Euphoria #31: “STRRRRIKE!”

 

Film student Stuart Condy hails from the same sleepy hamlet that birthed Great Scots Michael Caton-Jones and Nicol Williamson — say its name with a flinty pride: BROXBURN. For our ongoing series of happy-making moments, he has recommended this sequence from Roman Polanski’s 1967 curate’s egg THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS.

Last night I revisited THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and was presented with the perfect nomination. It’s not the dance scene, although that also gives a glow, but the scene where Professor Abronsius and the ever faithful Alfred evade the crypt keeper, scale the rooftops and climb in the small window at the back, with the intention of taking out Count Von Krolock and his son. … The great moment is the way Abronsius says “STRRRRIKE” when Alfred has eventually got the lids of the coffins and the stake in his hand………. Love it to bits.

There’s Jack MacGowran and Little Roman’s cartoon-expressionist performances, and the humour of thin men in tight trousers tiptoeing over battlements (something it should be compulsory to include in ALL FILMS), and an overall sense of the picturesque and folkloric that has nothing to do with comedy but is rather stunning and mysterious.

I have a history with this one. When I saw it as a kid, in a curious way it made me more aware of the film director, because Polanski was IN it. I’d seen lots and lots of Chaplin at this point, but Polanski was more famous as a director than as an actor, plus the Radio Times made special mention of him (he’s the film’s only major sales point). So I may have come for the vampires but I stayed for Polanski, whom I knew I’d heard of SOMEHOW.

A bit of research afterwards gave me the whole shocking story. But in the meantime I’d really enjoyed the film. I’ve liked it less and less since that first screening (even though it was a pan-and-scan, with the alternative title, DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES, carelessly stitched into the beautiful opening credits). The plot seriously lacks any sense of progress (Professor Abronsius is ALWAYS getting stuck, or trapped, or frozen stiff) and Polanski the director is possessed of some kind of anti-comic-timing. It’s rather sweet that he’s continued to try and make comedies, out of sheer enthusiasm for the form… I bet that’s the first time the word “sweet” has been used to describe any atribute of Polanski in print. But he’s clearly a fan — check out the references to Chaplin’s THE GOLD RUSH in both REPULSION and PIRATES (where the “eating a shoe” moment is recreated with a dead rat — very Polanski).

But Roman did succeed one time, I think. BITTER MOON may not have been a critical or box-office hit, and it may look like an ugly failure as a sexual melodrama, but viewed as an evil comedy it suddenly takes on vigour and imagination. It’s extremely funny. Surely, it HAS to be deliberate. He just didn’t let anybody know what he was doing, which kind of solves the whole timing thing, since the movie just uses dramatic timing. Polanski utterly demolishes the erotic thriller before BASIC INSTINCT was even released.

Returning to 1967 – FEARLESS VAMP was photographed by the towering Douglas Slocombe, who remarked on Polanski’s very Eastern European love of folklore and fairy tales, seen strongly in this film and almost nowhere else in his oevre.

Tragically, the last I heard, Mr. Slocombe was blind, having suffered a detached retina when a jeep went over a bump shooting an INDIANA JONES movie, and a second some years later. But Robin Vidgeon, formerly Slocombe’s camera operator, said the old chap was still chipper in spite of everything.