie

Film Reel 8   Rob

Film Reel 8  Romcomloveaffair

IFG Average Rating: 6.94

 

REMINDERS:

By 31st July 2020 please send your rating for: The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014)

POSTPONED: The IFG Awards will now be later in the year, but please do send your nominations ASAP: Time to consider who you would have awarded the Oscars to for films in 2019.  Coming Soon: IFG 2019 Awards

Please start thinking about any films you would like to nominate for selection.  The poll to select the films for October, November and December will be published late July/early August.

 

32 thoughts on “IFG 13: Dracula (John Badham, 1979)”

  2. Pingback: Welcome to the International Film Group | Oasis of Fear

  3. It seems like I’m the minority here as I didn’t like this film much. I found the whole direction uninteresting and the acting was borderline comical to me. Add to this some really bad visual effects and voila (not that I’m interested in the later as a film can be scary and atmospheric without any)
    On the other hand I just watched a very good (imo) horror film from UK (also from the same decade) which I would definitely suggest here :
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/?ref_=rt_li_tt

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  4. This film was actually better than I expected. For some reason I thought it would be very silly, but it was actually pretty decent. Frank Langella did a very good job as Count Dracula imo. The cinematography was mostly really beautiful, there were some gorgeous shots and John Williams’ score was really good as well. The main problem of the film for me was the plot which wasn’t all that interesting. As a romance it didn’t really work and as a horror I didn’t find it scary at all and that is probably because of the execution. Dracula was maybe a bit too charming to be menacing enough. I did like a lot the climbing up and down the walls scenes though which were very well shot imo, very effective (those were probably my favourite scenes). Overall it was a decent film that had its moments. It could’ve been better, but it suffered because of an uninspired execution imo.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  5. I also liked it a lot more than I expected…and I think I have found most Dracula adaptations a bit too camp and disappointing. For example, the Coppola version turned out to be very disappointing. Yes, he did a few nice tricks with the shadows etc., but gimmicks aside it was rather unimpressive. This loses quite a bit of the original story (which starts in Transylvania, where the Jonathan character visits the Count), but by starting kind of halfway through it cleverly compresses the plot (significantly reducing production costs as well I suppose) and it becomes more compact and manageable. I really liked the atmosphere the film creates. It is subtly erie especially the landscape shots. I like also Langella’s very calm and quiet acting as Dracula. He seems more gentle than menacing (especially compared to Coppola’s/Oldman’s very different rendering). I found it freaky when Olivier and the other guy went digging Mina’s grave and she jumped on them. She looked so horrendous I couldn’t believe it! In most other Dracula adaptations I’ve seen, the women retain their sexual allure, actually they become more alluring (that’s the point isn’t it?). But it was a fun surprise that made me jump a bit. 😀 Anyway, I think this was a good adaptation and found it thoroughly entertaining. The crawling up the wall thing is a big think in the book as well because it signals his abject nature. If i remember correctly Jonathan describes his horror very vividly when he sees Count Dracula doing that…it’s well worth reading the novel I’d say…I found it very scary because of the whole atmosphere it creates…my sister, however, found it extremely boring…so it’s all relative – plus I scare very easily! 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    • Good points. I thought, even more so for the 70s, that the special effects were great. I also liked how they got straight into the story with the shipwreck etc, rather than retelling something we have seen before.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  6. I really enjoyed this version of Dracula. Partly because it was very different from the other versions that I have seen. Being a big fan of the Hammer Horror films (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Film_Productions – take a look if you are unfamiliar with them) I have seen countless versions of the film/parts of the story, yet this one still offered a fresh take on a popular story. I thought the cast were universally good and, given this was 41 years ago, I thought the special effects were excellent! The main cast were very good and the locations were superb. Langella’s version of Dracula also added to the uniqueness of the film – manipulative rather than menacing.
    I was thoroughly entertained throughout .

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  7. I appreciate that this film was a different take on the vampire saga, but it didn’t quite tickle my fancy. The focus on romance kills the horror for me. I also don’t get why they changed Mina’s and Lucy’s characters – seemed pretty random. Laurence Olivier’s Dutch accent sounded more German to me. Speaking of which: the part where vampire Mina “attacks” her father and speaks Dutch to him is hilarious. The language is a medical mystery to me. Idk how they pull of these guttural sounds causing no lasting damage.
    There were some aspects I liked: the play with colours (f.e. Lucy’s transformation scene), Kate Nelligan’s and Frank Langella’s performance, the scene with Dracula and van Helsing in the study, but these things weren’t enough to push this movie above a 6,5 for me.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  8. The tagline of this movie states that ‘throughout history he has filled the hearts of men with fear and the hearts of women with desire’. And indeed, it is hard to view this film without seeing the emphasis placed upon Dracula as a dualist figure of masculine hate and feminine desire. In the latter, Langella’s version is not exactly unique, given that the famous count has seemingly always been present as a subject of female desire. Even Gary Oldman’s 90s grunge interpretation had three brides and easily managed to seduce sex symbol. In fact, the history of vampires on screen, particularly in the post-feminist era of Buffy inspired strong female heroines, is littered with the figure of Dracula or his facsimile as the main romantic hero. Whether it is the aristocratic Angel in Buffy The Vampire Slayer , or his rough-trade punk version antagonist, Spike, the fey and sparkly Edward Cullen in Twilight or the sensuous Salvatori Brothers in The Vampire Diaries. The male vampire has remained strong in his position as the main figure of heterosexual female desire and sexual awakening. The poster walls and sexual fantasies of millions in millennial teenage girls (and boys) would not have been complete without some homage to at-least one of the prior mentioned pop-culture characters.

    In this film though that position of female sexual awakening and Dracula’s peculiar erotic power over the two women, Lucy & Mina, takes pointed precedence. From the moment that Dracula, enters to ravish (and quite frankly rape) Mina in her sickbed, crawling animal-like up the mansion walls, to take apart her window and draw her blood, to the sensual candlelit dinner shared with Lucy, and their passionate midnight kiss, he is always the object of perceived romantic womanly desire. In fact from his entry to even his departure it is clear that Dracula is very much a different type of man to those normally present in polite Edwardian English society that this film interprets. As such, one key to that aura of masculine romantic hero power is the way he is placed and presented in the company that Whitley Bay makes him keep. His direct opposite, and fiancée of Lucy Seaman (future Dracula bride), is Jonathan Harker. Harker is bland, dressed in drab brown suits and only able to express some individuality by the car he drives. A shiny and rather obvious attempt to show off his success; compared to the educated erudition and sensual black Byronic capes and full lips offered by the aristocratic Dracula he is without any obvious romantic appeal. In fact, it is almost impossible to view this film without having some sense of the neo-gothic tones of 19th century romantic literature. The windswept dark broodiness of Heathcliff and Kathy’s story in Wuthering Heights or the mysterious grandeur offered by Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre and the haughty intellectualism of Mr Darcy in Pride & Prejudice; all appear to have deep echoes in the characterisation and landscape offered by this Dracula.

    Overall this is a film that I would suspect has downplayed some of the horror inherent to the original text and other more recent adaptations (see the Coppola version or Mark Gatiss’ interpretation for the BBC) but that does not diminish. In Langella there is a tall languid, and sophisticated interpretation. As described in the Gatiss documentary which inspired this addition to the film-group, Langella had been steeped in the world of Dracula before the cameras turned. As the films’ introduction states this is not really an adaptation of the original book. It is instead a translation of the 1924 play written by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (as the original 1931 film with Bela Lugosi was also), that ran for 900 performances on Broadway. Langella had portrayed the role all throughout that run. His total embodiment of the character, all his masculine power and erotic draw, earned a Tony award and is evident here.

    In conclusion, at the end, despite the terrible horror of his appetites, compared to the bland boredom seen in Trevor Eve’s interpretation of Harker, Lucy’s final look of desire to the departing flying count is obvious in its reason why. A woman who had in her first scene expressed feminist desire for independence and study, is not going to be easily satisfied as wife to a straight-forward English country solicitor. Eternal life with a handsome, tall and erudite, if murderous and horrific, wealthy and worldly East European count is bound to hold more obvious appeal.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  9. I’m a huge fan of the Dracula story and have quite a few adaptations including some of the more gruesome Nosferatu derivatives. This version defies the genre a bit as it is less a typical horror film and more, as romcomloveaffair points out, in the direction of a gothic romance, more Heathcliff than Dracula. I’ve always seen Dracula as a sensuous, seductive figure and this version definitely plays into that, albeit at the expense of the scary elements. For anyone who is interested, the version that best combines horror and sensuality is a BBC adaptation starring Louis Jourdan.
    As an aside I’m intrigued with the film adaptation of Interview with the vampire, which definitely has the sensual/sexual aspects front and centre both with the Cruise-Pitt-Dunst love triangle and with Antonio Banderas’ roaming gay vampire gang. I remember the tagline on the movie posters was “Drink from me and live forever”; intentional or not, shot at the height of the AIDS epidemic, that was a a rather startling point to make, suggesting an eternal bond between “perpetrator” and “victim”. I’d love to see a version where the bite of the vampire is a more open symbol of disease spreading (just not coronavirus please). Oh, and as for the Coppola version: Much wrong with it starting with the terribly miscast Keanu and Wynona but undoubtedly one of the most stunningly designed movies I have seen.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a comment