This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s all widow’s peaks and plastic fangs, as we listen to music from film adaptations of novels about vampires.
“Interview with the Vampire” (1994), based on the novel by Anne Rice, featured some pretty counterintuitive casting, including Tom Cruise as Lestat (Rice would have preferred Rutger Hauer), but thanks largely to director Neil Jordan the film still managed to deliver the goods. Elliot Goldenthal’s music was nominated for an Academy Award. Interestingly, Princeton’s American Boychoir sings the opening “Libera me.”
Frank Langella’s characterization of Bram Stoker’s Dracula drove the critics wild when the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston was revived on Broadway in 1977. (It was the same adaptation that launched Bela Lugosi on his big screen career.) But when the film “Dracula” (1979) was released a couple of years later, reviews were mixed. Langella retained his dreamy magnetism, and the producers managed to secure Sir Laurence Olivier and Kate Nelligan for the parts of Van Helsing and Mina, respectively, but I wonder if John Badham was the best choice for director. Badham had just come off the enormous box office success of “Saturday Night Fever,” and it looks as if his Dracula retains John Travolta’s hair. You know, just for luck.
I remember being so excited, as a 13 year-old, watching the trailer at the movies. When Langella leaped through a window and transformed into a wolf in mid-flight to John Williams’ dramatic music, it was almost more than I could bear. Watch the trailer here:
How could a film called “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2012) ever live up to its title? The answer is, it can’t, but the adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s supernatural-historical mash-up wasn’t as terrible as everyone says it was. Sure, I would have preferred it had Daniel Day-Lewis played Lincoln, but put anybody in a stove-pipe to fight vampires with an axe, and I’m happy. I probably wouldn’t have been so permissive had I seen it in the theater, where the noise and effects would have pushed me over the edge, but it was a diverting rental, with a gothic score by Henry Jackman that ping-ponged between Americana lyricism and an orchestra bolstered by electronics and heavy metal guitars. But what are you going to listen to when you’re fighting vampires, a string quartet?
James Bernard’s music for Hammer Studios’ “Dracula,” released in the United States as “Horror of Dracula” (1958), is one of his best-known efforts. His Dracula theme, with its clashing harmonies, laid the groundwork for the sound of the film’s numerous sequels, most of which featured Christopher Lee in his most iconic role. Bernard became so closely associated with Hammer and vampires that he was approached late in life to provide a new score for the silent classic “Nosferatu.”
Finally, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), despite the claims of utmost fidelity in its very title, was not a faithful adaptation of Stoker’s book. Why? WHY??? The film was lovely to look at, with eye-popping costumes and production design that combined Universal Studios in-the-camera trickery and honest-to-goodness miniatures with a few more Jean Cocteau references than perhaps was for its own good. This could have been THE Dracula film. Alas, it wasn’t. However, for me, it had THE Dracula score. It was a stroke of genius to hire Polish composer Wojciech Kilar to give the film just the right Eastern European sound.
Get your blood up, with page-to-screen vampires this week, on “Picture Perfect,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
Stream them here!
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