Speak of the filmic Dracula of the Fifties and only one name usually springs from the classic horror film fan's lips--Christopher Lee. And, indeed, Lee truly revitalized and revived the film role of the Immortal Count for generations of filmgoers. But there was another Dracula haunting theaters in the Fifties, one whose name usually springs from no one's lips, but should...Francis Lederer. Surprised? You won't be after you read about what we like to call....
By DON MANKOWSKI Lugosi , Lee and Langella: the three great Draculas. Or, were they? In 1977, when Frank Langella was earning raves as Dracula on Broadway, it was fashionable for pop critics to speak of him as completing that alliterative unholy trinity. Still, I had to wonder if they hadn’t overlooked the best of the lot: Lederer. I shall explain.
As we all know, Universal Pictures first brought Dracula to the screen in authorized form with Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal in the Tod Browning film of 1931. The studio used the character, or variations on the character, in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s. He was last seen in 1948’s Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein. There followed a decade-long Dracula drought. Universal had no use for the thirsty one, and other studios weren’t permitted to exploit the property. However, the Bram Stoker novel would soon be passing into the public domain internationally in 1962, the 50th anniversary of the author’s death. The U.S. copyright on the 1897 book had in fact expired in 1953. A certain British studio hammered (ahem!) out a deal with Universal for their rights to the material, and thus did Hammer Films mount their version of Dracula in 1958. It was distributed by Universal in the ‘States as Horror Of Dracula, and the rest, as they say, is history. Christopher Lee became the definitive Dracula for a generation.
Still, a couple of minor studios slipped in under the radar with variations upon the Dracula theme if not exactly adaptations of the original: American International Pictures with Blood Of Dracula in 1957, and Gramercy Films with The Return of Dracula the following year. The former was a (back then) modern, swingin’ teenage monster flick. What about that other Dracula film of 1958? Was it destined to remain forever in a temporal netherworld between the Universals and the Val Lewtons of the past and the Hammers and gore cinema of the future? Let’s examine it. Balkan artist Bellac Gordal sets out for America, but encounters a dark stranger in his train compartment. Looking into the man’s eyes, Gordal sees terror. He is slain. The killer assumes the artist’s identity, and completes the long journey by sea and again by rail.
In her small California town, gentle widow Cora Mayberry awaits the coming of the cousin whom she hasn’t seen since childhood, unaware that the man known to them as Bellac is an imposter, and moreover, a vampire. He might even be Count Dracula himself, hence The Return of Dracula. An official from the old country is on the vampire’s trail. The fiend’s scheme is to ingratiate himself with his new family long enough to elude or destroy his latest adversaries, and thus enable him to prey upon the new community at will. Ultimately, justice (personified by European secret agent Meyerman) and religion (personified by the Reverend Dr. Whitfield) fail to contain the vampire. Alas, these separate representatives of church and state don’t add up to one Van Helsing. Instead, Bellac/Dracula is undone by a fatal mistake. He has underestimated the courage and virtue of his ultimate conquest, Cora’s daughter Rachel.
Pat Fielder’s screenplay suggests the Stoker original, with the vampire from the old world invading the new. However, here it’s the newer part of the new world, the American left coast. Many critics have pointed out that the plot is the same as that of the 1943 Alfred Hitchcock film, Shadow Of A Doubt . . . only with vampires! The menace of spies and other villains from behind the Iron Curtain was a common theme in the 1950s. The Soviet Union had a firm grip on Czechoslovakia and had only just repressed rebellions in Poland and Hungary. Remember, not only does iron keep the voice of freedom out, it keeps ancient demons in. But, some escape. Here is subversive infiltration of a very extreme sort. The ill-fated Gordal spoke of going to America for the sake of free expression, but ended up donating his passage, his passport, his very identity to further the infernal incursion of old world horror. Unfortunately, the imposter’s very foreignness is cause for the victimized family to overlook his peculiar (i.e., un-American) behavior for too long. Afraid of Communists hiding under your bed? Try vampires.
Craggy-featured and curly-haired, Francis Lederer is terrific in the Dracula role. His lilting Czech accent suggests central Europe, but is in no way a Lugosi impression. Clad in a dark, old-fashioned suit and a big hat, he strides with confidence and determination, truly the man who rules the night. He can’t very well wear a cape and still blend in, but the costuming department drapes a massive overcoat about his shoulders to suggest such. Often Lederer’s lean face holds frozen while his dark eyes, hypnotic or furtive as required, emote. The actor exudes continental charm, but with cold cunning and restrained demonic fury just beneath the surface. Though he isn’t physically violent, his bearing suggests that he’d be very dangerous hand-to-hand, and that’s quite enough. Except for a token flap in the film’s finale, he doesn’t change himself into a bat, and we get the feeling that he rarely needs to do so. He manages somehow to sound gracious and threatening at the same time, brings sincerity to overwritten speeches such as "There is only one reality Rachel, and that is death. I bring you death, a living death…I bring you the darkness of centuries past and centuries to come. Eternal life…and eternal death."
It appears that Lederer, an actor of the "legitimate" stage, was practically duped into taking the role. He thought it was to be a parody of a horror story, then found, to his real horror, that he had to play it straight. The idea of the king of vampires holed up in an abandoned mine (and subsisting off the blood of a common cat) must have stayed with him: he looked back upon it glumly for the rest of his life. And what a life it was. Lederer’s (1899-2000) touched three centuries and many people. He’s notable in the Dr. Moreau-type role in Terror Is A Man (1959), and even played Count Dracula in "The Devil Is Not Mocked," a wry vignette within a 1970 episode of the Night Gallery TV series. Still, for the most part, he shunned the spotlight and concerned himself with directing and teaching theatre in his later years. The film is clearly low budget, with only token special effects. For example, Bellac/Dracula is matted into a scene of Rachel looking into a mirror and seeing only her own reflection. Here a good idea is betrayed by mediocre technical work. (Fortuitously, it looks okay on small screens.) Certainly, better props could have been provided. The necklace cross that Jenny and later Tim use to ward off Bellac is so tiny that it makes the scene a bit ridiculous.
A cemetery that is supposed to be in central Europe looks the same as its California counterpart, far too manicured. A little more care in the lighting, or a touch of fog would have helped immeasurably. The bit players in the scene are disappointingly western. Why not use some Slavic dialogue and subtitles? Still, the film has quite a few things in its favor. It’s true that there isn’t much star power in the cast. Good grief, the most famous participant in the picture is doubtlessly Mel Allen, who is seen briefly as the train depot’s baggage clerk. Allen is renowned in the sports world as the Voice of the Yankees from 1939 through 1964. He loved his job, his team and his listeners and conveyed it through the radio microphone so well that in 1978, he and Red Barber were the first broadcasters to be listed on a special scroll in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But, I digress.
However, the real actors in the film acquit themselves well, and all are quite believable. Even little Mickey’s grief over his slain cat rings true. Aunt Cora, as played by Greta Granstedt is not very sharp, but genuinely concerned for everyone. Her character is supposed to be an immigrant, and while an affected accent would have been the easy way out, the actress is careful to offhandedly show respect for some old world traditions, such as donning a veil for the trip to the train station, and addressing the man as "Cousin Bellac," insistent upon adding the familial honorific to his name. Aspiring artist Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) and her boyfriend Tim (Ray Stricklyn) joust and bicker all the time, but suggest genuine affection for one another. Why does the immortal vampire have designs on the rather plain girl? Everyone indicates that there’s something saintly about Rachel, and the chance to corrupt such angelic goodness may be too much for the fiend to resist. You may recognize Gage Clark from The Bad Seed (1956), as the well intentioned but ineffectual Reverend Dr. Whitfield. The vampire’s religious adversary could have just as easily been a Catholic priest, but I believe that the Protestant association was used to accentuate that gulf between the old-world and new cultures. This man is ill-equipped as an exorcist.
The devil, they say, is in the details. Director Paul Landres (1912-2001), whose résumé is otherwise heavy with Westerns, peppers the simple plot with diabolical details. Dramatic as resurrection may be, vampire films usually have to cut away or employ special effects to avoid the incongruity of the undead one crouching, squatting, scrambling and perhaps banging his knee. When you think about it, coffins are engineered to be entered passively and exited … well, never. But Landres took up the challenge. Thus does Lederer demonstrate how one can rise gracefully and methodically from ones casket. First, he sits up, abruptly, but in a less extreme version of the immortal Nosferatu (1922) catapult. Next, he switches on his sensors, tuning into the world around him while adrift in his afterlife lifeboat. The camera stays close on him, so as to betray no gangling limbs as he gathers himself up to his full height. Again, he reads the ćther, as if reluctant to depart the safety of his private space capsule for the harsh environment out there.
Ready at last, he purposefully steps out of the box and into our world. Surrounded by smoke and photographed with double-cranked camera stops that impart unnatural qualities to his movement, he pulls off the trick quite nicely. The vampire’s first local victim is Jenny, a young blind woman, who nevertheless can see him as he claims her. Brrr! It’s a scene of scary beauty when Bellac beckons her back from the grave. She awakens within her mist-filled coffin as his voice explains, "Yes, it hurts to breathe again." The vampire’s power transforms her into a savage white wolf that eliminates Bryant, an immigration detective who has intruded upon the case. (It seems that a targeted victim also hears the vampire’s otherwise inaudible voice.) Jenny is a plain girl, hardly the exotic vampiress we’ve come to expect. Later, in the predawn, the vampire hunters camp out by her tomb awaiting her return. She flits (no other word will do) past the monuments and across the lawn, in a white gown that subtly suggests seraph wings. It’s a truly dissonant, disturbing image, featuring unspeakable evil done up in whiteness, a contrast that dates back to Vampyr (1932).
I used to think that the scene would have played better in slow motion with misty vapors, but I’m no longer sure of that--its clarity and immediacy is striking. (In this film’s version of vampire lore, stakings must take place at the exact moment of sunrise.) Actress Virginia Vincent was later a part of Jack Webb’s unique repertory company, playing numerous roles on the Dragnet TV series. Having been called away from a Halloween party at the church, Rachel is costumed as a fairy princess when the vampire tells her, "Only this clumsy flesh stands between you and me. Eternity awaits you." The girl is able to fight off his hypnotic power just long enough to galvanize her boyfriend Tim into action. True, Bellac/Dracula falls to his death into an open pit at the old mine, much like your everyday doofus, but a powerful touch has him briefly incapacitated with sympathetic chest pains when his protégé is staked, rendering his actual demise mere icing. His (literal) downfall is triggered by his abuse and abandonment of Jenny. ("Let them find her -- she has fulfilled her purpose.") The finish is unusually gory for its time, with Bellac wrestling with a big wooden splinter projecting from his bloodied shirtfront before he gives up the ghost and fades to a skeleton.
There are a couple of musical cues from Star Trek, the original television series that just might survive to the 23rd century. One is, of course, Alexander Courage’s ten-note fanfare that heralds the U.S.S. Enterprise. The other is the barbaric battle anthem that underscores Mister Spock’s enforced duel with his captain and friend when called back to his home planet in "Amok Time." It’s been spoofed in The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Cable Guy, and it’s the work of Gerald Fried. Fried (born 1928) scored several of Stanley Kubrick’s early films, including Paths Of Glory. His scores are too often the only good things about their films (witness Curse Of The Faceless Man or Cabinet Of Caligari). Fried’s music for The Return of Dracula, is relentlessly rude to our senses, with sassy brass, piercing flutes, booming tubas, and groaning bass strings. He never lets us forget that there’s an alien element in the bucolic setting. The composer is very fond of the centuries-old Roman Catholic requiem hymn Dies Irae, and employs variations upon it in his themes for this film and also for The Vampire (1957) and I Bury the Living (1959). It’s very tense and gloomy stuff, just what you’d expect from Judgment Day. The music serves to infuse the narrative with a furious pace, however mundane the visuals.
For television, The Return of Dracula was often retitled The Curse of Dracula, perhaps because the film doesn’t suggest any continuity with Lugosi’s, Chaney’s or Carradine’s Dracula. The man posing as Bellac is not necessarily the original Dracula: he may be just an unusually ambitious old-country vampire. It could be worse: I’m told that the film picked up the absurd title The Fantastic Disappearing Man for its British play dates due to the Dracula-copyright issue. Producers Arthur Gardner and Jules Levy collaborated with writer Pat Fielder on a couple of other low-key films that ultimately rank with the best of 1950s horror and science fiction: The Vampire (also directed by Landres and scored by Fried) and The Monster That Challenged The World. With a need to indicate a physician’s residence, Return’s film editor swiped from The Vampire (1957) a few frames of a shingle that identifies a Paul Beecher, M.D. Thus does the lead character in that film bestow his name upon a bit player here!
These films had staying power. About 1970, I managed to see them in a theatrical re-release, on a triple bill at the old Clark Theatre in downtown Chicago. For several years there, the Clark eschewed first-run movies; instead, they screened older films and changed the program daily. This enabled me to see many films I’d missed from previous decades there, no small thing in those days before cable TV and home video. (You really had to love movies to go there. As the house was open around the clock, it was rumored that hordes of the big city’s vagrants went there to sleep, though the situation was surely exaggerated. I can’t imagine a worse program during which to catch some winks, given the crashing Gerald Fried music! The balcony was reserved for women and children, else none would dare to venture in, I suppose.) To put some life into the old black-and-whites, the new distributor presented them in green-tinted prints, an interesting technique that has been employed from time to time in the industry. It lends a false coloration to a film, wherein black areas are green, white areas mostly yellow, and gray and patterned areas bluish. However, it’s wrong for this film, the whiteness of which is an asset.
(Fact is, the original release used a few seconds of color to startling effect. When poor Jenny is staked to release her soul, there’s a close-up flash of red blood bubbling up, as a few feet of color film were inserted into the circulating black-and-white prints. This effect was absent from most television broadcasts, and of course not noticeable in the green-tinted version.) It was worthwhile to see the film in the presence of an audience, for it disclosed something: the film habitually teeters on a precipice. Bellac’s suavity, Cora’s fussiness, the Reverend’s blathering, Jenny’s moonlit flitter, the too-small cross and the too-big stake (a ghastly black obelisk fondled just a bit too much by the vampire hunter): all of these invoked some cackles from the viewers. However, just as swiftly, the film abruptly (and noisily) careened on, picking up its mad momentum, and sobriety was restored.
Terence Fisher’s Horror Of Dracula was justly popular and spawned many sequels, while Paul Landres’ less ambitious effort was largely forgotten. I’ve occasionally offered Fisher’s Dracula as the best horror film ever, at least in many respects. But the later California-based vampires, Count Yorga and Prince Mamuwalde (a.k.a. "Blacula"), owe much to Landres, Lederer, and company, I’d say. Their films stand out when compared to later Hammer efforts. (Don Mankowski is an engineer for a NASA contractor in central Florida. His literary work is documented here.) Thanks, Don. Yes, Return Of Dracula is much more than the sum of its parts and it remains a capable little chiller from the Fifties, with a truly engrossing portrait of the undead Count from the hugely talented Francis Lederer. The producers also deserve credit for creating such a high quality result from what had to be a paltry budget. Both the film and its star deserve to be better remembered by classic horror fans. This is another film worth both a first and a second look. Article copyright © Don Mankowski |
