Dracula (1979)

              Nostalgia is nothing new and as the years have gone by and we’ve invented types of media that stick around longer we’ve started to notice and quantify the waves of it that occasionally wash across popular culture.  There’s a general consensus of a twenty to thirty year cycle that happens when people who consumed something as children grow up and start to produce their own somethings, and often they want to indulge themselves in recreating and in some cases attempting to improve the things from their own childhood.  In the mid to late 1970’s this took the form of drawing inspiration, either indirectly or very, very directly, from the movies and tv shows they grew up on.  Thus did Flash Gordon and similar serials beget ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones,’ greaser culture beget “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,” and the Universal monster movies beget ‘Dracula.’

Says Finnish drama more than horror.

              There was also the stage show, of course.  The same adaption of Stoker’s novel that formed the basis of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 ‘Dracula’ was brought back for a very popular Broadway revival which ran from October of 1977 to January of 1980, starring Frank Langella to great acclaim for it’s first two years as the titular count.  He was nominated for a Tony award for the performance, so it made a great deal of sense to cast him in the movie version.  Instead of basing the movie script on the play, however, they went back to the source material, albeit making copious changes.  Sidenote: Raul Julia was one of Langella's replacements, and I would very much like to have seen either of their performances.

              In rather the inverse of 1958’s ‘Dracula’ this movie does away with all of the plot set in Europe and instead opens with Dracula’s ship crashing onto the rocks as it arrives at an English shore.  The opening does its best to convince the audience that this is indeed going to be a scary movie as it shows the sailors panicking, trying to throw Dracula’s coffin overboard as the waves toss them around.  Men are cast overboard, tie themselves to the ship, wolves are loose on board and some unseen menace starts killing everyone.  It doesn’t try particularly hard to be scary for the rest of the runtime

              Meanwhile we’re introduced to Dr. Seward and his asylum.  Seward is played by Donald Pleasance, who it's always nice to see, and upon viewing the multi-level set that is his asylum I assumed that they would somehow set a huge climactic battle there.  They don’t, but reportedly they didn’t have a firm ending during most of the filming so I’m sure there was at least one draft where Dracula faced off against Van Helsing there.  Dr. Seward is assisted in his asylum duties by his daughter Lucy, who in this adaptation fills the role of Mina Harker, and who is being visited by Mina Van Helsing, who in this adaptation fills the role of Lucy Westenra.  Mina is the one who hears the shipwreck while everyone else is assisting with the rioting asylum patients.  She rushes down alone to the shore and follow a wolf who leaps off of the boat into a cave where she finds the lone survivor, Count Dracula.

              Over the next few scenes it’s established that Count Dracula has arrived in England to finish buying a nearby abbey to call home and his solicitor is Jonathan Harker, who is engaged to Mina.  It’s also established that Dracula is a smooth, sexy motherfucker.  After a brief side scene where he attacks Renfield, who is about as important in this version as Renfield ever is, we really meet Dracula at the same time as the Sewards when he's invited to dinner.  Aside from a little too much body in his hair I can see why Langella’s Dracula made the impression that it did to Broadway audiences.  His performance is, in just about every respect, the complete opposite of Kier’s.  This Dracula is vital, energetic, smooth and polished and utterly unshakable.  He’s the kind of man who, when a woman starts to have a panic attack in the home of a noted psychiatrist, calmly but firmly insists that she not be given medication but instead hypnotizes her, placing her directly under his will, and everyone is just fine with that.

              At some point in the evening Dracula becomes fixated on Lucy and she becomes interested right back, much to the obvious annoyance of Jonathan.  That night, while Lucy and Jonathan canoodle, Dracula comes to Mina’s window to her initial horror and then delight.  This is drawing from the same well as 1958’s ‘Dracula’ with the sexytimes implications.  Here, though, they have the budget to have Langella crawl up and down the sides of buildings in a pretty decent effect.  The next morning Mina struggles to breathe and dies in front of the entire household, which naturally leads Dr. Seward to contact her father, Abraham Van Helsing.

              Despite being played by Laurence Olivier and basically being the protagonist of the rest of the movie this Van Helsing is rather weak when placed against Langella’s Dracula.  They do share a decent confrontation scene where they verbally spar until Van Helsing just starts tossing the crosses and garlic around, and he is the one to eventually kill Dracula (albeit in a very unsatisfying way), but unfortunately his performance and the part as a whole labors under the weight of the entirety of the plot, which isn’t what the movie is really interested in.  Reportedly Olivier was in fairly bad health during filming and that does come across.

              In a way it makes sense: if the movie is called Dracula, and you get the guy from the Broadway show to be your Dracula, then you really want to spend a lot of your time with Dracula.  So that’s what the movie does, and it’s not hard to enjoy him when he’s on screen.  Langella spoke up the charming, sexy side of his character, and unlike Christopher Lee I really do see that in his performance.  Langella also characterized his Dracula as lonely and hurting, wanting to find someone to help ease his burden of eternal life, and maybe that came through more in the stage version because in this movie he just seems like a ladies man who’s really, really got the hots for Lucy, pursues her, and then doesn’t really have a plan for after that.  Any kind of tragic backstory or underlying angst just isn’t up there on the screen.  There is a lot of sexy talk, and dramatic kisses, and one freaky laser show when Dracula drinks from Lucy the first time, but not so much of the angst.

              The second half of the movie doesn’t fall apart or anything dramatic like that, it all builds up to the eventual climax just fine, it’s just that I kept being distracted by how terrible Dracula is at forward planning.   He’s invested in a big ol’ hunk of real estate, so presumably plans on sticking around for a while, but instead of keeping to whatever plans he’s made he meets a woman his first day in town, decides instantly theirs is a love that will last forever, and when her family disapproves he grabs her and books it back for the home country.  The only person he manages to stealth kill before the whole vampire identity gets blown is Mina.  He does also feed on Renfield and Lucy before everything goes to hell but that’s it.  We get a whole three corpses this time, still very low for a Dracula movie.  The second Van Helsing shows up he clocks Dracula almost instantly, brings everyone up to speed on how to handle vampires, disposes of vampire Mina, and then notices Lucy is under the Count’s thrall before she can do anything. 

              The asylum set is eventually justified by locking up Lucy in a cell which makes Dracula have to dramatically break in and then out again to kidnap her.  The two of them end up in a crate in the hold of a boat which of course Jonathan and Van Helsing find and open.  There’s a brief fight which Dracula is winning up until a dying Van Helsing manages to swing a boat hook fully into Dracula’s back, allowing him to be hauled up into the sunlight as stock footage of the sun montages him to death.  It all hangs together well enough: it opened and closed on a boat, Van Helsing managed to be the one to end him, sunlight is deadly to vampires again, finally, and then it ends somewhat ambiguously as Dracula’s cape somehow stiffly flies away.

              The movie made its money back at the box office but was seen as something of a disappointment.  Although it was shot in full color the director had wanted to shoot in black and white before the studio told him obviously not.  When it was issued on laser disc in 1991 the director took the opportunity to color correct the print and drain much of that color out.  This was the default print of all future home video releases until the 2019 Shout! Factory DVD.  The recent blu-ray edition keeps this restored coloring as well, which is the version I saw.  It looks just fine, although I can see the logic of the other version.

              This movie, while not forgotten, has certainly faded from memory.  Langella’s Dracula isn’t spoken of all that much, certainly not like Bela Legosi’s or Christopher Lee’s still are.  The movie holds up just fine and doesn’t feel particularly dated, although in a way I have trouble articulating the way it depicts the period is very reminiscent of 1974’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express.’  Something about the way the 70’s portrayed the turn of the century is very specific.  There’s just not much new it brings to the table.  This is a very traditional depiction of Dracula.  He fears garlic, crosses, and sunlight, can mesmerize people, and even has a couple of new tricks: he can turn into a wolf or mist and can defy gravity at will.  He also loves him a cape with a collar.  It feels like what it is: an homage to the old Universal monster movies.  We won’t see a Dracula this traditional again on the big screen from a major studio any time soon.