Count Dracula (BBC)

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Film Description

Regarded as one of the best adaptations of the classic Bram Stoker tale, the BBC's Count Dracula benefits from a critically-acclaimed performance from Louis Jourdan as the title character. Frank Finlay as Van Helsing, Susan Penhaligon as Lucy Westenra and Bosco Hogan as Jonathan Harker round out the cast. A cult classic from the seventies, the film faithfully recreates Stoker's characters and prose.

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Review by Tom Darragh on 11th September 2007

Without a doubt, Philip Saville's BBC production of "Count Dracula" is the most faithful screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's master work. Beautiful composed and photographed, Louis Jourdan's Dracula is the best rendition of the Stoker character ever. Although shot in 1977, it beats hands down the Christoper Lee take on the supreme Vampire of them all.And it certainly outshines, in every conceivable way, Coppola's grotesque impertinence in calling his later dealing with the story as "Bram Stoker's Dracula".
The latter,in every way imaginable, while beautifully set, costumed and photographed, was the worst mishmash of the Stoker novel ever to shame the celluloid on which it was expended: botched story line, pointless sex squences that detracted by the foot from what could - and should! - have been the definitive version. Even the Hammer Lee version could boast an almost, barely almost, adherence to the orginal plot had its share of shock moments, but even this played around needlessly with charactrisation and storyline moments. Saville's version IS the definitive version of the classic novel, with a superb lead in Jourdan, a wonderful Mina and Lucy and a Van Helsing in Frank Finlay's magnificent performance that not one falls into the cinema versions that attempted to "spice" a mixture that was already perfectly formed.
Any true fan of the horror movie, or indeed faitful renditions of a great classic MUST opt of this two-part BBC production. As the saying goes, they don't (and didn't!) make movies like this any more!
Yet how wonderful to see it in a sparkling print and truly ravishing colour that shows great movies never die, even though they might have been aimed at smaller screens than are commonplace tody.

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