Bram Stoker's Dracula

In 1897, Dracula was published and experienced moderate success. Its author, the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, never knew how enduring his novel would become. When German filmmaker F.W. Murnau filmed Nosferatu in 1922, Stoker's widow came after Murnau for violating the copyright she held over Dracula. Florence Stoker wasn't able to stop the movies from getting at her late husband's most interesting and most sustained novel, but she did receive some remuneration from Universal when they made Dracula in 1931. And yet, if Dracula hadn't been made all the more popular on the stage and then on screen in these two afore-mentioned films, we likely wouldn't be talking about it today.

First of all there was a much more popular horror novel released in 1897: Richard Marsh's The Beetle, about a shape-shifting bug terrorizing London in much the same fashion as Count Dracula. The Beetle was forgotten (no movies have been made of it to my knowledge) and even though it has recently experienced a sort of literary resurrection among critics, it effectively switched places with Dracula after Stoker's novel was adapted to the big screen. Second, there was another vampire novel from 1897 called The Blood of the Vampire, by the prolific Florence Marryat. Marryat's vampire, Harriet Brandt, was a psychic vampire: she drained the life out of people without resorting to fangs and bloodsucking. And Harriet wasn't affected by sunlight or crosses or holy water. But like Dracula, she was cursed. (Harriet was mixed: her father a white scientist with an interest in vivisection and her mother a black slave and voodoo priestess from the island of Barbados.) I have often wondered what vampire movies would have been like if Marryat's had been the lasting work and not Stoker's. Would we have been stuck with Twilight either way?

Fast forward to 1992 and the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola (The Godafther, Apocalypse Now). Watching it for the third or fourth time, I am struck by the visual splendor and ecstasy of Coppola's version. He and screenwriter James V. Hart point up the erotic overtones in the novel. The film's visual composition has a sense of passion that makes this a supremely interesting movie to watch. It's a breathtaking, thrilling, visceral movie visually speaking: the black silhouettes against an angry orange sky during the scenes of the Crusades that initiate our understanding of Dracula the warrior (although the book doesn't really touch on this much); the howling wolves in the distance as Jonathan Harker changes carriages en route to Count Dracula's foreboding Castle deep in the Carpathian mountains of primitive Eastern Europe; the grey, grim yet Dickensian-looking skyline of 1890s London; the stark reds and greens that permeate the entire film, from the backdrops to the costumes to the blood and the flowers.

As for the plotting, Dracula unfolds in a relatively straightforward and faithful way, except for the beginning, which is an attempt to link the fictional Dracula to his alleged historical persona, Vlad the Impaler. Even when the film seems a bit poky, there is the beauty, the sheer intensity, the sensationalism, as well as the passionate music score of composer Wojciech Kilar. Coppola's ability to turn up the suspense and the terror is quite limber and surprising, and there's a sick, amusing sense of humor in the movie too. Even though this rarely if ever turns campy, it's an unashamed celebration of the excess of Gothic sensibilities. Gothic novels, going back to 1764's The Castle of Otranto, have always fixated on the passion and darkness that rattled and sometimes derailed modernity's reliance on things like science and rationalism. That is the chief allure of a story like Dracula: it's simply genius to have a vampire leave the superstitious culture of Eastern Europe and head to the mecca of European progress and imperialism: London. Nobody believes in vampires there--and even God has become a relic, removed very much from the common life of the modern world--so Dracula is free to feast on the blood of unsuspecting British ladies Mina (Winona Ryder) and Lucy (Sadie Frost, who really ratchets up Lucy's burgeoning sex drive) with hardly anyone to suspect his existence.

Gary Oldman plays the Count, and he imbues him with a sense of loss and emotional torment without sacrificing the qualities that make Dracula a dangerous and frightening enemy of pure British sensibilities. Anthony Hopkins--presumably trying to balance the scales after playing such a memorably devious character as Hannibal Lecter--has a fun time playing Dr. Van Helsing, the eccentric metaphysician and philosopher who figures out what's terrorizing the English ladies; Keanu Reeves is a bit of an embarrassment as Jonathan Harker, especially since his British accent fails to hide that stoner-surfer tone in his voice. But Reeves is handsome and works as a sort of 90s Joe Dallesandro, as though Coppola were nodding a little to Andy Warhol's 1973 Dracula movie. Reeves is also fairly convincing whenever he's being defiled by Dracula's three lascivious vampire wives (one of whom is played by Monica Bellucci), who keep him a prisoner in Transylvania while the Count travels to London. Harker is such a dull, passive character that having a not-so-great actor portray him isn't such a bad idea. You don't worry that he will overshadow Anthony Hopkins or Gary Oldman, and he balances out their intensity with his banality. (I'm really not trying to insult Keanu Reeves. If you're reading this Keanu, I just want to thank you for The Night Before, a forgotten 80s teen classic.)

With Richard E. Grant as Dr. Seward, Cary Elwes as Athur, Billy Campbell as Quincy Morris, Tom Waits as Renfield, and Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula's vampire wives. 128 min. ★★★

The Godfather Part II

In the first Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) never believed he could be sucked into his father's way of doing things. And in The Godfather Part II (1974), he can't accept that he has. His corruption happens quickly but subtly. Under the guise of vengeance, of protecting family honor, Michael becomes a tragic fallen hero. Director Francis Ford Coppola and author Mario Puzo have created a sequel that fills in a lot of detail for us, simultaneously depicting Michael's rise as the new Don Corleone and the life of young Vito (played in flashback by Robert De Niro) as he leaves Sicily for America and gradually begins a life of crime.

There are moments of greatness in The Godfather Part II, and moments of great drama. Some of the images stay with you, and considering how much it attempts, much of this movie is a smashing success. The actors are exceedingly good: Pacino shines darkly. You can see the transformation he's undergone in his face, which was once innocent. Now it has a yellow patina of greed and an addiction to power. Diane Keaton gets some stronger material in this sequel as well. She's the good wife who's stuck by Michael for longer than she should have, who's looked the other way too many times now. De Niro is a solid Vito (it's no small feat filling the shoes of Marlon Brando), Talia Shire adds a new level of depth to Connie, Michael's sister, who was always getting roughed up by her sleazy husband Carlo in the first one. In Part II she's given herself over to money and things, at the expense of her family. But then she experiences something of a reversal of character, and she rises up to be the family's new matriarch. It's fascinating to watch all these performances and the depths to which the actors take them.

But it's lacking something. Many critics have proclaimed this an even better film than its predecessor. They praise it for deepening the material, for elevating it to a mythological status. It's just that in the process of demonstrating how far Michael has fallen, the movie too seems to lose its soul. Despite the fact that he had already been corrupted by the end of the first Godfather, that film left you with a sense of ambiguity. That perhaps things were going to be different. After all, Michael's involvement in murder had been about "vengeance" and "justice." But in the sequel, we start to see the consequences of that. It's beautiful and compelling yet bleak and depressing. And the powerful scenes are linked by many scenes that lumber along. (It's three hours and twenty minutes long, where the first was under three, a significant difference.) The tacked-on ending, a flashback of the days before WW2, when all the children were alive, but grown, feels too TV-movie-ish, like Coppola was already showing signs of the bad judgment that would taint his directing ever after. (It is nice to see James Caan reprising his role as Sonny, if ever so briefly. His absence is really felt--Sonny was such a presence, such an iconic character, and Caan turned him into a hot-headed bad boy who you liked because of his brashness and his macho love for his family.)

Part II deserves credit for what it does and what it is: a very good movie, and a compelling study of the soul-destroying power of an America that has built-in methods of abiding criminal activity. It also gets at the things which knit this family together, and the myriad forces which tear it apart. With Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Michael Gazzo, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Bruno Kirby, Morgana King, and Gianni Russo.

The Godfather

Even those who haven't seen The Godfather (1972) are aware of its status as one of the all-time great motion pictures of our time. Some critics refer to it as the Gone With the Wind of the 1970s. A good many people consider it the greatest film of all time, or at the very least, somewhere in the top five. It may be worthwhile to venture back into film history for a few moments, to help those movie-goers who aren't familiar with the movie and its significance, understand why there's still so much hoopla.

First off, movies about organized crime are about as old as the medium itself. Scarface (1932) is one noteworthy example from among the early talkies. Many of these old-school crime flicks concerned themselves with Prohibition, and the licentious pleasures associated with that era of government-mandated morality. These movies are one of the reasons film has always been a sort of prodigal medium: an art form for the common people, the mass audience, concerned with iniquities and people of dubious character. That's the appeal of movies, ultimately. They're not good for us. (The Novel, when it was in vogue, was also considered suspect, denounced as the art of the "common," and what's more, as a medium full of subversive potential. As they say, the movies are the 20th century's answer to the Novel. Both have received similar treatment. But we've become post-literate, and one wonders if the same will happen to movies in the 21st century, ushering in a post-cinematic public.)

The appeal of such entertaining movies was threatened with the production codes starting in the mid-30s, which set strict rules about what films could depict in terms of sex and violence, etc. The major studios mostly churned out sanitized material that was non-threatening and "safe" and "clean." Writers and directors who wanted to address adult subject matter had to be coy about it, or risk being censored by the studio heads. Film adaptations of novels and plays had to tone down racy material. For example, when Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was made into an MGM movie, the main character's homosexuality was removed from the story. Those familiar with the source material of such expurgated movie adaptations could read between the lines, sure, but it would seem that studios exercised a great deal of confidence in the ignorance of the movie-going public at large. Moreover, they perpetuated such ignorance by depicting life in a blissful state. It's like the men in The Stepford Wives (1975) who want to pretend their wives haven't been turned into automatons. Sure, there have always been exceptions to this rule, but mostly Hollywood was about keeping things superficial and fake.

Then came the 1960s. Films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) in France and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in America began to introduce a new kind of realism to the movie-going public, a violent realism that re-examined the values of movies and ignited a new passion for something different, something urgently real.

Along the heals of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch (1969) and other such movies came The Godfather. What people tend to see in The Godfather is a sort of tragic humanization of these old-time gangsters, once cartoonish, expendable, forgotten the moment the picture was finished. In this new vision of the American organized crime world, these characters are no longer divorced from their human context. They are fathers and sons and brothers and husbands, and they bleed real blood. They are corrupt, but also redeemable. They have scruples, as antithetical as that may sound, and their own moral code, which too seems incredulous, and yet they are cold-blooded killers. Ambiguity is always more interesting than morality depicted in black-and-white.

But enough about film context. You can read all that elsewhere, and it doesn't mean you have to like The Godfather a bit. The movie speaks for itself. (The context may deepen one's understanding, but it does not define it.) Marlon Brando plays the head of the Corleone family, based in New York (it starts in 1945, just after the war has ended), who's competing with several other crime families. A chain of events, beginning with Don Corleone's rejection of a narcotics operation in conjunction with the other families, sets up his youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino) to take over the family business, neither a vocation nor a lifestyle he wanted. He's the war hero, the "pure" son, untainted by the blood of organized crime. (They were going to try and land him a political career so he could be "untainted" there too.) It's inevitable of course that Michael is sucked into the world he thought he was too principled to embrace.

Director Francis Ford Coppola turns this gangster picture into a tragic masterpiece. He is helped by Mario Puzo, on whose novel this was based, and with whom he wrote the screenplay. The iconic music is by Nino Rota. The supporting cast includes James Caan as Sonny, Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, Richard Castellano as Clemenza, Diane Keaton as Kay, Michael's wife, Talia Shire as Connie, John Cazale as Fredo. Also starring Abe Vigoda, Al Littieri, Gianni Russo, Sterling Hayden, Lenny Montana, Richard Conte, Al Martino, John Marley, Alex Rocco, and Morgana King. Followed by two sequels. (The only criticism I can give of The Godfather is that it spawned a lot of inferior imitations that we have had to sit through for the last 40 years.)