The Blood Is the Life, Part Three
For some reason, the 70's seemed to spur an interest in Dracula on a level that really hadn't been seen since the Universal era--Hammer's output notwithstanding.
Four years after Jack Palance raged against the rising of the light and disappeared as ashes on the wind, another TV version appeared. This time, the Count was portrayed by Louis Jourdan, a French actor best known for his roles as the romantic, urbane leading man in Gigi, Madame Bovary and Three Coins in the Fountain. While he certainly brought a note of elegance to Dracula, to say this really wasn't his kind of part is an understatement. The requisite undertone of menace is missing; and while Jourdan's Count is seductive, he simply isn't scary.
Born in Marseilles, Jourdan was a noted actor in French cinema prior to World War II. His refusal to participate in Nazi propaganda films rendered him unemployed, so he joined the French Resistance. His film career might have come to a screeching halt entirely had he not been persuaded to move to Hollywood in 1947. The quintessential French lover, he was still working in TV movies fifty years later.
Which brings us to the third actor to be firmly identified with the King of Vampires--the talented Frank Langella.
A native of New Jersey born in 1940, Langella as a teen used recordings by Sir John Gielgud to help him get rid of his Jersey accent. By then, he had already been bitten by the acting bug on his elementary school's stage. He studied at Syracuse University, graduating from the drama department at 19, then went to New York City to study under Elia Kazan at the Lincoln Repertory Theatre.
In 1977 Hamilton Deane and Jon L. Balderston revived the stage play based on Stoker's novel and tapped Langella for the title role. His performance won him two Tonys and the role in the theatrical version that changed forever the way the world looked at vampires.
Although the resemblances between this movie and the original story are essentially coincidental, Langella is a masterfully seductive, passionate antihero. Despite the trail of corpses he leaves behind as he travels from Transylvania to London, it is nearly impossible not to be as drawn to him as Mina Harker. Darkly intense, vibrating with hunger, Langella gives Dracula a depth and reality that overcomes the rather corny F/X and melodramatic overacting of most of his fellow performers. Even Lawrence Olivier seems committed to scenery chewing -- his Van Helsing is nearly as crazy as Renfield.
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