Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968) It was the fourth of Hammer's "Dracula" films and the third to star the malevolently magisterial Christopher Lee* as the "Count-of-Few-Words," where, the events of the previous film, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, the Count has been dispatched by being thrown into the frozen moat that surrounds his high castle. Not quite as thorough as a stake through the heart or an hour in a tanning booth, but that seemed to be good enough to end the film with. One wonders why nobody worried about a potential Transylvanian spring-thaw just to make sure the Count was really and sincerely dead rather than merely or nearly dead. Perhaps they anticipated the sun's rays hitting the moat would do the trick.

Perhaps I'm thinking too logically about a movie featuring vampires.

Anyway, the nearby village still has an issue, in a preamble set a year before the film, a young church helper is stunned to find a recently bit damsel tumbling from a belfry bell. Presumably, it's a reminder that Dracula was about and has a lot to do with the idea of desecration—Dracula had chosen to do his dirty work in the very house of God. But, he got his; he's in a frozen moat, never to be heard from again.

Not bloody likely...

And it's religious hubris that sets off the chain of events that frees him, all in the name of trying to do the right thing. No good deed goes unpunished, etc. You can't have religion in a horror movie without some irony attached to it.

Monsignor Mueller (Rupert Davies—he played John Le Carre's George Smiley in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) visits the town to find that nobody is going to church and it's in ruins. The young helper has become mute from his belfry shock and the parish priest (Ewan Hooper) is found in the local tavern, drinking something stronger than sacramental wine. He has lost his faith, given the previous year's struggle with the Count, and even though Dracula sleeps with the fishes, none of the towns-people have returned to the church, fearing Dracula's evil influence as the shadow of his mountain-top castle still touches the church.

Mueller intends to rectify things, so, with the priest in tow, he climbs to the Count's castle to exorcise it, jamming a crucifix in its door-way. The fallen priest, frightened by the influence of the place, literally falls, cracking his head on the rocks, and the blood from his wound makes its way into the moat, eventually reviving Dracula. Prematurely satisfied that he has solved the problem, Mueller gathers up the injured priest and they return to the town. The Monsignor returns to his home-city of Keinenberg, where he stays with his sister-in-law and her daughter, his niece (Veronica Carlson).

"SNARLINGLY miffed..."

Dracula is snarlingly miffed that he can't re-enter his castle and swears revenge (rather than immediately bite someone and tell them to remove the cross—vampires are so unpractical! But he'll get there, eventually). Placing the village-priest under his thrall, he extracts the name of the Monsignor and the two travel to Keinenberg, the Monsignor's home-town, where the venerable old priest has enough things to worry about. It seems his niece Maria has a young man, Paul (Barry Andrews), a student and baker's assistant, and the two are quite in love. But, when he is invited for Maria's birthday dinner, the subject of religion comes up and it seems that Paul is an atheist, which so offends the monsignor that he leaves the table early.

Maria doing what Hammer heroine's do:

laying around in diaphanous sleepwear and breathing hard

Maria still loves Paul—enough to sneak out of her bedroom window and walking over roof-tops to be with him—but with Dracula in town, any comely blond with a good collection of ornate peignoirs had best keep her windows locked, her meals heavy in garlic, and a rabies vaccination nearby. But, her nightly habits are bad enough—what with being out at night and roof-hopping—she's the perfect match for Dracula (they have so much in common!) And, as she's the monsignor's niece, he thinks she's the only game in town to pay back getting crossed at his castle.

The director for Dracula Has Risen From the Grave is Freddie Francis, who started out his career as a cinematographer, and a very good one, versatile with both black-and-white and color, and working with some very visual directors—John Huston, The Archers, David Lynch, Jack Clayton, Robert Mulligan, Martin Scorsese—and was the shooter of choice for some cinematographer/directors like Jack Cardiff. He won two Oscars for his work—for Sons and Lovers and Glory—but, one of my favorite films that he shot is Clayton's The Innocents. 

Francis had another cinematographer shoot this for him when he took over directing the film (for ailing Hammer veteran Terence Fisher), but he lent him the filters—tinged at the edges with red, amber and yellow—used for that film for every scene that featured Lee's Dracula. The results are jarring (especially when it goes from a shot without to one being used), but they create a creepy sense that the Count even has an effect corrupting the film it'd been shot on, giving it a jaundiced unhealthy look. For that, and Francis' direction, it makes an interesting part of the series.

And even though Lee hated the jokey way that Hammer sometimes treated and advertised the films, that poster is hilarious.

Lee does his "these aren't the droids you're looking for" move.

* Dracula does not appear in The Brides of Dracula, as the film centers around Peter Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing.

The Doctor and the Devils

The Doctor and the Devils (Freddie Francis, 1985) The film company Brooksfilms (established by Mel Brooks) had a bi-polar streak to it. Yes, they would do comedies, of course, like Mel's movies and To Be or Not To Be and My Favorite Year. But they would also make projects of The Elephant Man (the first studio film directed by David Lynch—now, there was a gamble), the Frances farmer biography Frances, and this film, adapted from a literary rarity, an original screenplay by Dylan Thomas (written in 1953), based on the true story of the mercenary ghouls Burke and Hare, who, starting in the year 1827, developed a lucrative trade in killing locals in Edinburgh and selling the corpses to an anatomy professor for display in his lectures.

The script was adapted by Ronald Harwood and the film directed by legendary British cinematographer Freddie Francis (The Innocents, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Glory, as well as The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story for Lynch, and Cape Fear for Martin Scorsese). 

One can't say anyone scrimped on the cast. For all the loathsomeness of the subject matter, it attracted a great crew of British thespians with Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea as the psuedonymed Robert Fallon and Timothy Broom, who would liquor their victims up and then suffocate them for the betterment of science. Their customer is Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton, just before his Bond years), who in some twisted idealism, looks the other way at the subjects brought to him by Fallon and Broom. He is opposed, and looked on with suspicion, at the Institute by Professor Macklin (played by a pre-Trek Patrick Stewart) and supported there by Dr. Murray (Julian Sands) who has his own secrets—he is in love with a bar-doxie (Twiggy), who may become one of the potential victims.

Great cast, maybe, but great movie it is not, despite the pains taken to present the squalor of London, both upstairs and downstairs. After starting out as a cinematographer, Francis became a director, doing a lot of pictures for Britain's Hammer Studios, a good prep for his work on this. It is atmospheric, alright, with a low-level discomfiture throughout, with Fallon and Broom being the lowest of the low, preying on the sick, weak and debilitated, and Rock turning a blind eye to the source (grave-robbing at best) of his demonstration subjects. 

There is a very large irony inherent in the script, not to far afield from the one Richard Matheson employed in "I Am Legend." But, the script, whatever it's pedigree (Harwood is an Oscar-winner, Dylan Thomas a writing legend) is the film's true down-fall.  It might seem a bit leaning to the pedestrian to say this, but there is no one to root for in all this, no one to sympathize with—not even the victims—and one watches with a dis-interest in the outcomes...for anyone.

There might have been a real reason no one dug up this script for so long.