Count Dracula (Franco)

Count Dracula (Jess Franco)

1970

Director-Jess Franco

Cast- Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski, Jack Taylor, Frederick Williams,  Maria Rohm, Soledad Miranda, Paul Muller

            

    I watched this movie several years ago and my only memory of it was that it was boring. I decided that I needed to give it another look and I did have a different reaction. Now, it didn’t keep me on the edge of my seat, but I can say that it’s not boring.

           

    First off, it has a great cast; Christopher Lee as Dracula (can’t beat that), genre legend Jack Taylor as Quincy Morris, Klaus Kinski (who would play the vampire in his own movie a few years later), familiar genre actor Herbert Lom as Van Helsing (Mark of the Devil, Spartacus), and 2 beautiful Franco regulars Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda as Mina and Lucy.

           

    Second, it’s pretty faithful (until it goes off the tracks a bit in the last 20 minutes). It has all of the characters except Arthur (the most frequently left out). The beginning with Harker in Dracula’s castle seemed to really evoke the mood of the book. Most importantly, this is the only Dracula film (that I’m aware of) where they actually tried to make Dracula look like the book. It was probably refreshing for Lee to play the character as he was written. Though he was iconic in the Hammer films, he was mostly mute and that voice is too good to go to waste.

     

      

    Despite all of this, the movie still feels like unfulfilled potential. It has almost no eroticism, which is perhaps the biggest surprise. Franco is known for the sex in his movies, some of them are porn for crying out loud! I wasn’t expecting The Devil in Miss Jones, but the erotic meter is lower than the most tame Hammer vampire film. I could have also used about 30 minutes more (yes I know that’s an unrealistic expectation). Christopher Lee looks really good and the film really was doing a decent job of sticking to the book, and then it just gets really rushed to wrap everything up.

    So if we are grading this on entertainment value, it would be toward the bottom of my list for Dracula adaptations. For faithfulness, however, it’s close to the top. So if fidelity to the source material is important to you, watch it to see Lee play Dracula as he was written and enjoy it for that.