Count Dracula (1970)

I cannot deny that I'm not an unqualified fan of Jesus Franco.  Indeed, in the past I've been pretty harsh in my judgements of some of his output.  The problem isn't just stylistic - his over use of the zoom lens, for instance - but simply that Franco was so prolific, churning out films by the dozen, with lower and lower budgets it seemed.  Inevitably, many of them were going to be crap, made simply for money.  But every so often he'd turn out a film that displayed his directorial virtues to the max - an imaginative approach to his material, a bold use of colour compositions, wild imagery and unconventional plotting and story structures, for instance.  Venus in Furs (1970) and Rio '70 (1969), made for Harry Alan Towers, are both good to look at and hugely entertaining, while Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972) and The Erotic Experiences of Frankenstein (1972) are fabulously surreal takes on well worn subject matter, (the latter, in particular, pointing forward, toward Franco's increasing interest in more pornographic scenarios.  Virgin Among The Living Dead (1973), represents another enjoyably off-kilter take upon an established subject.  Indeed, this ability to approach classic horror staples from a different (and hugely idiosyncratic) perspective is probably why I found Franco's Count Dracula (1970) so disappointing.  Another film from his Harry Alan Towers period, it has the distinction of being the only non-Hammer Dracula film that Christopher Lee starred in, (he played other vampires for other companies, of course, and made numerous cameo appearances as the Count).  It was also claimed by Towers, (who scripted it under his usual pseudonym of 'Peter Welbeck'), to be the most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel to date.

To some extent this claim to fidelity, (on which the film was sold to Christopher Lee), is justified.  Certainly, the early part of the film follows the novel more closely than most adaptations and, most importantly for Lee apparently, not only does Dracula sport a 'tache, (the first since John Carradine had played the role for Universal in the mid forties), but starts out as an old man, gradually getting younger as the film progresses and he drinks more blood.  Unfortunately, once the film leaves Dracula's castle and Transylvania, it begins to depart from the book in terms of plot and character as much as any previous version.  It doesn't help that the scenes in 'London' are clearly shot in Spain and that the dialogue is ponderous and the pace leaden.  The poor script and shaky production values are compounded by the miscasting of many of the supporting characters.  In particular, Herbert Lom's Van Helsing fails to provide Dracula with a convincing, let alone worthy, nemesis.  He is neither the wild eccentric portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the late Coppola version of Dracula, nor the steely fanatic played by Peter Cushing in the Hammer series.  Instead of those dynamic characterisations, Lom's Van Helsing is, to be frank, a tedious bore who barely seems to have the energy to engage in dialogue with the other characters, let alone confront Dracula.  The problem is less the actor than the pedestrian script which simply offers him nothing to work with, even having him disabled by a stroke part way through, to further immobilise the character and render him even less effective.

To be fair, though, in this film Dracula himself seems curiously muted compared to his depictions elsewhere.  Certainly, Lee's performance is nowhere near as effective as those he provided in the earlier Hammer productions, where he came across as the embodiment of evil, smoothly alternating between smoothly courteous host, seductive lover and savage blood-lusting monster.  Perhaps Lee was just 'Dracula'ed' out, having made two appearances in the Hammer series, (Taste The Blood of Dracula (1969) and Scars of Dracula (1970) around the same time that he made Count Dracula), but here he seems defeated by the script.  Franco, likewise, seems defeated by the subject matter and its treatment, with the film featuring none of his trademark quirkiness or visual flair.  The script simply gives him nothing to work with, nothing to lift the subject matter beyond the level of a Gothic fairy tale.  In particular, there is simply no sex here - unlike Hammer's 1958 production, (which took many liberties with the actual plot of Stoker's novel, but retained its spirit), Count Dracula's script doesn't seem to grasp that the book is very much about sex, about Dracula's vampiric bite releasing all those staid Victorian ladies from the sexual repression imposed upon them by a patriarchal society.  (The irony being that their release is effected by another patriarchal figure in the form of Dracula).

Count Dracula isn't all bad, of course.  There are some good individual scenes, such as the mother outside of Dracula's castle, desperately pleading for the life of her baby, that has been taken by the Count's vampire brides.  Moreover, Klaus Kinski puts in a memorable turn as the insane Renfield, while Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda do their best as Mina and Lucy, respectively.  Overall, though, the film remains a disappointment, both as a Dracula film and as a Jesus Franco film, reaching neither the heights of his very best work, nor the tatty craziness of his worst.  Thanks to Welbeck's plodding script, it instead comes over as the sort of 'tasteful' classic novel adaptation you might have seen on a Sunday teatime on the BBC in the seventies.  It all goes to show that even a director as individualistic and eccentric as Jesus Franco could be bludgeoned into mediocrity when strait-jacketed by a script that is simultaneously too reverential to its source material while also missing completely its sub-text.