Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952)

I've watched a fair few mainstream movies this bank holiday weekend - although I did manage to fit in a double bill of The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), not to mention a sleazy little number called The Psycho Lover (1970) - but the call of schlock is powerful and I found myself watching Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) this evening.  It wasn't planned, it just happened to be showing a Roku channel that continuously live streams scratchy prints of creaky old movies, but it exerted a dreadful fascination over me.  Dreadful, not just because it is so poorly and cheaply made, but because it features the unique and utterly bizarre teaming of British music hall dame Old Mother Riley (Arthur Lucan) and Hollywood horror icon Bela Lugosi.  Moreover, it features both as they were nearing the ends of their tethers, both professionally and personally.  For both, the film represented something of a last chance saloon.  Lugosi was involved only because he had found himself stranded in the UK after the failure of a touring stage production of 'Dracula' left him with insufficient funds to pay his fare back to the US.  For Lucan, it was to be the last of his seventeen films as Irish washer woman Mother Riley, but the first (and as it turned out, only) film without his regular screen daughter and sidekick (and in reality wife and business partner) Kitty McShane, from whom he had separated the previous year.  Both actors show the ravages of time in the finished film: Lucan was in his mid-sixties and simply wasn't up to the physicality the role required for the various slapstick sequences, while Lugosi, despite giving his trademark over-the-top performance, looks tired and uncomfortable, with the film's lighting cruelly emphasising the evidence of the advancing years etched on his face.

Despite both leads being known for giving larger-than-life performances better, perhaps, suited to the stage, the film represents a colossal mismatch of talents, with Lucan's increasingly tired looking antics jarring badly with Lugosi's straight villainy.  The latter is, on occasion, genuinely menacing, but his attempts to bring an edge of horror to the proceedings is constantly undercut by Lucan's mugging and shrieking. Both might, at times, look as if they are playing to the stalls, but their approaches are completely different, resulting in a discordant onscreen clash of styles.  Overall, it is probably Lugosi who comes out on top as, despite the poor material he has to work with, he conducts himself with remarkable dignity, giving his lines everything he's got, delivering even the weakest with villainous relish.  In truth, it was the sort of role he could perform in his sleep (and probably did here), recalling the sort of mad scientist characters he had played for Monogram in countless B-movies during the forties.  Lucan, by contrast, simply seems desperate.  Personally, I've never been a fan, always finding his act thin and repetitious - he fell into the trap of many performers who made the jump from music hall to film, of believing that he could keep on repeating essentially the same routine in film after film, with only the settings for his antics changing.  While you could get away with this on stage for years at a time, on film, once you'd done it once, everyone had seen it.  I've always been amazed that the 'Old Mother Riley' films lasted as long as they did, as they all felt much the same to me.  The inclusion of Lugosi in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire was meant to give it something different, not to mention secure it US distribution.  But it was too little, too late.  The public appetite for Lucan, seemed to have waned, with the film performing poorly in the UK and not getting a US release until 1963, by which time both stars were long dead.

Although Mother Riley Meets the Vampire is shoddily made with threadbare production values, poorly put together action sequences and an awful script full of unspeakable dialogue, it does have some points of interest, (apart from teaming Lugosi and Lucan).  Most interestingly, we get to see several soon to be well known British actors near the beginnings of their film careers, including Dora Bryan (more or less standing in for Kitty as Lucan's comic foil), a very young Richard Wattis as a police constable and Laurence Naismith as a police sergeant.  Also present is Graham Moffat, now best remembered as one of Will Hay's main sidekicks, but also a prolific comic performer in his own right.  In the director's chair is British B-movie veteran John Gilling, who would go on to make a number of interesting films for Hammer in the sixties.  Ultimately, the film did little to help the declining careers of either Lugosi or Lucan, (apart from securing Lugosi the funds to get back home).  While Lugosi continued to make films, they quickly declined in quality as his health failed amidst his struggles with substance addictions, until he ended up working with Ed Wood.  By 1956, he was dead.  For Lucan, it proved to be his final film.  He continued to perform as Old Mother Riley on stage and died in his dressing room in 1954, just before he was due on stage for a performance.  Not that his death spelled the end for the character: his understudy Roy Rolland, who had doubled for Lucan in the more physical sequences in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, took over the character and continued to perform as Old Mother Riley into the seventies, including some TV appearances, (which is why some people mistakenly think that they saw Lucan still performing in children's TV in the early seventies, despite the fact that he had died in 1954).  I might not have been a fan of Lucan and his act, but he was hugely popular in the thirties and forties and his act highly influential on other performers, paving the way for the likes of Danny La Rue and even Brendan O'Carroll.  Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, while a fascinatingly bizarre piece of British b-movie crud, is a poor epitaph for both Lucan and Old Mother Riley.