Olivier has much the same problem, only much worse. He comes on with his elaborate fussing and bogus accent, and just as he begins to work his magic, the way he did under the sluggish lenses of Daniel Petrie (The Betsy) and Franklin J. Schaffner (The Boys From Brazil), Badham cuts away. Olivier is a man of the stage, and cold entrances don't suit him; it takes him awhile to warm up. The only time Badham holds on him for any length of time is after he's just rammed a stake through his daughter's heart, at which point he emits a series of ludicrously overwrought sobs. And the accent? "The vampire vants your blid," he explains at one point. The shame....the shame....
The only other thing worth mentioning about Dracula--aside from the terrible Latex, greasepaint and collodion jobs on a few of the vampires, and the turn-of-the century, tradition vs. modernism theme Badham and Richter apparently tried to concoct in the visuals--is the great love scene that stopped the show on Broadway. As Dracula and Lucy begin to embrace, their figures dissolve into multi-colored silhouettes and recede into the distance, whereupon a bunch of shapely limbs wind and unwind to John Williams' less than austere music. The whole thing is modeled on the title sequences in the Bond films, but aside from its inappropriteness, it's technically a cut-rate job. It is unspeakably bad. Who was responsible for this sequence? Who? I want to know his name. I can't believe it was Badham. Producer Walter Mirisch? Who? I want to know so I can tear out his throat, break his neck, impale him to the side of a boat, and butcher his baby.
SO WHO IS THE SCREEN'S greatest Dracula? Not Bela Lugosi, who gave a lugubrious performance in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, which was utterly ruined by its failure to abandon the Deane-Balderston play. F.W. Murnau's German silent Nosferatuwas a good deal better, and even today provides one or two chilling moments, but Max Schreck's strutting rat did not have a whole lot of dramatic stature.
My vote goes to Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer films and one independent production. Lee is not a very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable of displaying a kind of cynical tenderness that lulled his victims into a trance before he turned animal and sank his fangs into their throats. The latter Dracula films were undercut by hackneyed scripts, but the first--Horror of Dracula--remains the best to date, aided immeasurably by Peter Cushing's bloody marvelous Van Helsing.
It is the figure of Dracula himself, not the book, the play, or the movies, that has endured. If Superman is the fantasy figure of sandy-haired, scrawny, neo-Nazi Kansas farmboys, then Dracula is for the urban or suburban adolescent: chubby, acne-ridden, excrutiatingly lonely, the boy with nothing to do after school but tear the limbs off Barbie dolls and masturbate. Girls laugh at him, or, worse yet, ignore him altogether.
If you've ever been to a science-fiction convention you've seen them in a less egregious form: short, bad complexion, slightly overweight, greasy hair, glasses, copy of Stranger in a Strange Landdiscreetly folded over an otherwise prominent hard-on. At least they have something to talk about: the possibilities of sending Isaac Asimov to Pluto, or the time Mr. Sulu's left ball was shot off by Klingons. It's worse at Dracula conventions: the plastic fangs they wear inhibit conversation, and instead of meeting tall, gaunt, Continental types they find only themselves, or else fat, greasy middle-aged men. The shock of recognition: it's like casting a vampire into the sunlight.
DRACULA. Graceful, hypnotic, cultured, with the accumulated wisdom of 500 years. He can shrivel a potential rival with a burning glance, and back it up with action. No matter that he never sees the sunlight--the day is evil and harsh; it is for playing ball and going to school and applying fresh Clearasil after every class. Daylight means exposure. Whereas Dracula haunts the shadows, dissolves into a puff of smoke, a wolf or a bat. And he can hide his hard-on in his cape.
Voluptuous maidens fight to do his bidding, and after the first encounter he has no obligations: he doesn't have to give anything to hold onto them. No woman says, "I'm sorry, Vlad, it's just not working out--I guess you're not my type."
And another thing: he hurts people.
Men he merely mauls. But women--women he subdues with a combination of violence and gentleness, depending on their speed of submission. Dracula robs sado-masochism of its ugly, hideous, sordid side, and changes it into the brutally tender ballet of your innermost fantasies. (Yean, your fantasies, fella).
Vampires have always plagued such hysterical misogynists as August Strindberg, who saw women as the bloodsuckers, preying on the very soul of Man. Dracula is Our Champion,the only man capable of fighting back, of beating women at their own game. The whole thing smacks of sexism increased exponentially by psychosis, but that, after all, is what we go to movies for, to satisfy our primitive urges without actually acting them out.
No character can churn up these kinds of emotions and survive. Dracula must die at the end of his movies, and he's got to die bloody, so it hurts. Part of us dies with him--loving it--and the other part drives in the stake and loves it more, sending Dracula back where he came from, to hell, to the bubbling pits of our own souls.
DRACULA'S LONELINESS acquires real dimension, because after he has obliged us by providing a series of lurid thrills, we pull out on him too. And he goes knowing that he'll be back, that you can't keep a good man down, that you can't put a stake through your own heart of darkness. So we return to our isolated hells, knowing that he has the answer to our terminal loneliness, our inability to know--really know--other human beings: ingest them.