DRACULA (1973)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*

Because Bram Stoker spent years working for a theatrical company, a few critics have wondered if he may have structured his most famous novel so that it could be easily adapted to stage. Stoker himself never authored a play of DRACULA, but the book became a very successful play in other hands, not least because the character of the “king-vampire” allows for a featured actor to really storm some barns. That said, both the novel and most of the adaptations for stage and screen have still devoted considerable attention to all of the equally strong supporting characters. Not all of the novel’s characters make the transition to other media—Quincy Morris is a frequent casualty—but there’s at least some attention to exploring the mentalities of the support-cast.

Dan Curtis’s 1973 DRACULA was given the full title “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in its TV release, in order to imply a greater fidelity to the source material than previous adaptations. Of course the Curtis production did not appreciably follow the novel any more closely than either of the best-known cinema-versions, the 1931 Lugosi vehicle and the 1958 Chris Lee work, nor should anyone expect total faithfulness in a ninety-minute version of a sprawling novel. Both the 1931 and 1958 films change a lot too, but one thing they do quite well is to provide a good balance between the supporting characters and the story’s monstrous star.

Not so the Curtis DRACULA. Jack Palance gives a memorable, intense performance as the vampire count, but all of the other characters are seriously underwritten, as if the director was so awestruck by the wonderfulness of Palance that he instructed all the other actors to mute their performances.

Of necessity Jonathan Harker gets a little more attention than the other support characters, since the Curtis film spends roughly the first half-hour on the usual encounter of count and solicitor in Dracula’s castle. But after Harker’s served the purposes of the vampire (and the script), the count lets his wives have him (a twist mirrored in the Coppola version), and so Harker more or less becomes the TV-film’s “Renfield.” However, he’s a Renfield that does nothing interesting and gets dispatched at the end with no real emotion. Because Harker gets reduced in importance, so does his fiancée Mina, and though as in the novel the vampire-hunters use her connection to Dracula to track the count, Mina herself comes off as little more than a puppet for either side to use. With Harker’s dimunition, Arthur Holmwood assumes greater importance as the “earnest young man” type, but neither he nor his wife Lucy has any dimension. She no longer flirts with other men, since Arthur’s the only one in her life, but she’s almost indistinguishable from Mina except in order of vampirization. Worst of all, the film doesn’t even allow its Van Helsing the chance to chew the scenery with his weighty revelations about nosferatu—meaning that the story lacks one of its most mythic aspects: the assertion of the reality of things from beyond the grave.

Palance, as said before, makes a better than average Dracula, convincing in both the erotic scenes with his victims and in the film’s climactic fight-scene. The end-battle is certainly not as impressive as the climax of the novel, or the very different confrontation at the end of Terence Fisher’s work. But it does have enough back-and-forth energy that the Curtis film qualifies as one of the more combative Draculas.