Count Dracula (1970) – In the middle of his two-decade run as Dracula for Hammer Films, Christopher Lee turned around and made a Dracula movie with Jess Franco. Way to fight the typecasting, Chris! You can tell it’s not a Hammer flick, though; Dracula has a mustache! (As any self-respecting 19th-century Eastern European nobleman would have.) That facial hair, and the first twenty minutes, promise that the movie is going to be a faithful adaptation of the novel; however, when the entire Demeter sequence is skipped over (my favorite part of the novel), it all goes downhill. Part of the problem is that, having spent about half an hour on the “Harker in Transylvania” part, everything else has to be… I don’t want to say “rushed,” because the pacing is sepulchral, but maybe… truncated?
One usually doesn’t think of the word “reserved” when one thinks of Jess Franco, but all of the main performances — Lee, Herbert Lom as Van Helsing, and even Klaus Kinski as Renfield — are very stolid and internalized. (Franco even had some off-screen screaming dubbed in after the fact for Renfield, which meshes poorly with Kinski’s practically ethereal performance.)
But if you’ve been saying, “I just don’t see enough unconvincing day-for-night scenes in my normal viewing diet,” have I got the movie for you!
Air Force One (1997) – It’s refreshing to watch a movie about a U.S President who isn’t hated by half the country — heck, you can’t even tell what party he is! Both tough on terrorism and compassionate? Check! Speaks a smattering of Russian without being accused of being an asset? Check!
And such an enlightened viewpoint on Russians, too: Only the bad ones are bad! The good ones are less-bad! And as usual, the person you really have to watch out for is whoever’s being played by Xander Berkeley!
Three Fugitives (1989) – A heartwarming tale of armed robbery, kidnapping, childhood trauma, and veterinary malpractice. Nick Nolte is the career bank robber who, on parole, is determined to go straight; Martin Short is the desperate single parent who tries to rob a bank to pay for special school for his withdrawn daughter, and ends up taking Nolte as his “hostage.” Not immortal cinema, but it’s fun.
I looked up the six-year-old girl who played the traumatized, almost autistic daughter — I was taken by how much screen presence she had, despite playing most of her scenes silent and stone-faced. Turns out she only appeared in this movie, and two television episodes in the next year. Sic transit.
Abandoned movies: Aelita, Death in the Garden.