Won't you take your hand in mine, nervous as it is at times?
Earlier this evening ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I watched Destry Rides Again (1939), which neither of us had seen and therefore had not understood just how much in addition to Dietrich it had bequeathed to Blazing Saddles (1974)—I mean it as a compliment to both films—and then I wandered around the house for the next three hours knowing I had recently had a similar insight about another pair of films and I couldn't remember what it was.
I was trying to remember that last week we had watched Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) for the first time and I suddenly realized how much of that film had gone straight into the DNA of Fright Night (1985). It wasn't even the premise of vampires vs. teenagers plus stake-wielding elders and the camouflage of modernity that made it click for me. It was the confrontation between Peter Cushing's Lorimer Van Helsing and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard, the point at which the occult, for the grandson of the last Van Helsing to grapple with Dracula, comprehensively ceases to be his family's theoretical study and becomes the messy fact of a willing Renfield doing its best to tear his throat out while he holds it off with his bare hands and a silver cross and reflected light and it's a close thing—Cushing never made his victories over evil look easy, but this one especially might not have ended well for him if it hadn't been daybreak already and his adversary hadn't sluiced himself in clear running water trying to get away from the skylight in the bathroom. He's an aging academic, not a professional vampire hunter, in that sense much closer to Stoker's Van Helsing than Hammer's usual; he can say confidently enough to the skeptical police inspector that "silver bullets are impractical and garlic is not one hundred percent reliable," but he does a lot of scrambling in his actual fights. Being patched up afterward by the detective sergeant who was confusingly not a young Christopher Lloyd, he looks exhausted and hurting and resolute and anxious and at that point a Roddy McDowall-shaped light flicked on in my brain. The scene is not one-for-one with Peter Vincent's confrontation with Evil Ed, but it's close enough that I can't imagine a writer-director who named his semi-fearless vampire killer after Cushing and Price not having it in the back of his head somewhere while writing. There is fortunately no equivalent to Charley in Dracula A.D. 1972, but I wish Stephanie Beacham's Jessica Van Helsing had been more of the next-generation vampire-ass-kicker we were hoping for and less of an Amy-like object, most important to the plot as something to be stolen from the hero and turned by the villain in revenge. At least the police in this film are willing to entertain the possibility of vampires as opposed to your garden-variety Satanic-panic murders.
Anyway, in an ideal world I will combobulate my brain enough to write properly about Dracula A.D. 1972 because honestly it delighted me, but I wanted not to forget the lightbulb moment—again—in the meantime.
spatch and I watched Destry Rides Again (1939), which neither of us had seen and therefore had not understood just how much in addition to Dietrich it had bequeathed to Blazing Saddles (1974)—I mean it as a compliment to both films—and then I wandered around the house for the next three hours knowing I had recently had a similar insight about another pair of films and I couldn't remember what it was.I was trying to remember that last week we had watched Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) for the first time and I suddenly realized how much of that film had gone straight into the DNA of Fright Night (1985). It wasn't even the premise of vampires vs. teenagers plus stake-wielding elders and the camouflage of modernity that made it click for me. It was the confrontation between Peter Cushing's Lorimer Van Helsing and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard, the point at which the occult, for the grandson of the last Van Helsing to grapple with Dracula, comprehensively ceases to be his family's theoretical study and becomes the messy fact of a willing Renfield doing its best to tear his throat out while he holds it off with his bare hands and a silver cross and reflected light and it's a close thing—Cushing never made his victories over evil look easy, but this one especially might not have ended well for him if it hadn't been daybreak already and his adversary hadn't sluiced himself in clear running water trying to get away from the skylight in the bathroom. He's an aging academic, not a professional vampire hunter, in that sense much closer to Stoker's Van Helsing than Hammer's usual; he can say confidently enough to the skeptical police inspector that "silver bullets are impractical and garlic is not one hundred percent reliable," but he does a lot of scrambling in his actual fights. Being patched up afterward by the detective sergeant who was confusingly not a young Christopher Lloyd, he looks exhausted and hurting and resolute and anxious and at that point a Roddy McDowall-shaped light flicked on in my brain. The scene is not one-for-one with Peter Vincent's confrontation with Evil Ed, but it's close enough that I can't imagine a writer-director who named his semi-fearless vampire killer after Cushing and Price not having it in the back of his head somewhere while writing. There is fortunately no equivalent to Charley in Dracula A.D. 1972, but I wish Stephanie Beacham's Jessica Van Helsing had been more of the next-generation vampire-ass-kicker we were hoping for and less of an Amy-like object, most important to the plot as something to be stolen from the hero and turned by the villain in revenge. At least the police in this film are willing to entertain the possibility of vampires as opposed to your garden-variety Satanic-panic murders.
Anyway, in an ideal world I will combobulate my brain enough to write properly about Dracula A.D. 1972 because honestly it delighted me, but I wanted not to forget the lightbulb moment—again—in the meantime.
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I am very glad!
(Peter Cushing makes a magnificent good guy, because he's never complacent about it. I wrote about him some years ago when I wrote about The Brides of Dracula (1961), which I recommend highly even if on some important narrative levels it doesn't make a lick of sense.)
(let's see if I dream of vampires...)
Enjoyably, I hope.
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Yay, because I am probably about to start watching it today as well! <3
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Enjoy! I was not sure what I would think of it beyond Peter Cushing, and I seem to have ended up wanting the soundtrack.
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You may like to follow up with this four-minute promotional featurette for it. You get to see Christopher Lee putting in his fangs, pontificating and (best of all IMO) brushing back unruly wig-hair while on location for the carriage-wheel scene.
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Thank you! The Criterion Channel has a collection of '70s horror for Halloween and it was right there.
You may like to follow up with this four-minute promotional featurette for it. You get to see Christopher Lee putting in his fangs, pontificating and (best of all IMO) brushing back unruly wig-hair while on location for the carriage-wheel scene.
That's adorable.
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(Christopher Lee, polyglot and rolled-magazine-murder-capable agent. Also game for wearing plastic teefs.)
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We weren't sure what to expect of it! It was marvelous!
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I think I knew about Igor, but not the one-armed inspector, and that's delightful.
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Wait, what?
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You may have sold me on this movie on the strength of the dartboard.
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I wish more vampire movies had groovy party scenes.
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Thank you! (
I wish more vampire movies had groovy party scenes.
I genuinely enjoyed the score for Dracula A.D. 1972. Also I hadn't known until last night that the eerie noise music played during the Dracula-raising sort-of-black-mass was, in fact, "Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell" by the original Delia Derbyshire lineup of White Noise and I was very happy to find out.
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Speaking of AD 1972
http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsa-d/blacula.htm
Given what would come in its wake, the truly astonishing thing about Blacula is how seriously good it is when its engine is running smoothly. There are, as we shall see, some really groan-worthy moments in this film, but on the whole, it is a well-executed, imaginative, and intelligent movie.
- Not that you’d ever figure that out from the first three scenes, of course…
… Who’d have expected this kind of thoughtful, nuanced storytelling could be hidden in a movie called Blacula?
From AD 2015: “Grand Moff Tarkin”
Re: From AD 2015: “Grand Moff Tarkin”
I am extremely fond of Peter Cushing.
Re: From AD 2015: “Grand Moff Tarkin”