Hammer horror: perversely seasonal. DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS.
Roddy sure likes his vampire movies. He watched the Hammer DRACULA, DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, over three days, and found room for the Universal DRACULA with Bela Lugosi too.
Gotta love the way the theme music to DRACULA — better known as Swan Lake — warbles like a faulty gramophone.
And then they take care to explain all about vampires before we see any, and then cut ahead to Castle Drac to see the Count rising from his sepulchral slumber, along with his pet bugs and opussums. It’s all about clarity — establish that he’s a vampire, see? because if you don’t do that, the extreme reticence with which the film treats his blood-drinking makes him look like a sexual pervert. Dracula descends on Dwight Frye: fade to black. Upon a little waif in a dark street: fade to black. Frye creeps up on an unconscious woman: fade to black.
Ben Hecht wrote that Hollywood’s insistence on fading out for sexual interludes led him to imagine rampant intercourse whenever a film faded out for any reason whatever: the DA rogers the judge across his desk, the coach assaults his team, the chorus line fall upon, de-bag and ravish Warner Baxter. All is fade-out depravity.
At a not-too subconscious level, this erotic subtext is a big part of Roddy’s love of vampire movies.
“Oh, there’s the castle, ho ho!”
“Uh oh — David!”
“Where’s the female vampires, can’t even see them…”
Roddy keeps up a running commentary of non-sequiturs during most films, as well as baths, trips to the bathroom, and any other activity that doesn’t fully occupy his mouth muscles.
Love the track in on Lugosi during his first entrance, perversely accompanied by opossum squeaks. Reminds me of Deneuve and the cats in BELLE DE JOUR — the similarity is so striking that I suspect an influence. After all, Bunuel was just getting into movies when DRACULA came out.
“Oh, there he is!”
“You look busy writing there, David.”
Dracula: “I never drink…” and then the word “wine” is drowned out by Roddy, the teetotaler, declaring “Good man!”
“It’s only a bat, for God’s sake!”
“What’s happened there. What’s he doing? What’s he — uh oh!”
“They’re nice girls. Well, they seem friendly.”
When the asylum nurse calls Renfield a loony, “Loony, ho ho!”
“Do you think there’s such a thing as bats?”
Roddy, as usual, speculates on what he’d be like as a vampire: “I’d have to wear a black jacket, a red-black cloak, black shoes, and then I’d be like that Dracula.”
So if you happen to encounter a short, stout man, caped, black-jacketed and shod, naked from the waist down, do not be unduly alarmed.
