DRACULA
Directed by John Badham
Screenplay by W.D. Richter
This is the expensive Dracula that the gang at Hammer films must have dreamed of making back in the '50s and '60s. The legend had fallen out of general favor back then, and only B-picture makers and their fans still cared about the ineffable Transylvanian count and the strange folkloristic ways of fighting off his baleful influence (garlic on the windowsills, stakes through the heart, that sort of nonsense). Like those old programmers, the new Dracula is shot in the high gothic-romantic tradition, lushly scored and terribly serious about itself and its subject matter. It is also, like the old Hammers, quite overt—if a trifle too discreetly so—in making the connection between Dracula's blood lust and other, more conventional forms of eroticism. This time round there is plenty of money to do a handsome production, to hire first-class actors and use sophisticated special effects (the stuffed bat on a wire was always the curse of the genre efforts).
Some of those old el cheapo pictures were, in the last analysis, more entertaining than this rather too impeccable film.
There was about the best of them a crazy energy—part libidinal, part desperately inventive, as their makers sought to keep belief alive despite the strictures of the budget. And mind, this leaves aside discussion of higher levels of creativity that have occasionally been placed in Dracula's service: the stylish camp of the 1977 Broadway production, from which this film has borrowed Frank Langella for the title role, only to tune him down; or the wonderful expressionistic grotesqueries of that marvelous silent, Nosferatu.
One reason Dracula remains forever undead is that no amount of cinematic miscalculation can entirely loosen his grip on our imaginations. Now he has proved that even an excess of good taste cannot entirely ground him. Not permitted to parody romantic menace as he was able to do on the stage, Langella shows himself capable of playing it straight and slightly melancholic. Kate Nelligan, as Lucy, the young woman who enthralls him and is herself enthralled, is superbly spirited. In the film's early scenes, she plays the part as a liberated lady, turn-of-the-century variety. Once Dracula has begun to work his will on her, she becomes a resourceful woman fighting boldly for her forbidden love. Laurence Olivier contributes another of his shrewd Germanic foxes to the proceedings as Van Helsing. Dracula's scholarly nemesis, though both he and Donald Pleasence.
Lucy's doctor father, occasionally look as if they would have liked to cut loose a little but were not allowed.