Ken Russell's Dracula Read Free Page B

Dracula? Bram Stoker was a part-time writer
but a full-time man of the theatre. He was a full-time friend of Henry Irving.
It can be said with certainty that aspects of Irving’s character inspired the
more cultivated aspects of Dracula’s character, and an Irving-as-Dracula
reading does tie nicely with Ken Russell’s version. Stoker was with Henry
Irving when Stoker made the ‘eureka’ visit to Whitby, the English seaside town
with the ruined abbey on the rocks. Irving and Stoker were in Whitby to meet a
writer whose play had flopped in nearby Scarborough. The writer? George
Grossmith.
    Let’s look at
Ken Russell’s script:
    Russell’s prose
style has great energy and an almost total disregard for the conventions of
punctuation. Clauses and sentences run into each other wilfully, as if Russell
is suggesting a moving camera. Certainly his narrative style creates a flow of
images. I’ve left this alone, with the minor exception of adding forty or fifty
commas where they are needed to clarify meaning. These are mostly where Russell
had neglected to put a comma before a name. For example, he writes: “That’s
enough Professor”, which suggests the speaker has ‘had’ his fill of Professor
for tea. A comma before the word Professor makes it clear that the
speaker is telling the Professor to stop doing what it is he is doing.
    It’s curious to
observe the decline in the standard of dialogue given to Harker, in the first
instance, and then to Van Helsing. Harker starts out speaking the complex
sentences of an educated man, but soon declines into a sort of Cockney. On
reaching Vienna, in the pursuit of Dracula, Van Helsing’s English deteriorates
into a schoolboy imitation of a foreigner, with simple sentences ending with
the verb, e.g. ‘He would an embarrassing spectator be’. I’ve left this in, if
only because it gives a rare screen example of pre- The Empire Strikes Back Yoda-speak.
    The only really
new character Russell adds to the Dracula story is that of the aforementioned
boy, The Gardener’s Boy. Dracula uses the nude boy to entice Renfield. Unlike
his lapsed Catholic contemporary, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work seemed to be
awash with naked youths, and which Russell found abhorrent, the young male nude
was not something with which Russell liked to dress his sets. An earlier use of
a young male nude had got him into a lot of trouble. The reporting of a nude
boy, said to be in a sex scene with a nun, on the set of The Devils, caused
such an uproar of excitement in Fleet Street that The Devils was swept
up into a destructive tidal wave of cant and outrage from which it hasn’t
recovered. The name of the fourteen-year-old boy on the set of The Devils is
Balfour Sharp. Balfour is such an uncommon name that it’s quite likely that the
only other Balfour Russell had heard of was Balfour Gardiner, a minor British
composer. Ken Russell was a national authority on minor British composers.A
punning flourish on Gardiner’s name, whilst winking at the rats of Fleet Street
who seemed to praise Pasolini’s films to the skies, and the boy in Dracula was
born. Renfield is Fleet Street.
    It should be
remembered that a script isn’t a film. It’s the building block, the bare bones
if you will, for a film. On the whole, Ken Russell did not slavishly adhere to
the written script; the major exception being Altered States (1980). A
fair bit of Women in Love (1969), for example, was acted not from the
script but from the book; the nuns stripping off in the pit, and Balfour’s sans
culottery , in The Devils (1971), were improvised on the day. Ken
Russell’s Dracula would be polished through with added colour. Ideas would
flow and changes would be made after casting and during the design process.
That said, the script is a finished piece of Ken Russell work. If he was a
composer it would be given a full Opus number. It exists. It is real. Ken
Russell’s Dracula will probably give more film-pleasure than any trip to
the