Count Dracula

This BBC produced adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel is one of the most faithful ever filmed, aswell as being one of the most atmospheric and spookiest. At two and a half hours long it's certainly ambitious, but Louis Jourdan gives the performance of his life as Dracula. Handsome, elegant, and charmingly polite, he is also a sociopath who knows how to gaslight those who are under his control. Frank Finley is brilliant as Van Helsing, he actually looks like a Dutchman (which the character was), and plays the role as if it was Shakespeare. Jack Shepherd comes close to stealing the show though, in a gleefully manic turn as the fly eating Renfield, a disciple of the count incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. A highlight is Dracula's crawl down the castle wall, witnessed by Jonathan Harker from his window. Hammer films did this sequence in Scars of Dracula (1970), but it wasn't half as good as it is here. Kudos too for this adaptation featuring the English seaside town of Whitby. An integral part of Stoker's novel ( and which to this day attracts Dracula devotees from around the world to it's annual goth weekend), it is pretty much ignored in practically every other version that has been filmed. Philip Seville's film however features great location filming, including making use of the towns atmospheric abbey ruins. This is one TV movie you can really get your teeth into.

This English version of the classic Stoker novel played on PBS in the late '70's and was one of the better shows that I remember watching on public television at that time. It has a quality that gave it more substance than other versions that I have ever seen. Even the Copella "Dracula", which is centerpieced by a fabulous performance by Gary Oldman, does not have quite the depth that this one did. Like many "Dracula" versions, they have changed the story a bit, but have kept the essential feel of piece

It might be said that Louis Jourdan is miscast here, but I would only say that from the standpoint of age (Jourdan was nearly 60). The man has an aura and appeal that draw women in. Even in his 60's when he played the villain in "Octopussy", he was still sexy in a continental playboy sort of way. If he had been maybe ten or 20 years younger he would have been better.

Susan Penhaligon and Judy Bowker will probably be familiar due to the fact that at one point in time they were the English babes of the moment. While Penhaligon is a reasonable actress she wasn't able to rise above it like Jane Seymour. In this show, both give interesting performances. Bowker has a few great moments where her character struggles with the pull she feels for Dracula and her love for her husband.

The great, but underrated Frank Finlay does a fabulous job as Van Helsing.

PBS needs to bring this production back on video or DVD. It would be interesting to see it again. While the production is filmed in as the average BBC studio style, it still has appeal.

I have a comment for Author: kriitikko from Kirkkonummi, Finland. I will first use his comments and then respond.

"Ironically, the only performance not so faithful to Stoker, comes from Louis Jourdan as Dracula. This however is not a bad thing. Instead of copying Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, or playing Dracula more faithfully as a furious warlord (which Jack Palance had done few years earlier in another TV adaptation), Jourdan plays Dracula as calm, calculating demon who seduces his victims by offering them power and eternal life, but who is just coldly using them for his own advantages. In fact Jourdan portraits Dracula as a sort of Anti-Christ creature, who is looking for disciples and going against God. In one of the scenes Van Helsing raises his cross against Dracula and starts to enchant a prayer in Latin, only to receive an arrogant comment from the Count of how prayer always sounds more convincing in Latin. Jourdan may not be most faithful Dracula, but certainly one of the best, making Dracula seem far superior to humans." You are exactly correct. In the novel, Van Helsing states that because Dracula has what he attributes to a be mere "child's mind", that he is "slow to make haste". He uses the Latin term: Festina Lente, which means Hasten slowly or as Van Helsing puts it, "slow to make haste".

This however proves to be Dracula's ultimate downfall.

Though Van Helsing also warned Jonathan that "if he (Dracula) dared to use his full array of his powers, he would have been long beyond our (meaning the vampire hunters) reach".

Thus proving his point. And Dracula's arrogance about believing himself to be vastly superior to mere mortals. He thought himself to be so superior, that in the end they finally defeated him. Because he failed to prepare for the fact that humans in the late 19th Century were better able to combat him, than human contemporaries of his 15th Century.

I saw this once in about 1978 on public television in San Francisco. It was astounding because for once not just the horror, but also the senusality of the Dracula story was transferred to the screen without the (then) standard "monsters jumping out of the box" treatment. I got marvelous chills and tingles while watching. NOW, if those of us who remember this movie/tv show could just get a copy of it!

The BBC's 1977 production of "Count Dracula" arguably represents for many Dracula aficionados the finest screen version of Stoker's novel ever likely to be made.

"Count Dracula" probably stands alone by virtue of its very faithful adherence to Stoker's plot, as well as the uniformly stunning quality of the acting performances (who, for instance, could forget Jack Shepherd's "Renfield"?).

But for me, the most outstanding feature of the production is the conscious, studied, Gothic restraint of the female cast, echoing much of what was best about the early Hammer vampire movies before the regrettable advent of the "tits and fangs" genre.

Without the exposure of a single breast, the trio of female vampires at Castle Dracula succeed in conveying an astonishing level of sexual allurement as they coquettishly tease Jonathan Harker with his letter to Mina.

In similar vein, when the (by now un-dead) Lucy Westenra is confronted in the cemetery by the group of vampire slayers, she transforms herself almost instantaneously from a blood-stained Fury from Hell into a virginal Lady of Shalot, and then back again.

How sad that this near-perfect cinematic achievement appears to have been very largely eclipsed by "Dracula" of 1978, as well as Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula"!