Count Dracula (1970) Directed by Jess Franco
You have learnt much. You can do nothing. – Dracula
Many films claim (with varying degrees of pretension) to be faithful to their source material, and few come really close. It’s gotten to the point where it would actually be refreshing to see a film open up with a title card that reads “based tentatively on the hideously uncinematic novel by ___.” We can have a whole argument about why a society that supposedly values original thought and intellectual property should be so demanding of products that are sold as “based on a true story” or claim to be as faithful as possible to someone else’s intellectual property. And we can have another argument about why anyone should or shouldn’t bother to be faithful to Bram Stoker. We can have both arguments right now. Seriously.
But the funny thing is that we should be discussing this at all while talking about a Jess Franco film. My introduction to Señor Franco’s filmmaking efforts began when I stumbled upon a VHS copy of Oasis of the Zombies in the clearance bin at Woolworth’s in Waltham, Mass. For the longest time I thought I had in my possession one of the worst films ever. I have long since stood corrected. The thing about Jess Franco’s Dracula, and what gives it an edge over that other monstrosity (I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is that, bless his heart, Jess Franco obviously tried to get it right.
For one thing, he managed to do a pretty good job of hiding his small budget. Dracula’s castle is as good as anything from the contemporaneous Hammer oeuvre. The plot follows Stoker in most cases and if you’ve sat through any three other Dracula films you can almost forgive the changing of the various characters around Mina and Lucy and Jonathan. (It almost seems to be a point of pride amongst Dracula adaptors to see who can make the most hopeless jumble of Harkers, Holmwoods, Sewards, Westenras and Morrises. How hard could it be to keep track of five characters? Maybe they need a soap opera writer to do an adaptation from Bram Stoker.) The most telling detail is in the way Dracula becomes younger and more robust in the course of the film. This is straight out of Stoker, and this was the first film to remember that part of the story and try to represent it. And that’s just one example of Franco’s attempts to keep his film faithful to Stoker. The fact that he makes a halfway decent film while doing it is to his credit. It proves once and for all that he’s not a shitty filmmaker because he doesn’t know how to make a good film or what a good film should look like.
So, maybe you don’t care about whether or not a Dracula film is faithful to Bram Stoker. What else could make you want to see this film? Did I forget to mention that Christopher Lee is Dracula? Yeah, I forgot to mention that. As inconsistent as this film is, it’s probably the best Christopher Lee Dracula performance ever. If you don’t believe me, just skip ahead and watch the monologue that Dracula delivers to Harker about the history of the Draculas. It’s terrifying, awe-inspiring, oddly touching, menacing and simply brilliant. It’s not just the acting there, but the writing is good too. It pains me to think that people will continue to watch that craptastic BS Dracula from the 1990s and will never bother to see a moment of brilliance like Christopher Lee saying “I am not young, yet I am restless.”
And did I mention that Klaus Kinski plays Renfield? I did now. He looks like a blonde Mick Jagger in a strait-jacket. And when you find out he’s gone insane because his daughter was killed by Dracula, he becomes suddenly much more interesting than just some crazy guy who likes to eat flies and lives in a padded cell.
And did I mention that Herbert "Chief Inspector Dreyfus" Lom is Dr. Van Helsing? (Apparently he was the second choice, because they couldn't get Vincent Price.) The only way it could have been better is if they had gotten Alec Guinness for Dr. Seward and Peter Sellers as Quincey Morris. Lom is a great Van Helsing. He could easily have gone head to head with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing and is a sight better than most of the other versions. (I’ll make an exception for Christopher Plummer’s Van Helsing from Dracula 2000.)
I think what really impressed me (and which felt more true to Stoker than other versions) was the absence of exploitation. There’s no gore or grotesque effects, precious little in the way of blood and nary an exposed ankle’s worth of sexploitation. It’s a film that is almost as repressed as Stoker in its sexuality. For the director of Vampyros Lesbos to show that kind of restraint shows just how well he understood Stoker’s novel and just how true he intended to be to it in spirit. The latent sexual metaphor of vampirism loses its power if you actually show other forms of sexuality. What makes it fascinating in Stoker and in this film is how it is a form of release, if you will. And it makes us more fully understand Lucy and Mina’s mesmerized attraction. Soledad Miranda does a particularly wonderful job of playing the hypnotic hunger when she’s trying to hunt the little girl in the cemetery. It’s seductive without being obviously sexual, which is a good way to describe the best parts of this film.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a real Jess Franco movie without the scene that makes you either groan or laugh like a maniac at the absurdity. In this case, it’s a scene in England where Dracula’s lair is populated with various examples of rural taxidermy that turn and shake a little (like a really piss poor haunted house exhibit) while lights shine and various animal hisses and screeches are heard. Franco says the scene is symbolic of Dracula’s violation of the natural order of things, presumably because Dracula can wire up the forces of taxidermy and a reel-to-reel tape player. It’s the only scene that reminded me that this was a Jess Franco film and it made me smile a little (yes, that’s a badger over there, and not just any badger but Dracula’s Badger, with pointy buck teeth) even if it felt very out of place in an otherwise noble effort.
Extras
If Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom and Soledad Miranda weren’t enough for you, then maybe you’ll want to stick around for the extras.
1. Christopher Lee reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula
It’s an abridgement, but it clocks in at around 84 minutes, so it’s a good night’s entertainment and a great moment in audiobook history. You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard Christopher Lee narrate the entirety of Dracula. Also, if you had any doubts about how faithful Jess Franco really was to Stoker, you can actually listen up. Again, I think it shows a respect and love for the original on the part of both Jess Franco and Christopher Lee.
2. Beloved Count
A retrospective documentary featuring interviews with Jess Franco and others. Besides stories about Klaus Kinski (who apparently gave Jess Franco no trouble at all but allegedly bothered the producer Harry Alan Towers in novel ways, if Towers is to be believed) the most amusing part is to see Jess Franco (subtitled, even though he’s speaking in English, allegedly) trash-talking Francis Ford Coppola’s Mary Shelley's Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I know that Coppola said his adaptation is more faithful to Dracula. It’s not true. The meaning of the film is completely wrong…” I can’t do full justice to either Jess Franco’s mangled English or his hilarious delivery here, so you’ll just have to watch it yourself. In another context I might consider it would be ironic, absurd or surreal to watch any filmmaker being taken to task by Jess Franco, but the thing is, when he says that Coppola’s Dracula is absurd, he’s right. And there’s something entertaining about watching Jess Franco be right about something.
One more thing that Jess Franco may be right about is Klaus Kinski. Franco’s response to one anecdote is the best demythologizing line I’ve ever heard: “I can’t remember that because it’s not true.” The story in question is that Kinski had no intention of doing a Dracula movie and that he didn’t realize he was in one until a moment of clarity while working on a scene with Maria Rohm (wife of producer Harry Alan Towers) and said to her “That bastard husband of yours has got me in a Dracula film.” For this story to be believable we’d have to think that Klaus Kinski didn’t read the script (or didn’t have a script) that he didn’t know his character was named Renfield or that he was in a scene with someone named Mina or that he was so drugged up that he only became lucid halfway through filming. Makes a great story, but maybe it’s one more thing that Jess Franco is actually right about. But lest we completely dispense with the legend of Klaus Kinski, Difficult Actor, Franco does mention that Kinski wanted them to shoot his scenes in a real asylum. Franco recalls, “I said if we start shooting with you in a real cell, they hear you, they won’t let you out.”
More difficult than Kinski were the Catalan police dogs, which prompt this aphorism for filmmakers: Always in cinema you have problems because of the dogs.
3. Soledad Miranda essay
A brief bio about the late Soledad Miranda who died in a car accident in 1970 not long after making most of the films she is remembered for.
4. Still Gallery
Be sure to check out all the foreign posters for the film.
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File under Vampires/Dracula/Evil Taxidermy
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