DAN CURTIS: JACK PALANCE SIMON WARD FIONA LEWIS : DRACULA: GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Jack Palance (Count Dracula), Nigel Davenport (Van Helsing), Simon Ward (Arthur Holmwood), Murray Brown (Jonathan Harker), Penelope Horner (Mina Murray), Fiona Lewis (Lucy Westenra) 

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Dan Curtis, Screenplay – Richard Matheson, Based on the Novel by Bram Stoker, Photography – Oswald Morris, Music – Robert Cobert, Special Effects – Kit West, Production Design – Trevor Williams. Production Company – Dan Curtis Productions/Universal. USA. 1974. 

SYNOPSYS:

May, 1897. British real estate clerk Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to conduct the purchase of a property in Whitby for Count Dracula. However, Dracula is a vampire and allows Jonathan to be claimed by his three brides. Five weeks later Dr Van Helsing is called to Whitby to tend Jonathan’s fiancée Mina Murray and then Lucy Westenra as they fall inexplicably ill. Tracing the source of the illness brings Van Helsing up against Dracula. Dracula believes Lucy to be the reincarnation of his love and is determined to make her immortally his.

COMMENTARY: 

This was the fifth major attempt to film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Up to that point there had been the uncredited silent classic Nosferatu (1922); followed by Dracula (1931), the Universal version with Bela Lugosi; Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), the Hammer version with Christopher Lee; and the Jess Franco version Count Dracula (1970) also with Christopher Lee. This version was made by Dan Curtis who had emerged as producer of the popular tv series Dark Shadows (1966-71) and the cult Night Stalker tv movies. Curtis debuted as director with the Dark Shadows cinematic spinoffs, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971). Curtis then embarked upon a series of classic horror stories remade for tv – including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1968), Frankenstein (1973), The Picture of Dorian Grey (1973), The Turn of the Screw (1974) and this. Dracula was released cinematically outside of America, the only of Dan Curtis’s tv movies to do so.

The script comes from respected genre novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson, who has been responsible for works like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Duel (1971), What Dreams May Come (1998), most of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and the oft-filmed novel I Am Legend (1954). Richard Matheson treats the Bram Stoker story with the greatest degree of faithfulness that any adaptation had up to that point. The Transylvanian scenes are played almost entirely as Bram Stoker wrote them – all that is missing is the scene of Dracula climbing down the castle wall. The climactic pursuit back to Transylvania tracking Dracula via the hypnotized Lucy is also effectively introduced – the first film to do so. Richard Matheson does trim some aspects of the book – Renfield and the lunatic asylum have been dropped outright. So are the other vampire hunters, excepting for Arthur Holmwood. 

The additions that Matheson makes are intriguing – this was the first version to directly equate Dracula with also being Vlad the Impaler. (Although the end note that pops up to inform the audience that Vlad was an alchemist and sorcerer and “... so powerful a man was he that it was claimed he succeeded in overcoming even physical death. To this day it has yet to be disproven” is absolute tosh). The attempts to create sympathy for Dracula during the flashbacks is also interesting, but these fail to work due to the briefness of the scenes and also because of the casting of Jack Palance. The climactic killing of Dracula, which owes much to the Hammer The Horror of Dracula, with Van Helsing ripping open the blinds of the library to pin Dracula in beams of light before he is impaled against an overturned table by a giant spear, is a highly effective improvement over the book’s climax. 

At the same time, the film is also no good. It is certainly a well produced film – the production values seem like those of a feature film rather than a tv movie. What is noticeable is the naturalism of the production. Both the Universal and Hammer adaptations took place in artificial worlds that were almost entirely shot on soundstages. This version has a look of authenticity – its photography is naturalistic, the costumes in period without being ostentatious or florid, and the film appears to have been shot on the grounds of authentic castles and estates. It looks for all the world looks like a BBC costume drama. On the other hand, while such an approach adds an enormous amount in the way of a plain straightforward adaptation of the story, it is resolutely un-fantastic in nature. All the supernatural elements have been pared away and those that remain are played as low key and unremarkable as possible. Here Dan Curtis makes the mistake of directing the film in terms of physical action – Dracula is not a supernatural presence, he merely sweeps into rooms and throws people about. Scenes that should have great impact – the attack of the brides, the blood-drinking – and so on are directed without flair or style and are almost nil in impact. 

Even worse is the casting. It is certainly difficult to think of an actor less suited to the role of Dracula than Jack Palance – maybe Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger? Jack Palance is unable to shake the image of the old warhorse of countless westerns and makes his way through the role with characteristic asthmatic wheeze. The performance is appalling – the scenes where Palance tries to demonstrate anger by throwing things around in a room are so lacking in threat, so lacking in anything except hammy melodrama, that the entire plausibility of the film collapses. The rest of the casting is not much better. Nigel Davenport’s Van Helsing lacks any sense of intellectual prowess or commanding power. He is no more than a plodding gentleman. There is a laughable scene that demonstrates just how wimpy this Van Helsing characterization is – Davenport waves a cross at Dracula, who snarls “Throw it away”... whereupon Davenport does with only a slightly peeved “All right.” 

Dan Curtis’s other genre productions are:- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1968), House of Dark Shadows (1970), Night of Dark Shadows (1971), The Night Stalker (1972), Frankenstein (1973), The Invasion of Carol Enders (1973), The Night Strangler (1973), The Norliss Tapes (1973), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973), Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Turn of the Screw (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Burnt Offerings (1976), Curse of the Black Widow (1977) and Dead of Night (1977). 

Other adaptations of Dracula are:– the uncredited classic German silent Nosferatu (1922); Dracula (1931), the classic Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi; Hammer’s classic Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) with Christopher Lee; Count Dracula (1970), a cheap continental production that also featured Lee; Count Dracula (1977), the BBC tv adaptation with Louis Jourdan; Dracula (1979), the lush romantic remake with Frank Langella; Werner Herzog’s remake Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) with Klaus Kinski; Francis Ford Coppola’s visually ravishing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), featuring Gary Oldman; the modernized Italian-German Dracula (2002) starring Patrick Bergin; Guy Maddin’s silent ballet adaptation Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002); Dracula (2006), the BBC tv adaptation starring Marc Warren; the low-budget modernised Dracula (2009); and Dario Argento’s upcoming Dracula 3D (2012) with Thomas Kretschmann as Dracula. 

Review:Here

Images: Marcus Brooks       

CHARLTON HESTON: IS 'THE OMEGA MAN' LOBBY CARD GALLERY AND REVIEW.

CAST:

Charlton Heston (Robert Neville), Rosalind Cash (Lisa), Anthony Zerbe (Matthias), Paul Koslo (Dutch), Lincoln Kilpatrick (Zachary), Eric Laneuville (Richie) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Boris Sagal, Screenplay – John William Corrington & Joyce H. Corrington, Based on the Novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, Producer – Walter Seltzer, Photography – Russell Metty, Music – Ron Grainer, Makeup – Gordon Bau, Art Direction – Arthur Loel & Walter M. Simonds. Production Company – Walter Seltzer Productions.  USA. 1971.

SYNOPSIS:

The year 1975 in the ruins of Los Angeles. The entire world has been killed off by bacteriological warfare, all except for one man, Robert Neville, a research scientist who has managed to inject himself with an antidote he developed. At night, Neville’s home is besieged by the mutated survivors, who have been turned albinoid and made vulnerable to sunlight by the plague. The mutants belong to a cult that is led by Matthias, a former tv newscaster who invokes them to destroy everything that belongs to the society that created them. Neville then encounters a group of unaffected survivors and realises that his blood may prove the means of saving them before they succumb to the effects of the plague.

COMMENTARY:

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is a classic genre novel. The novel, which widely differs from this film adaptation in many essential details, concerns the last man left alive on Earth who nightly faces a horde of vampires, the mutated remnants of humanity, who gather outside his door, imploring him to come out and surrender to them. The ending, wherein comes a startling conceptual reversal of the traditional relationship between vampire and hunter, is stunning.  

I Am Legend has been often in the cinematic eye. Hammer Films brought Richard Matheson to England in 1957 to write an adaptation to be called Night Creatures but this was cancelled due to censorship problems. Matheson later wrote (under a pseudonym) the Italian-made adaptation The Last Man on Earth (1964), which is very faithful to the book but a dull film. Next came The Omega Man. Other versions were announced in the mid-1970s, while in the 1990s Tracy Tormé, scriptwriter of Fire in the Sky (1993) and Sliders (1995-2000), toyed with getting an adaptation off the ground and then there was the announcement of a big-budget adaptation with Ridley Scott at the helm and Arnold Schwarzenegger starring, although neither of these emerged. This went through several directors and stars – and was at one point to be directed by Michael Bay – before being revived as I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith and directed by Francis Lawrence, which abandoned the source novel and disappointingly just remade The Omega Man. I Am Omega (2007) was also a cheap uncredited ripoff of the latter.  

Unfortunately, The Omega Man is a ham-fisted adaptation of I Am Legend. For one, the vampires have been eliminated and rewritten as mutants, as though vampires were considered too B-movie. They are now construed as a cult who want to destroy all remnants of technology. (The cult was no doubt added due to the then public fascination with Charles Manson – and are even named The Family like Manson’s cult was). The vampire leader Ben Cortman goes from Neville’s work colleague to a tv newscaster Matthias (Anthony Zerbe). They certainly cut striking figures in black hoods, sunglasses and with white albinoid faces – but make no sense. It is difficult, for instance, to see what stops them from simply breaking into Neville’s apartment – in the book, they were unable to because the house was shielded with garlic and mirrors. Ruth’s conversion, which takes minutes, seems an almost instant physical transformation into not only an albino but also a member of the cult – it is hard to understand how a mutation would also instantly change someone’s organisational affiliations as well. 

The film sort of incorporates some of I Am Legend’s classic final scene where Anthony Zerbe says to Charlton Heston: “You killed three of us. It is you, Mr Neville, who are the angel of death” – however, this is a throwaway line that lacks the true irony of such a meaning in the book where it was seen that Neville became to the new vampire people the same monster that humanity traditionally regarded the classic vampire as. The film keeps and expands on the idea from The Last Man on Earth that Neville is a biochemist who created a cure for the plague and inoculated himself. The film also introduces the Ruth equivalent early in the show – only 30 minutes in – whereas if this were being faithful to the book, she would not appear until the last 30 minutes. Interestingly, it casts her with African-American actress Rosalind Cash – in so doing, making the relationship between her and Charlton Heston one of the first interracial ones seen in a mainstream US film.

In the early sections of the film, director Boris Sagal does a reasonable job of creating images of isolation as Charlton Heston prowls an empty L.A.. The film opens on a great series of images – panoramic wide-angle views looking down from the sky on the deserted streets; Heston’s car breaking down and he just taking a brand new car from a showroom and driving right through the plate glass window; he imagining hearing telephones ringing in his head; an open armoured car left abandoned with money blowing in the street. It is not a literal translation of what Richard Matheson wrote but could almost be something straight out of the book. During these scenes, the film gets the spirit of the original spot on.  

These scenes are modestly effective, although a film like The Quiet Earth (1985) does a far better job of portraying the psychological isolation and madness that being the last survivor of the human race would entail. The film also casts Charlton Heston in square-jawed heroism mode. Thus we get no sense of hero’s loneliness and despair. Instead, we get Heston dressing for dinner in a velvet frock coat and making wisecracks over a chess game with a bust of Caesar. To me, this a betrayal of the book where the last survivor was someone utterly haunted by loneliness. We do get scenes of the mutants begging Neville to come out but still no corresponding sense of his utter isolation. 

Alas, The Omega Man loses itself after the introduction of the community of survivors. What we get is very much a fantasy of the hippie era – in particular, the image of Charlton Heston sitting in an abandoned cinema watching and reminiscing over Woodstock (1970). (There is a certain irony in watching these scenes today – the images of anti-war protestors and hippies celebrating peace and love are almost the complete opposite of the views that Heston adopted in later life as an ardent spokesman for the NRA). The film is also filled with resonance of Biblical imagery. The final scenes descend into clumsy allegory with allusions made between Jesus Christ and Charlton Heston shedding his blood to save humanity – the film even ends with Heston literally sacrificing his life to save the world, lying in a fountain in a crucifixion pose with a spear penetrating his side. This also plays into Heston’s cinematic association with Biblical roles especially that of Moses – the end of the film has him leading a group of love children away to peace and freedom. These include Paul Koslo as an Easy Rider (1969)-type biker anti-hero and Rosalind Cash with bandana and machine-gun bringing associations of the Black Power movement. While post-holocaust films from Mad Max 2 (1981) onwards co-opted imagery of the Western, the post-holocaust films of the 1970s – the likes of Gas-s-s; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), Glen and Randa (1971) and Zardoz (1974) looked to the idea of remaking the world by way of Love Generation, celebrating the ideals of communalism and altered states headspace. The interestingly radical idea that The Omega Man offers up is in saying that civilisation has fallen and that the hope of the future lies in the political radicals and anti-establishment youth figures of the 1960s.  

The Omega Man is the most well known film of Boris Sagal, a prolific tv director. Boris Sagal’s other genre outings include a tv play remake of The Spiral Staircase (1961), The Helicopter Spies (1968), a feature film re-edited from episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hauser’s Memory (1970) and World War III (1982). Sagal died in a helicopter crash in 1981. He is also the father of Katey Sagal, alias Peg Bundy of tv’s Married ... With Children (1987-97) and the voice of Leela on Futurama (1999-2003). The script comes from husband and wife screenwriting team of John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington who later wrote the last film entry in the classic Planet of the Apes saga with Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), as well as the tv movie The Killer Bees (1974). 

Richard Matheson’s other genre works include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) based on his novel, the scripts for Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World (1961), the occult film Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), the Corman-produced mortician’s comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Last Man on Earth (1964) based on I Am Legend, the Hammer psycho-thriller The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), the classic Hammer occult film The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), the historical biopic De Sade (1969), Steven Spielberg’s first film Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) tv movies, the haunted house film The Legend of Hell House (1973), the tv adaptation of Dracula (1974), the tv movies Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Stranger Within (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Dead of Night (1977) and The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver (1977), the tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), the time travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980) from his own novel, Jaws 3-D (1983), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), and numerous classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Thriller and Star Trek. Works based on his novels and stories are the afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come (1998), the fine ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), The Box (2009) and Real Steel (2011). 

Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks

VINCENT PRICE BARBARA STEELE: PIT AND THE PENDULUM: HORROR THAT SWINGS WITH STYLE TO SPARE

CAST:

Vincent Price (Nicholas Medina/Sebastian Medina), John Kerr (Francis Barnard), Luana Anders (Catherine Medina), Anthony Carbone (Dr Charles Leon), Barbara Steele (Elizabeth Barnard Medina)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Richard Matheson, Based on the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Les Baxter, Photographic Effects – Butler-Glouner Inc & Ray Mercer, Special Effects – Pat Dinga, Makeup – Ted Coodley, Production Design – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP.

SYNOPSIS:
Spain in the year 1546. Upon the news of his sister Elizabeth’s death, Francis Barnard goes to pay respects to her husband, nobleman Nicholas Medina. Once there, Francis decides to stay on, dissatisfied with Medina’s lack of explanations about what happened to Elizabeth. As a child, Medina watched his grandfather, a member of the Spanish Inquisition, torture his mother and uncle to death. He is verging on madness, believing that he buried Elizabeth while she was still alive. Things happen to suggest that Elizabeth may still be alive and/or haunting the castle. Francis must decide whether the hauntings are real or the result of Medina’s tormented mind. When the ghost of Elizabeth reappears, Medina snaps and goes over the edge. Believing that he is now his grandfather, Medina imprisons Francis in a bladed pendulum torture device.

COMMENTARY:

The Pit and the Pendulum was the second of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, following The House of Usher (1960). (See below for Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe titles and films). Corman has reunited most of the creative team behind The House of Usher, including Vincent Price, screenwriter Richard Matheson, photographer Floyd Crosby, production designer Daniel Haller and musician Les Baxter. This time he has also recruited Barbara Steele, who made a striking appearance as the reincarnated witch in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) around the same time that The House of Usher came out.

  

Along with The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Pit and the Pendulum is usually the fan favourite among Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. However, it does feel overshadowed by the success of The House of Usher, as though Corman and Richard Matheson felt like they were under pressure to make another Usher. The plot draws heavily draws upon The House of Usher – again an ordinary man travels to Vincent Price’s foreboding house in search of a woman who is close to him and has to force his way into the household against the unwelcome he encounters; the house and sanity of its owner is interwound and clearly crumbling; there is talk of the physical presence of the house where the depravities of the past have created a physical evil that affects the inhabitants/descendants in the present day; Vincent Price is cast as a tormented character crushed by the weight of his fears; and there is another premature burial plot. (Not that this is any different from the rest of the films in the Poe series – at times, it seemed as though Roger Corman and Richard Matheson merely shuffled around the themes and gave the characters different names). 

Notedly in contrast to the film here, the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Pit and the Pendulum (1850) is a mood piece in which the unnamed narrator finds himself in a cell after sentence by The Inquisition where he is slowly tortured by a descending bladed pendulum. The story consists of little more than the narrator’s fear and terror as the blade scrapes closer to his body over a matter of days. There is little background to the original story, no explanation of how the narrator came to be there, while the end of the story delivers an abrupt deus ex machina salvation that occurs in a single paragraph. All the rest of the plot that takes place in the film has been invented by Richard Matheson. To such extent, the title of the film feels like a cheat – all that corresponds to the short story has been crammed into about the last twenty minutes of the film; and even there it is largely removed from much of the slim context that Poe gave in the story. 

There is no torturer in the original, just the narrator being tortured in the cell as the pendulum descends. Much of the story also takes place with the cell in total darkness, which has necessarily been changed here due to the uncinematic problems that this presents. The Poe story is a masterpiece in terms of conjuring fear, terror and impending dread. Most of the film adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum make it solely about a unique torture instrument and fail to discover any of the internal psychological torment that is the essence of the story. In fact, the big story twist in Pit and the Pendulum feels as though Corman and Matheson were attempting to graft Poe onto a Les Diaboliques (1955)-styled psycho-thriller. The plot of Les Diaboliques with its elaborately staged contrivations to drive someone mad was just starting to be imitated by the likes of William Castle and Hammer Films. However, incorporated here, such a plot sits somewhat at odds with Poe’s brooding, tortured mood.  

 

On the directorial front, Roger Corman drums up a good deal of thunderous atmosphere. The sets are expectedly lush – the doom-laden labyrinthine house interiors and the massive dungeon are good, the colour and set dressings are so drenched in midnight blue that the colour almost seems to be running down the screen. Despite this, Pit and the Pendulum is often slow moving – it takes three-quarters of the running time before it fully gets going. Nevertheless, when Corman finally plays his hand in the last quarter, the film works well – Barbara Steele’s emergence from the tomb and pursuit of Vincent Price is good. The pendulum makes for a good climax and the darkly ironic final shot holds a sting. Barbara Steele is certainly an interesting casting choice, her Romantic looks and alabaster beauty hide a nice otherworldly chill – unfortunately, Roger Corman fails to make substantial use of her here in the way that the Italian directors who turned her into a cult figure during the 1960s managed to.

Other versions of the Edgar Allan Poe story have been Alice Guy-Blache’s French lost silent short The Pit and the Pendulum (1913); The Pit (1962), a British short film adaptation; Stuart Gordon’s campy The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), which was also set during The Inquisition; and The Pit & the Pendulum (2009) from low-budget hack David DeCoteau.

Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).  

Roger Corman’s other genre films as director are:– Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Not Of This Earth (1956), War of the Satellites (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), The Undead (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), Last Woman on Earth (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), Tower of London (1962), The Terror (1963), X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), The Trip (1967), Gas; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) and Frankenstein Unbound (1990). Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011) is a documentary about Corman’s career.
 
Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks