Dracula Mania: Dracula (1979)

Yet again we don’t get the full story that’s laid out in Bram Stoker’s novel.  This is based on the same play that the ’31 version used as a starting point.  It’s the 1920’s and we open with the Demeter voyage to England.  Dracula washes ashore and is found by Mina.  From there on it’s your pretty standard Dracula story except for some inexplicable reason they switched the characters of Lucy and Mina.  Mina is the one who becomes a vampire and Lucy is the one that the Count falls in love with.  Also the ending is different with the finale taking place on a ship.

I didn’t expect anything from this one because no one ever talks about it.  I figured it was so bad that people just don’t even want to bring it up.  Well I was pleasantly surprised.  I really dug this version and now I’m confused why it’s never referenced.

Let’s start with the good.  The production design is pretty incredible.  Dr. Seward’s hospital is a little messy, a little creepy and a little overrun with patients; the ships are dingy, the days are constantly overcast, the period costumes look great and the nifty car that Harker drives is kinda cool.  But definitely the pièce de résistance is Carfax Abbey.  It stands in for Dracula’s castle and man does that set look tremendous.  The space is huge with gothic sculptures, chandeliers everywhere and a sweeping staircase.  The outside looks fucking eerie as well.

The cast gives good performances including Donald Pleasance (Halloweens) as Dr. Seward, Kate Nelligan (Wolf) as Lucy, Laurence Olivier (Rebecca) as Van Helsing and Frank Langella (The Ninth Gate, Frost/Nixon) as Drac.  I’ll get into Olivier and Langella more specifically in a minute.

The scene where Van Helsing stakes Mina through the heart is done really well.  The makeup in particular on Mina is pretty spooky.  And the special effects aren’t bad.  I especially like when Dracula climbs up and down walls.  It looks convincing.  And there’s this one part where he jumps through a window and instantly becomes a wolf that was awesome. 

It’s shot pretty damn well too with John Badham directing.  This is what he did after Saturday Night Fever.  The cinematography was done by Gilbert Taylor who was DP on Hitchcock’s Frenzy, The Omen and fucking Star Wars.  The score was penned by John Williams also.  So this was kind of an epic production.

There are a couple of bad points though.  The first is going to sound odd but bear with me.  Langella’s hair is very distracting.  It’s really 70’s and it’s too big.  The length and poofiness keeps changing too making it incredibly difficult to ignore.  Other than his hair Langella is a fucking bad ass Dracula.  I’ll admit I had my doubts but once you see him next to others he’s a tall, slender man dressed practically all in black that has an imposing presence.  Just his very stature and calm but assertive voice demands your attention.  I mean the man’s a good six to eight inches taller than anyone else in the film and that was smart casting.  Langella has a special talent of looking relatively normal while radiating this very off feeling.  But Jesus that hair. I don’t know what they were thinking.

The second is Van Helsing.  They handle him strangely in this one.  First of all they have Mina be his daughter (Lucy is Seward’s daughter here) so her death is what prompts Van Helsing to be brought into the mix.  He has no idea what the hell is going on at first and that’s very different from what we’re used to.  He acts like a confused old man that’s out of his league.   Olivier was quite sick when he was making this and that absolutely comes through.  It’s unfortunate and hinders the performance a fair amount.  Van Helsing does get his act together but it’s not until a little later when he goes to discover what happened to Mina.

So overall more positives than negatives.  Langella wanted to portray Dracula as “…a nobleman, an elegant man with a very difficult problem” and I think he achieved that.  We don’t get any bloody fangs or gory violence.  This version is more play-like similar to the ’31 Dracula.  And I’m not sure which one I like better.  I want to say this one but it doesn’t have the journey to Dracula’s castle segment that carries so much weight with me.  However, I do very much like the look and feel of the ’79 version.  It strikes a good balance between the horror and romantic aspects of the story.  Good job movie.

Creep factor: Some but not a lot.  Carfax Abbey is fantastic, Dracula himself and the vampire Mina scene are all good stuff.

Romance factor: Pretty high.  After Bela Lugosi’s infamous performance Dracula had become caricatured pretty quickly and everyone just thought of him as a monster.  This film attempts to show a more humanized version than what you’ve seen before.