Man and Saruman, Part II

Our representative sampling of non-Hammer movies by recent birthday boy Christopher Lee (May 27) concludes with a look at his work in the ’70s, plus one token ’80s offering.

El Processo de las Brujas (The Trial of the Witches, aka El Juez Sangriento [The Bloody Judge], Il Trono di Fuoco, Der Hexentoeter von Blackmoor [The Witch Killer of Blackmoor], Night of the Blood Monster, Throne of the Blood Monster; 1970): Nasty knockoff of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General from director Jesus (aka Jess) Franco and writer-producer Harry Alan Towers, with Lee in the semi-historical role of Judge Jeffreys. Highly exploitative in scenes not involving Lee, including one in which the heroine is compelled to lick blood off the naked body of a dead girl (which pretty well speaks for itself, I presume).

El Conde Dracula (Count Dracula [1970]): This is the underrated, if undeniably shabby, Spanish version from Franco and Towers. Trying to play the role more faithfully than the long-running Hammer series frequently allowed him to do, Lee embodied Bram Stoker’s conception of an aging Count who grows younger as he feeds, and wisely insisted on using some of Stoker’s dialogue. The supporting cast includes Herbert Lom as Van Helsing, Klaus Kinski as an excellent Renfield, and Paul (Nightmare Castle) Müller as Dr. Seward. Until Bram Stoker’s Dracula came along, this was easily the most faithful adaptation, with a memorable score by Ennio Morricone’s sometime conductor, Bruno Nicolai. Leading lady Maria Rohm was also married to Towers from 1964 until his death in 2009, God bless her.

The House That Dripped Blood (1971): Of the three Amicus anthology films adapted by Robert Bloch from his own stories (the others were Torture Garden and Asylum), this is the only one to star Lee as well as Peter Cushing. (According to the DVD audio commentary with director Peter Duffell, Lee soon priced himself out of Amicus’s range, although Cushing continued working with them until the end.) “Method for Murder” stars Denholm Elliott as an author convinced his literary strangler has come to life; “Waxworks,” previously filmed as an episode of Thriller, stars Cushing and Joss Ackland (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) as romantic rivals captivated by a statue of Salome; “Sweets to the Sweet” (sometimes erroneously attributed to Richard Matheson) features Lee as a cold, distant father whose daughter delves into voodoo; and “The Cloak” has sometime Dr. Who Jon Pertwee as an actor whose search for realism in his low-budget horror films has unexpected results; Ingrid Pitt (The Vampire Lovers) co-stars.

I, Monster (1971): A depressing misfire, this Amicus adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suffers from producer Milton Subotsky’s lame script—which inexplicably changes the eponymous names but not those of the supporting characters—and even worse insistence on having it shot in a new 3-D process that required the camera and/or actors to be in motion at all times. It reportedly gave the people who watched the rushes splitting headaches, and ended up as such a fiasco that much of the footage was scrapped, resulting in an abnormally short running time. This would be a blessing were it not for the fact that it stars Lee (giving his all despite the film’s failings, and adding to his roster of classic movie monsters) and Cushing.

Nothing but the Night (aka The Resurrection Syndicate, The Devil’s Undead; 1973): I barely remember this as a sad reunion for Lee and Cushing in a tale of evildoers cloning kids, or something like that. Latter-day Hammer flash in the pan Peter Sasdy directed, and it was doubly depressing as the first and last solo effort from Lee’s Charlemagne Productions (although they apparently co-produced his Hammer swan song, To the Devil a Daughter).

The Three Musketeers (aka The Queen’s Diamonds, 1973): In light of his subsequent hard-drinking decline and death, it’s as difficult to believe that Oliver Reed was once considered enough of a star to be top-billed in this adaptation of the Dumas classic as it is nice to be reminded of what he was once able and allowed to do. The purist in me wishes this didn’t have so much humor in it, as befits Richard Lester, director of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels. But much of it is actually funny, and what isn’t is made up for by the uniformly excellent sets, costumes, score (by Michel Legrand), swordplay, and cast: Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch (rarely more lovely), Geraldine Chaplin (daughter of Charlie), Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Lee (as one-eyed villain Rochefort), Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simon Ward, Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan. Many of their characters died in the more downbeat follow-up (see below), while Kinnear, who appeared in many of Lester’s films, sadly died for real after falling from a horse while filming his The Return of the Musketeers (also with Lee) years later, and his part had to be completed by a double.

The Wicker Man (1973): Not one of my personal favorites, as those who have seen it may understand, but undeniably effective, with Lee as Lord Summerisle, presiding over the Scottish island where policeman Edward Woodward seeks a missing young girl. Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland up the pulchritude quotient. Senselessly remade with Nicolas Cage.

The Four Musketeers (aka The Revenge of Milady; 1974): Strictly speaking, this is not so much a sequel to The Three Musketeers as the rest of it, since it was shot as one mammoth film and then broken into two parts. As a result, just about the only new name in the credits is that of Lalo (Mission: Impossible) Schifrin, who composed a worthy score that falls only a little short of Michel Legrand’s original. Michael Gothard (seen as a blood-drinking android who rips his own hand off to escape a pair of handcuffs before destroying himself in a vat of acid in the Amicus-AIP co-production Scream and Scream Again, and an equally ill-fated assassin in For Your Eyes Only) has a small but key role. It’s been said that the stars didn’t even know the film was being released in two parts until the first one premiered in Paris, which seems pretty hard to believe, but apparently it established a legal precedent in which future contracts prevented producers from doing just that (the so-called “Salkind Clause”).

The Man With the Golden Gun (1974): My daughter helped persuade me that I ought to own this one, since it was the only Bond film before The Spy Who Loved Me that I didn’t already have, and with Lee as the titular villain, Scaramanga, I couldn’t really argue with that. It was, however, the first entry to rush ahead of the then-customary two-year interval between films since 1965, and it shows. Ekland, while decorative, is annoyingly spacey as the Bond girl du jour, and even Lee isn’t as effectively used as he might be, with Herve Villechaize (Fantasy Island) as his henchman and model Maud Adams, later to play the title role in the awful Octopussy, as an ill-fated romantic conquest of both adversaries. The fact that Clifton James returns as Sheriff J.W. Pepper from Live and Let Die sort of says it all.

House of the Long Shadows (1983): This is notable chiefly, if not solely, as the only film in which the genre’s latter-day Big Three (Vincent Price, Lee, and Cushing, previously gathered in Scream and Scream Again) teamed up with its own Energizer Bunny, John Carradine. It’s a shame that they couldn’t have done so in, first, something closer to their prime, as this is a bit like watching a bunch of fossils pottering around in a museum (Lee’s the liveliest and, aptly, the sole survivor offscreen) and, second, a genuine genre vehicle, as this is nothing more than the umpteenth version of Seven Keys to Baldpate, an old-dark-house novel by Charlie Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers that was adapted for the stage by George M. Cohan as far back as 1913. Not helping matters is the fact that the team behind the camera was as undistinguished as the cast was stellar: Cannon Films and exploitation hacks Pete Walker and Michael Armstrong. The plot, such as it is, involves Desi Arnaz, Jr. (strike one!) betting agent Richard Todd that he can write a novel in twenty-four hours in a secluded house, and then getting constantly interrupted as the stars pop up (and in turn get mowed down) one by one, along with sundry unknowns.

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