Stuffy Nonsense

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DRACULA

Directed by John Badham

Screenplay by W.D. Richter

This is the expensive Dracula that the gang at Hammer films must have dreamed of making back in the '50s and '60s. The legend had fallen out of general favor back then, and only B-picture makers and their fans still cared about the ineffable Transylvanian count and the strange folkloristic ways of fighting off his baleful influence (garlic on the windowsills, stakes through the heart, that sort of nonsense). Like those old programmers, the new Dracula is shot in the high gothic-romantic tradition, lushly scored and terribly serious about itself and its subject matter. It is also, like the old Hammers, quite overt--if a trifle too discreetly so--in making the connection between Dracula's blood lust and other, more conventional forms of eroticism. This time round there is plenty of money to do a handsome production, to hire first-class actors and use sophisticated special effects (the stuffed bat on a wire was always the curse of the genre efforts).

Some of those old el cheapo pictures were, in the last analysis, more entertaining than this rather too impeccable film.

There was about the best of them a crazy energy--part libidinal, part desperately inventive, as their makers sought to keep belief alive despite the strictures of the budget. And mind, this leaves aside discussion of higher levels of creativity that have occasionally been placed in Dracula's service: the stylish camp of the 1977 Broadway production, from which this film has borrowed Frank Langella for the title role, only to tune him down; or the wonderful expressionistic grotesqueries of that marvelous silent, Nosferatu.

One reason Dracula remains forever undead is that no amount of cinematic miscalculation can entirely loosen his grip on our imaginations. Now he has proved that even an excess of good taste cannot entirely ground him. Not permitted to parody romantic menace as he was able to do on the stage, Langella shows himself capable of playing it straight and slightly melancholic. Kate Nelligan, as Lucy, the young woman who enthralls him and is herself enthralled, is superbly spirited. In the film's early scenes, she plays the part as a liberated lady, turn-of-the-century variety. Once Dracula has begun to work his will on her, she becomes a resourceful woman fighting boldly for her forbidden love. Laurence Olivier contributes another of his shrewd Germanic foxes to the proceedings as Van Helsing. Dracula's scholarly nemesis, though both he and Donald Pleasence.

Lucy's doctor father, occasionally look as if they would have liked to cut loose a little but were not allowed.

Even the work of the director. John Badham, has a slightly restive air, as if he would like to unleash some of the drive and sexual energy that marked his work in Saturday Night Fever. He is technical ly very competent: there is a smooth, pro fessional quality to every shot. But since the script and the entire design of the pro duction are aimed at stressing the roman tic at the expense of the passionate and obsessive elements in this tale, he gets to do only the odd clutching-hand scare shot and a few nicely staged chases. There is evidence-- a dinner Dracula gives Lucy that is lit by thousands of candles, for example--that he is capable of much stronger mood and atmosphere. But it is as if someone decreed that this was to be a Dracula for adults, forgetting that the sto ry has always been for adults regressing to adolescence, with its hopeless loves and wild fantasies. There is no point in retelling this tale if you are going to be stuffy about it- Richard

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