CHRISTOPHER LEE RETURNS : BARBARA SHELLEY : SUZAN FARMER : DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS : KEY STILLS GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Andrew Keir (Father Shandor), Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Francis Matthews (Charles Kent), Barbara Shelley (Helen Kent), Suzan Farmer (Diana Kent), Charles Tingwell (Alan Kent), Philip Latham (Klove), Thorley Walters (Ludwig)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Terence Fisher, Screenplay – John Sansom, Story – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer – Anthony Nelson-Keys, Photography – Michael Reed, Music – James Bernard, Music Supervisor – Philip Martell, Special Effects – Bowie Films Ltd, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – Hammer/Seven Arts. UK. 1966.  

SYNOPSYS:

Two English couples holidaying in Transylvania are abandoned on the roadside after their coach breaks down. They are picked up by a driverless black coach and taken to Castle Dracula where they are granted hospitality by Dracula’s manservant. During the night, one of the men is attacked and gutted by Dracula’s manservant and his blood used to revive Dracula. Two of the group manage to flee the castle. In the village below, they join a local priest in standing up to destroy Dracula.

COMMENTARY:

Dracula - Prince of Darkness was the third of Hammer’s Dracula films. Unlike the first sequel The Brides of Dracula (1960), Prince of Darkness brings back Christopher Lee who had refused to return to the series until he had established himself as a serious actor first.

The Brides of Dracula worked well despite the absence of Christopher Lee but Prince of Darkness achieves somewhat less successfully despite Lee’s return. It is a film that never coheres or gets fired up despite a great deal of potential to do so. A large part of the problem is Christopher Lee who, while he returns, gets no dialogue (although Lee claims this was his own choice because the dialogue he was given was so awful). Reduced to merely hissing and dilating his red contact lenses, this has the effect of making Lee much more animalistic – something that Lee conveys most effectively – but the net result is that the central threat in the film is like a tiger in a cage, prowling and roaring, but never getting to pounce.

Certainly, many of the other elements come together well. The opening of the film – warnings to avoid the castle; villagers refusing to acknowledge its existence even though it sits in front of their eyes; travellers abandoned in the middle of nowhere and then the appearance of a mysterious black coaches harnessed to horses that have wills of their own; and the castle, which is conversely shown to be welcoming with dinner laid out and a fire stoked up, even luggage placed in their respective rooms – builds an increasing sense of unease. 

 

This erupts in a shock sequence where Charles Tingwell is stabbed and his body is hoisted upside down over the catafalque containing Dracula’s ashes and the throat slit to spill his blood, which brings the ashes to life. It is a conceptually remarkable sequence – one that created considerable controversy at the time, blasphemous inversions of The Crucifixion being seen in it and all – although today seems tame. 

Thereafter, Dracula - Prince of Darkness becomes more a series of set-pieces, loosely connected by the overall plot of Dracula trying to seduce Suzan Farmer while husband Francis Matthews sets out to rescue her. There are a number of good sequences interspersed throughout – notably the climax where Dracula runs out onto the ice and Andrew Keir shoots into it around him, causing it to crack and Christopher Lee to be swallowed up by the running water (although the sequence is betrayed by cramped sets – the ice-pack being only several yards square. It is a problem shared in other parts of the film too – the castle corridor where most of the skulking takes part is about 20 feet in length and contains only two doors). The film is also happy to swipe the Renfield character out of Bram Stoker – calling him Ludwig – with Thorley Walters giving an amusingly doddery performance in the role.

 

The most remarkable sequence in the film is the scene where Barbara Shelley is held down on a table, hissing and writhing, as a stake is hammered into her heart by the dispassionate priesthood. It is perhaps the most potent image of sexual repression in all of British horror cinema. Indeed, Dracula - Prince of Darkness, more than any of the Hammer Draculas, embodies the recurrent image of sexual repression threatening to emerge to tear Victorian society apart and its dispassionate elimination by men of reason. 

The travellers are deliberately set up as representatives of English genteel in order to be torn apart – the strongest image of this polarity is the turning of the prim, uptight and anxious Barbara Shelley into a voluptuous vampire, begging Francis Matthews “Give us a kiss.” The sexual overtones in the scene where Christopher Lee causes Suzan Farmer to kneel and drink from the cut he opens with his fingernail in his chest are incredibly vivid.

Hammer’s other Dracula films are:– Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula/Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires/The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974). 

 

Terence Fisher’s other genre films are:– the sf films The Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Gorgon (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973), all for Hammer. Outside of Hammer, Fisher has made the Old Dark House comedy The Horror of It All (1964) and the alien invasion films The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967).
 
Review: Richard Schieb
Images: Marcus Brooks  

HAMMER FILMS: CAST AND CREW OF 'THE OLD DARK HOUSE : CANDID ON SET PHOTOGRAPH

How many of the old Hammer team can you spot in this photograph?

For our FULL REVIEW and LOBBY CARD feature CLICK HERE:

The Old Dark House

FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY (1974) MASON AND SARRAZIN REVIEW AND GALLERY

CAST:

Leonard Whiting (Victor Frankenstein), Michael Sarrazin (The Monster), Nicola Pagett (Elizabeth Fanshawe/Frankenstein), James Mason (Dr Polidori), Jane Seymour (Prima/Agatha), David McCallum (Henry Clerval), Ralph Richardson (Lacey)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Jack Smight, Screenplay – Don Bachardy & Christopher Isherwood, Based on the Novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Producer – Hunt Stromberg Jr, Photography – Arthur Ibbetson, Music – Gil Melle, Special Effects – Roy Whybrow, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Wilfred Shingleton. Production Company – Universal.

SYNOPSIS:

After the death of his younger brother William, medical student Victor Frankenstein determines to find a way of reviving the dead. Fellow doctor Henry Clerval shows him a means of reanimating a severed arm with the use of solar energy. Obsessed, Frankenstein joins Clerval in building a handsome creature that they piece together from the bodies of several workmen killed in a quarry accident. After Clerval dies of a heart attack.

Frankenstein places his brain inside the creature and brings it to life. He is amazed at the creature’s intelligence – but soon the process begins to reverse itself and the creature’s body degenerates. The creature falls into despair and tries to kill itself but finds that it cannot, that it is invulnerable. The creature is found by Clerval’s teacher, the crippled Dr Polidori, who forces Frankenstein into helping create an Eve for the creature. Frankenstein builds the beautiful Prima. But after Frankenstein introduces her to high society, the creature exacts a disastrous revenge on them for this, killing her. Frankenstein flees aboard a ship but the creature pursues him up into the Arctic determined to kill him.

COMMENTARY:

The subtitle ‘the true story’ is wholly contentious but this classy, literate television production is a commendable attempt to sidestep the previous cinematic interpretations of the Frankenstein story – respectively Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) and Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – and return to the story that Mary Shelley wrote. Frankenstein: The True Story is not really all that close to the book, but the film does bring in many aspects that have been dropped from other versions of the story – the climactic pursuit into the Arctic, and most importantly the intelligent (as opposed to dumb and brutish) creature and his relationship with his creator, and the levels of Biblical metaphor. 

The film also borrows strongly from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – it includes an equivalent of the Pretorius character (who is now named Dr Polidori after Lord Byron’s physician, who was also present at the famous Villa Deodati writer’s workshop where Mary Shelley received her inspiration to write the book) and his blackmailing plans for a female creation, as well as the violin-playing blind hermit.

Jack Smight’s direction lags at times but there a number of strong sequences, especially the scene where the monster invades a ball and rips the female creation’s head off. It is all mounted in lavish period style. Particularly good is the rooting of the film inside the historically accurate charnel houses and the appalling sanitary conditions of the hospitals of the period. Although the use of solar power rather than electricity seems an overly strained attempt to avoid the cliches of electric storm regenerations from previous films.

The impressive cast list manages to unite the cream of the British Screen Actors Guild, including the likes of Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, David McCallum and a young Jane Seymour. Leonard Whiting, while rather weak-jawed, projects great idealistic drive and intensity as Frankenstein. Nicola Pagett gives a real moralistic strength of character to Elizabeth. Although the standout is James Mason’s glitteringly megalomaniac performance as Polidori.

On tv, Frankenstein: The True Story aired as a 175 minute production, which is usually screened in two two-hour parts. However the film was also released to cinemas in a 123 minute print, which curtails much of the storyline and was poorly received by critics at the time. Celebrated novelist Christopher Isherwood, best known for the autobiographical stories that formed the basis of Cabaret (1972), was not at all happy at the way his and Don Bachardy’s script was treated by Jack Smight and the producers and they published their own version of the screenplay in book form as Dr Frankenstein (1973).

The other versions of the Frankenstein story are:– Frankenstein (1910), the silent Thomas Edison short; Frankenstein (1931), Universal’s classic James Whale adaptation starring Boris Karloff; The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Hammer’s classic adaptation with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee; The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), Hammer’s lame comedy remake; Dan Curtis’s tv adaptation Frankenstein (1973); the Swedish-Irish production Victor Frankenstein (1977); Frankenstein (1992), David Wickes’ dreary tv adaptation with Patrick Bergin and Randy Quaid; Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) with Robert De Niro; and the tv mini-series Frankenstein (2004) with Alec Newman as Frankenstein and Luke Goss as the monster.

Jack Smight is a director who has made some occasional genre forays including the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Illustrated Man (1968), the serial killer black comedy No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Screaming Woman (tv, 1972) and the post-holocaust film Damnation Alley (1977). Smight is probably best otherwise known for the Paul Newman thriller Harper (1966) and big-budget films of the 1970s such as Airport 1975 (1974) and Midway (1977). 

REVIEW: Richard Scheib

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

REVIEW: HERE

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: THE REPTILE: COME SLITHER!

THE CREW:
Director: John Gilling. Screenplay: John Elder. [Anthony Hinds]. Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys. Photography: Arthur Grant. Music: Don Banks. Music Supervisor: Philip Martell. Special Effects: Bowie Films. Makeup: Roy Ashton. Production Design:  Bernard Robinson. Production Company:  Hammer Film Productions/Seven-Arts.

CAST:

Ray Barrett: Harry Spalding. Noel Willman: Dr Franklyn. Jennifer Daniel: Valerie Spalding. Jacqueline Pearce: Anna Franklyn. Michael Ripper: Tom Bailey. John Laurie: Mad Peter Crockett. Marne Maitland: Malay

THE PLOT:
Harry Spalding, a captain in the Royal Grenadiers, inherits a cottage in a small Cornish village after his brother Charles dies in mysterious circumstances. He moves into the cottage with his wife Valerie. Harry discovers that several locals have been killed by mysterious snake bites. This is also found to have been the cause of Charles’s death. The origin of the snake killings appears to rest with Dr Franklyn who lives in the village mansion. As Harry investigates, he discovers that these are being caused by Franklyn’s daughter Anna who was abducted by a snake cult that Franklyn was researching in Borneo and that she now periodically transforms into a snake creature.

COMMENTARY: 

This Hammer film has obtained a reputation as a minor classic. It is almost invariably discussed in tandem with director John Gilling’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966), which he shot back-to-back with this on the same sets and using several members of the same cast. Both films are strong examples of the colonial revenge theme that rings through a number of Anglo-Horror films – others include The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and The Ghoul (1975). In these films colonial evils – thuggee cults, dark foreign rituals – represent the same symbolic threat to British society as vampirism does in Hammer’s Dracula films – that is, it festers beneath the repressions of polite society and unleashes dangerous sensual energies.

The Reptile was made at a time when Hammer had conducted most of their variations on classic monsters and were trying to come up with new ideas. In reality, all that they did was coin new variations on the vampire – such as The Gorgon (1964) and the Reptile here. The Reptile is only Dracula with snakes. The reptile attack pattern is even identical to the vampire’s – two teeth marks at the neck – and the reptile’s end dispatch is not dissimilar to the one in Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958). However, this tends to reveal the film’s conceptual limitations. The reptile’s behaviour is not logically thought out – in actuality, a snake kills its victims either when it is threatened or to have food, whereas the reptile here appears to be doing neither. In effect, it is a series of random killings that have been designed to be modeled on vampirism but that come without much in the way of supporting rationale.

Director John Gilling’s effectiveness is in building atmosphere. He gets good mileage out of the hoary old tropes – the villagers who refuse to talk to strangers, the town drunk who may or may not be crazy and is the only one able to give an insight into the menace. Even better is the subtlety with which Gilling uses the genre’s expectations where Jacqueline Pearce, later to attain cult status as the intergalactic dictator on tv’s Blake’s 7 (1978-81), is painted as a threatened innocence where in fact everything that is happening to her is completely the opposite – father Noel Willman is made to seem autocratic and controlling when in fact he is trying to restrain her from attacking others; when a cat is brought to her by Marne Maitland, it is made to seem that he is threatening the cat when in fact he is offering it to her; a skin briefly-seen in her bed gives the impression that she is another victim of the reptile where in fact it is the skin she has shed.

John Gilling’s other genre films include Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire/My Son, The Vampire (1952), The Gamma People (1956), The Flesh and the Fiends/Mania (1960), The Shadow of the Cat (1961), Panic (1963), The Night Caller (1965), The Plague of the Zombies (1966), The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and The Devil’s Cross (1975). Gilling also wrote the scripts for House of Darkness (1947), The Gorgon (1964) and Trog (1970).

Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks

YVONNE ROMAIN : OLIVER REED: HAMMER FILMS: THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF 1961 LOBBY STILLS AND REVIEW!

CAST:

Oliver Reed (Leon), Clifford Evans (Don Alfredo Carrido), Catherine Feller (Christina), Richard Wordsworth (Beggar), Yvonne Romain (Jailer’s daughter), Antony Dawson (Marquis Siniestro), Hira Talfrey (Teresa), Warren Mitchell (Pepe Valiente), Josephine Llewellyn (The Marquesa), Justin Walters (Young Leon)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Terence Fisher, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Based on the Novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, Producer – Anthony Hinds, Photography – Arthur Grant, Music – Benjamin Frankel, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – Hammer/Hotspur.

SYNOPSIS:

A beggar goes to the wedding banquet of the Marquis Siniestro. The cruel Marquis treats the beggar as an object of amusement and then has him thrown in a dungeon. Forgotten for many years, the beggar is treated with kindness by the jailer’s daughter. However, the beggar is overcome by loneliness and rapes the daughter. She runs away and is taken in by the kindly Don Alfredo Carrido where she gives birth to a son on Christmas Day and dies shortly afterwards. The Don adopts the child, calling him Leon. As he grows up, Leon demonstrates a strange liking for the blood of animals. When a shepherd shoots an attacking wolf, Leon is later found with bullets in his body. Growing into manhood, Leon takes a job with wealthy landowner Don Fernando and soon becomes attracted to Don Fernando’s daughter Christina. But when his instincts are aroused by a whore, Leon turns into a werewolf. Terrified, he tries to persuade Christina to marry him in the hope that her pure love might overcome his animal nature.

COMMENTARY:

England’s Hammer Films found considerable recognition with the twin successes of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), both remakes of Universal genre classics of the 1930s. This success spurred them onto conduct remakes of other classics including The Mummy (1959), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960) and The Phantom of the Opera (1962). But when Hammer turned their attention to updating the werewolf legend they ran into a problem – the wolf man character that became a staple among Universal’s Famous Monsters lineup in the 1940s following The Wolf Man (1941) was one of the few characters that Universal had created specifically for the screen, rather than adapting from a novel as they had with most of the other classics. So instead of purchasing the rights to remake the screenplay of The Wolf Man, Hammer turned to a novel The Werewolf of Paris (1934) by Guy Endore. [Guy Endore himself had some fame during the 1930s as a screenwriter with films like Mad Love (1935), Mark of the Vampire (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936)].

As with Hammer’s reworking of the abovementioned classics, The Curse of the Werewolf is a thoughtful and substantial reworking of the werewolf myth. In his screenplay (which varies substantially from the Guy Endore novel), Hammer producer Anthony Hinds roots werewolf mythology firmly in Spanish Catholicism. Indeed, The Curse of the Werewolf is perhaps the only werewolf story to treat lycanthropy as something that is not passed by a bite, but as a divinely cursed state. In order to set this up, Anthony Hinds creates a lengthy preamble to Leon’s story – it is over 50 minutes before we get to see Oliver Reed and over an hour before Reed becomes the werewolf. It comes filled with crashingly heavy symbolism at times – the child is born on Christmas Day, the font boils over and thunderclouds amass as he is baptized. But this is by far the more interesting half than the second, which travels in more traditional areas. Nevertheless, the second half is a reasonable werewolf story with a young, then unknown Oliver Reed standing up well in the part and Roy Ashton conducting a fine makeup job.

Most Hammer films (particularly those made by Terence Fisher) are rooted in a British upper-class assumptions. They create a divide between civilized reason and brutal animal passions. The wolf here represents brutish passions, which the film sees can be kept in restraint by a good society, even the love of a pure-hearted girl. Notedly, Leon’s animal instincts are stirred up when he strays outside the confines of ‘decent’ society and goes to visit a ‘bad’ girl – a whore. As with Dracula, we see that civilized reason and religion as conquering the dangerous forces of unrestraint.

Terence Fisher’s other genre films are:– the sf films The Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973), all for Hammer. Outside of Hammer, Fisher has made the Old Dark House comedy The Horror of It All (1964) and the alien invasion films The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967).