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The Hammer style is observed, though Jesús Franco prefers the mesmeric tempo of Browning's version. Blue mist and wolves in Transylvanian woods, before that a tremulous warning to the young lawyer from London (Frederick Williams). "When the clock strikes midnight, all the evils of the world circle around us." Christopher Lee's Dracula is a wizened aristocrat who speaks with the weight of the ages, last in a line of mythical conquerors ("The blood of Attila is in these veins"). The visitor's boudoir in the castle is sketched with streaking spidery lines to set off the crimson velvet of the bed, a scratch on the frosted window pane is used as a jagged iris, all part of the procession of discreet images that has a trio of ravenous vampiric brides pacified by a baby snack. Back home, a clinic run by Professor Van Helsing (Herbert Lom). "I have never met the Count, and yet I feel like I know him better than my own soul." Stoker filmed "exactly as written" or so declares the prologue, down to a Western climax with boulders hurled at the gypsies carrying the villain's coffin. Franco has little use for the staid Mina (Maria Rohm) but dotes on Lucy (Soledad Miranda), who gazes through a trance to delicately offer her neck to the caped roué. Klaus Kinski's mania is surprisingly attuned to the film's quiet timbre, his Renfield transforms the walls of his padded cell into a Pollock canvas of smeared food before retiring to a corner to munch on insects. The pistol and the crucifix, the Black Sea by way of the Danube, the menagerie of ferocious taxidermy mounts. Pichel and Holden's She is cited for Dracula's demise, and there's Herzog's ultimate revision with Kinski. With Paul Müller, Jack Taylor, and Jesús Puente.
--- Fernando F. Croce |