Yeah, I know, I just missed his 88th birthday, which was Thursday, but is there ever a bad time to talk about Christopher Lee? “Not from where I’m standing,” to quote a certain British agent in Lee’s The Man with the Golden Gun. Focusing on the films he made with Hammer and Mario Bava, as we have done here already, it’s easy to lose sight of the wonderful work he has done in other movies and television shows (some of which were otherwise not so wonderful), so we’ll attempt to rectify that oversight now. Since I’m a firm believer that Lee’s heyday in the 1960s and ’70s represented the Golden Age of cinema, this representative sampling will concentrate there, starting today with the ’60s. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his more recent collaborations with Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Alice in Wonderland), Peter Jackson (as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), and George Lucas (as Count Dooku in the Star Wars CGI-fest prequels Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith).
La Vergine di Norimberga (The Virgin of Nuremberg, aka Horror Castle, The Castle of Terror, Terror Castle; 1963): During the Italian Renaissance of horror films in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Lee followed in the footsteps of his transplanted countrywoman, Barbara Steele, and made films with both Bava (Ercole al Centro della Terra, La Frusta e il Corpo) and Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony M. Dawson). This one reunited Margheriti with the producer (Marco Vicario) and leading man (Georges Rivière) of his first film with Steele, La Danza Macabra; for good measure, Vicario also published the eponymous story by Frank Bogart upon which the film is based and supplied his wife, Rossana Podestà, as the leading lady. Here, Lee has a decidedly second-banana role—dubbed by another actor, as he was in his Bava films, alas—as the scarred and sinister-seeming family retainer in a German castle. The bride of the current occupant (Rivière), Podestà is tormented by dreams of his scarlet-clad ancestor, The Punisher, who tortured girls to death in the family dungeon. But it turns out that his deranged father, turned into a living skull by Nazi scientists for taking part in the plot to kill Hitler, sees himself as The Punisher, a plot twist aped in the inferior Il Boia Scarlatto. Shot in gorgeous color, the film features some gruesome effects.
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Lee made his American debut in the 1964 episode “The Sign of Satan,” adapted by Barré Lyndon from Robert Bloch’s story, and plays Karl Jorla, whose involvement with a Satanic cult takes his acting career down a most unusual path; the creepy black-and-white cinematography is positively Bava-worthy.
La Cripta e l’Incubo (The Crypt and the Nightmare, aka La Maldición de los Karnstein/La Maledizione dei Karnstein [The Curse of the Karnsteins], Crypt of Horror, Terror in the Crypt, The Crypt of the Vampire, The Vampire’s Crypt, Karnstein, Carmilla, Catharsis; 1964): This oft-retitled Spanish-Italian co-production is a restrained adaptation of J. Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” filmed previously and subsequently as Et Mourir de Plaisir (aka Blood and Roses) and The Vampire Lovers, respectively, although it also owes a lot to Barbara Steele’s genre debut in Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio (The Mask of the Demon, aka Black Sunday). That’s appropriate, as director “Thomas Miller” (Camillo Mastrocinque) went on to work with Babs in Un Angelo per Satana (An Angel for Satan), apparently his only other noteworthy genre credit, but it’s a shame he didn’t have her for this film, which somewhat makes up for her absence with a boatload of black-and-white Gothic atmosphere and, above all, the presence of Lee. Unlike many of his Italian efforts, it features his real voice, to boot.
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965): The first official Amicus film, after the wonderful City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel, also with Lee), written (badly) by co-founder Milton Subotsky and directed by studio mainstay Freddie Francis. Kicking off their successful series of anthology horror films, it gets better than it deserves from Peter Cushing as the titular fortune-teller and frequent co-star Lee as an acerbic art critic tormented by the hand he severs from artist Michael Gough. Donald Sutherland is a small-town doctor convinced his wife is a vampire, and Bernard Lee (“M” in the Bond films) appears in a silly story about a killer vine. One segment concerns a werewolf; another is shamelessly plagiarized from “Papa Benjamin,” a Cornell Woolrich story that was also adapted on the TV series Thriller.
The Face of Fu Manchu (1965): First and best—which isn’t saying much—of Lee’s five similarly titled (The [fill in the blank] of Fu Manchu) appearances as Sax Rohmer’s evil genius, with Nigel Green letter-perfect as nemesis Nayland Smith and old Hammer hand Don Sharp directing. Brides followed, with Sharp but sadly without Green, who was replaced by Douglas Wilmer in both that and Jeremy Summers’s Vengeance. But worse was yet to come, in the form of director Jesus (aka Jess) Franco and Richard Greene as Smith, with the two final entries, Blood and Castle. Other than Lee, the only constants in this precipitously declining quintet were writer-producer Harry Alan Towers and Tsai Chin as Fu’s twisted daughter, Lin Tang.
Circus of Fear (aka Psycho-Circus; 1966): The hooded Lee was, as I recall, a knife-throwing red herring in this big-top caper from Towers, based on an Edgar Wallace novel and directed by John Llewellyn Moxey (City of the Dead). Klaus Kinski, who appeared in innumerable German krimis (crime films) based on Wallace’s work, and Leo Genn co-star.
Theatre of Death (aka The Blood Fiend, The Female Fiend; 1967): I have only the vaguest memories of this contemporary thriller with Lee playing the head of an ill-fated Grand Guignol-type theater. Director Samuel Gallu is suitably obscure; Julian Glover also appears.
Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (The Snake Pit and the Pendulum, aka The Blood Demon, The Snake Pit, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, The Torture Room; 1967): This German mishmash was allegedly inspired by Poe, with Lee as the reincarnated and vengeful Count Regula (who presumably ate all his prunes), reassembled after being drawn and quartered for killing twelve virgins—what a waste!—in his torture chamber; erstwhile Tarzan Lex Barker plays the hero. Director Harald Reinl was then married to leading lady Karin Dor (who, like Tsai Chin, also appeared in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice).
The Oblong Box (1969): An okay AIP film with an interesting history, this is another alleged Poe adaptation, which supposedly has more to do with Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast.” It was to have been the next film by writer-producer-director Lawrence Huntington, who dropped dead leaving the hilariously awful The Vulture as his last effort. Meanwhile, Michael Reeves, fresh from Witchfinder General, was slated to direct Richard Matheson’s script for De Sade with Gordon Hessler, an old friend of Louis M. “Deke” Heyward (AIP’s so-called “Third Man,” who headed their European operations), producing. When Heyward was asked to produce that film personally—with disastrous results—and Reeves bowed out due to personal problems, he and Hessler were reassigned to this project, with Huntington’s script substantially rewritten by AIP and Hammer scribe Christopher Wicking (Cry of the Banshee). But before it could even go before the cameras, Reeves bowed out once again and was soon dead of a drug overdose, forcing Hessler to tackle the direction as well. The film features Vincent Price as a nobleman who keeps his insane and disfigured brother, the victim of a voodoo curse, locked up in an upstairs room. It also marked the first teaming of Price with fellow horror legend Lee, although their sole scene together consists of Price finding Lee dying of a throat slit by the brother, so the dramatic possibilities were limited…
To be concluded.
Looking forward to part two.
Thanks very much. Are you by any chance the wife of the late Harry Alan Towers? I think Count Dracula, despite its need for a bigger budget, is terribly underrated.