Jon Spira (Elstree 1976) takes on a big subject here – and does remarkable justice to the long life, multiple on-screen and apparent career deaths (and, very movingly, his actual demise) and evolving legend of Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015). In an audacious conceit, the film is narrated by Lee himself – with his words voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, ascribed to a Gerry Anderson-type puppet avatar – with striking animated biographical inserts, including a stretch of Tolkienery crafted by Dave McKean.
It’s probably mandatory to include John Landis and Joe Dante among the talking heads – they both worked with Lee (The Stupids, Gremlins 2) and are scholars enough to know a lot about his career – and we get valuable input from Peter Jackson (instrumental in Lee’s late-career burst of high profile franchise activity) and Paul Maslansky (more on Castle of the Living Dead than Police Academy Mission to Moscow) plus personal takes from Lee’s actress niece Harriet Walter and musical collaborator son-in-law Juan Rodriguez. A spine of the film is commentary from Lee’s official biographer Jonathan Rigby, who is not above gently chiding his subject or pointing out why Lee’s dissatisfaction with his image led him into odd career decisions and the cultivation of an air of grumpiness which possibly alienated his fans and potential fans. Typical is a telling clip of a laudatory interview given outside Buckingham Palace on the occasion of his knighthood in 2009 – at a highpoint of his life, he turns peppery when an interviewer calls him ‘king of horror’ and insists he hasn’t made a horror film for thirty-four years (though he was in Tale of the Mummy in 1998 – just to name one of several dozen possibles).
The film covers Lee’s family background, school days, slightly shadowy war and beginnings in the Rank charm school, 1950s bit roles, then his ‘graveyard period’ as a horror icon for Hammer and others, a brief tax exile in Switzerland and a flurry of European odd credits, and pivot in the 1970s away from cheapish British horror films (though that description even fits his favourite credit, The Wicker Man) to smaller roles (or shorter parts, as Rigby says) in bigger, more international films which, paradoxically, hastened his slippage into a wilderness years period before filmmakers who grew up on his work (Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Jackson) came calling. Skipped over is his turn in Richard Lester’s Musketeers films, which is pretty much on a level with his showing in two out of three of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars prequel trilogies. Rigby cannily notes that Lee’s breakouts were often double-edged … yes, he was a Bond villain, but in one of the naffer Bond films … it may have been much more expensive nonsense, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the world who revisits Lee’s work in Airport ’77 more often than, say, The Satanic Rites of Dracula … and he wasn’t in Tim Burton’s or Martin Scorsese’s want-to-work-with lists because of A Tale of Two Cities. George Lucas even cast him as a cape-wearing Count whose name begins with a D in Star Wars – certainly not wanting to evoke his role as the founder of Pakistan in Jinnah (a career highlight compromised by the odd decision to cast a white British actor in the role – and in a film made because a certain government looked at Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and thought they ought to have one of those too).
This constant sense of not living up to his own expectations makes Lee a human, flawed, rather sweet character (as his family attest). He knew the shadow he cast, but consistently underestimated how much affection was felt for him. Spira makes him unabashedly the hero of his own story, more in the mode of the role he wanted but never played (why Terry Gilliam didn’t call him up when he lost his first Don Quixote is a mystery I’ll never fathom) than the one for which he was lastingly famous. It’s sparing in its use of clips, though we get flashes of Lee’s charisma and magnetic personality within the range his height and breeding defined for him. He was, for obvious reasons, not often cast as ordinary people – but he was in the frame for Rasputin.
I’ve recently rewatched The Scars of Dracula – to my mind, Hammer’s worst film – again, but I have a BluRay of Jinnah – which I’ve never seen – still in its shrinkwrap. Christopher Lee would give me a hard stare for that.