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 Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Over Christmas, I had great fun reading "A Legacy of Spies," the new novel by John le Carre. In it, the events of le Carre's earlier book "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" come back to haunt the British Secret Service—The Circus, as le Carre dubbed it—as those who are still living are sued by living relatives for damages incurred by the events of the story. Is it some Russian plot? No. It is mere gold-digging. The plaintiffs are blackmailing the Service to reveal what they know...or suspect...if they are not payed handsomely. It is always fun for me to read le Carre but the nostalgia factor of coming back to the old characters, even if in passing, was a bit of a thrill. And whenever Alec Leamas was mentioned in the book, I still had trouble imagining Richard Burton's face and manner. I wrote this in 2011, some time before Tomas Alfredson's excellent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy reached theaters—I should post my review of that here when I'm done with the clutch of Holiday released movies.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) With the anticipation of the Christmas release of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it would do well to revisit the world of George Smiley, "Control," and the duplicity of agent-turned-novelist John le Carré's "kitchen-sink" version of spies. Although Smiley and the others would loom large in his later novels (especially the "Karla Trilogy"), they're mere background characters in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the focus of the tale being operative Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), former head of the West Berlin branch of "The Circus," who must go behind enemy lines—in fact, one of the toughest of them, the Berlin Wall—as a potential "mole"* to ferret out who, among their Cold War equivalency on the other side, might be a double agent for the Soviets, the one who is responsible for the death of one of Leamas' contacts. To "Control" (Cyrilm Cusack), the head of "The Circus"  it is a rare opportunity to do some damage control and, possibly, if they can take advantage of an agency power-struggle, some harm. 

His identity is kept the same—The Circus wants Leamas and his background history out in the open—but he is demoted in rank and stature, and, depressed and drinking heavily, he becomes bait for Soviet recruitment to betray information. That's the mission, become a decoy on the "inside," another "double" feeding the Soviets false information, while trying to find out if there's a player on the other side in The Circus feeding information to the Russians.** 

Oh, what a tangled web the Cold War weaves.

Taken to East Berlin, Leamas is interrogated by a suspicious Russian administrator named Fiedler (Oskar Werner) who (rightly) suspects Leamas of being a "plant." Fiedler suspects a British "mole" already underground in the Soviet service and so sweats Leamas for any information to discover who that might be. Ultimately, Leamas is undone by what so many of le Carré's heroes or anti-heroes are susceptible to, the warmth of human contact—a failing that trips up a lot of the author's protagonists. Leamas "comes out of the cold," the world of spies, and his friends, relations or lovers—the thread of decency and honesty they provide—are used against him.

For the fact of the matter is the Spymasters of "The Circus" are cold-hearted bastards ("without sympathy" as "Control," played by Cyril Cusack, ponders)—they have to be to combat their enemies—and they're just as capable of betraying their own as those they fight.  

Case in point: George Smiley (played here by Rupert Davies). He would become le Carré's most celebrated character, but here he's a bit of a functionary, and he's just as cold-hearted as the rest. In the "Tinker, Tailor..." timeline, "Control" was long since dead, having been driven out by "the new broom" from his station, which had left him suspicious and paranoid (ultimately with good reason) with Smiley his only trusted colleague. 

When the BBC made a television mini-series of "Tinker...", Smiley was famously played by Sir Alec Guinness and (as le Carré amusingly notes in his new forward to "Tinker, Tailor...,") because of that he "lost control" of the character. But Smiley (however sympathetically Guinness played him) is also a "cold-hearted bastard"—if he wasn't, he wouldn't have lost the vital clue that was exploited by his enemies. He gives as bad as he gets, and, even at his most triumphant, takes little joy in what he does.

Davies as George Smiley in The Spy...

In such a world, Ritt's direction is entirely appropriate—low-key, almost documentary in feel on the streets of London—in drab black-and-white, not the high-contrast color of other spy films of the era. There is nothing glamorous about it, and the circumstances play out slowly and subtly—in fact, after a debriefing by his boss, the shift in tone is so dreary one suspects one is watching a different film. It is part and parcel of the subterfuge—it works on us as it does for Leamas' Sov' recruiters (most prominently Michael Hordern).

And the script—now there's an interesting tale. A beginning draft was written by Hollywood veteran Guy Trosper, who died subsequently. Taking over was poet-playwright Paul Dehn. Dehn had written the final polish on the James Bond spy film Goldfinger (amusingly, as the two films could not be more polar opposite), and was the mainstay-writer for the "Planet of the Apes" sequels. But, Dehn knew the world of spies well—during the second World War, Major Paul Dehn was the "Political Warfare" officer at the BSC training headquarters "Camp X" (where among the trainees were Roald Dahl and Bond creator Ian Fleming). *** Dehn was well-versed in spy-craft, deceit, and keeping secrets and his distillation of le Carré's novel brings the moral duplicity to the fore, while keeping the audience guessing on whose side is whom.

If the film has one flaw, it is the casting of Burton as Leamas. Burton was too good, too charismatic an actor/star to play a functionary like Leamas (it's about the same as "buying" Sean Connery as a spy (which was part of the joke of the Bond series)—he's someone you'd notice walking into a room, and thus, hardly spy material. But, Burton's presence, no doubt, got the film made, so the point is a bit moot. Still, if its ideas and mysteries of the State and the heart you want more than action and fireballs (shall we say if you want to be "stirred and not shaken?"), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a fine, bracing tonic.

Smiley's before they were emoji's: Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman

* The term "mole" is a le Carré invention—his spy-circles code-name for a double agent hiding in plain sight within one of the other spy agencies, Soviet or British, and relaying information to "the other side."

** There has been a rich history of double agents throughout the annals of spy-dom, the most significant of which were "The Cambridge Five"—Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth (and possibly more)—who'd been recruited during their college years, passed information to the Russians during WWII, and subsequently during the post-War years through the early 1950's. "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (and the other two of the le Carré "Karla" novels) and le Carré's subsequent "A Perfect Spy" are inspired by "The Five" and their Russian puppet-master.

*** And, interestingly, one of the people who asked, and was briefly considered, to run Camp X...was Kim Philby!