Your Daily Dracula – Peter Cushing as MacGregor, Tendre Dracula (1974)
This is such an odd item that it’s a shame it’s not better; its arrival in an optimal transfer on BluRay at least means that after circulating in hideous transfers on various forms of bootleg it now looks beautiful. A French homage to an English gothic tradition which is much appreciated in France but very seldom attempted, it gives Peter Cushing the sort of self-aware showcase Karloff has in Targets, Price in Madhouse and Lee in Dracula and Son. Christopher Lee – more often found taking trips to Europe for oddities – may have been offered it first. It would perhaps have made more sense with his stern, Draculoid presence: the premise is that a horror star wants to quit the genre to make romantic films, which doesn’t quite fit Cushing’s kindly image, which was already tender enough even in his horror roles.
MacGregor, last of the great horror stars, has decreed he will pull out of a long-running horror series and wants to make only romantic dramas. In his sixties, Cushing was hardly likely to be on the same casting lists in 1974 as, say, Ryan O’Neal or Robby Benson – then again, MacGregor is a) mad and b) perhaps a real vampire. A crass studio head (Julien Guiomar) sends two scriptwriters – melancholy Russian ex-make-up man Boris (Stephen Shandor) and gawky young Alfred (Vernard Menez) — to MacGregor’s island castle (a splendid location) to persuade him to sign up for their romance series, which the studio sneakily plans to turn into a horror show after he joins the casr. Along the way, the pair are provided with ‘erotic fantasy girls’ Marie (Miou-Miou) and Madeleine (Nathalie Courval), a development which is pretty much par for French cinema c 1974 but liable to get groans these days. After a messy car crash – have they survived? – the visitors to the castle are met by MacGregor’s sometimes mad wife Heloise (Alida Valli) and her mute butler ex-husband Abelard (Percival Russel), who unmanned himself with a mistimed axe-stroke.
The castle shenanigans are sometimes mildly erotic, sometimes absurd and sometimes decidedly nasty (Valli tortures Menez by writing her name on his leg with a knifepoint) but rarely very funny and certainly don’t add up to a plot. There’s a lot of talk about horror and romance but few conclusions are reached, and we even get a few singspiel numbers for the girls. The producer and a crew turn up in ghost sheets to film things, and decide that porno is the future (which delights Boris since all that exposed skin needs make-up and he can go back to his old job). It ends with the witchy Valli apparently destroying the world to make a new one for MacGregor, with the Earth disappearing from under the castle in a visual which is a very throwaway stab at Terry Gilliam-look animation. However, it has splendid, imaginative art direction – walls decorated with white masks, a dining room dominated by huge sculptures, a staircase (a real location?) which is a dead ringer for the centrepiece of Tod Browning’s Castle Dracula.
The whole thing is a series of non sequiturs, which are occasionally striking: Miou-Miou and Courval share an oddly sexy dream of being stroked by anonymous hands, Miou-Miou is cut in half so her legs and torso go their separate ways. Cushing, in what may be his last full-on star vehicle, is unusually all over the place. His familiar urbane menace is leavened with touching melancholy charm (a waltz with Valli is lovely) and ill-judged hysteria; he even has mildly kinky scenes, spanking Miou-Miou and sharing the screen with naked girls. He gets to dress as a Lugosi-look vampire and do a Scots accent in a flashback where he plays the actor’s gravedigger father who tried to persuade him not to become an actor. Jean Rochefort dubs Cushing in the French version, but Cushing and Valli – and some not-that-great day players – are heard on the English language track.
Discussion
No comments yet.