Good night, Sweet Prince (of Darkness)

Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in 1973's "The Wicker Man."

When you live to the ripe old age of 93, you collect a lot of stories — both the ones you tell and the ones others tell about you.

In the week since news of his death became public, people who knew him, and many who didn’t, have told a lot of stories about Sir Christopher Lee. Lee appeared in roughly 250 films yet never quite escaped his earliest starring role as Dracula in Hammer Films’ 1958 movie “Horror of Dracula.”

My favorite Christopher Lee story goes like this: Asked by an interviewer about his still-classified exploits during World War II, Lee sat forward conspiratorially and asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

Excitedly, the interviewer said, “Yes,” to which Lee, sitting back in his chair and smiling as only he could, with a combination of menace and charm, replied, “So can I.”

Lee’s wartime exploits, some reportedly involving Winston Churchill’s clandestine special ops force, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” and his postwar Nazi-hunting activities would be enough for most men. You could call that a job well done, a life well lived, and write your memoirs. But Lee was only in his early 20s when the war ended. He was just getting started.

It’s for his second act — as an actor — that we will remember him. It’s not the stories he told — no matter how well — nor the war stories he lived that will endure, but the stories he helped bring to life on the screen. In a movie career that spanned nearly 70 years, he went from “uncredited spear carrier” in Sir Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” to Saruman the White in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies. In between he was Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy and Fu Manchu (all roles also played by Boris Karloff), as well as Bond villain Scaramanga in “The Man with the Golden Gun,” “Three Musketeers” antagonist Rochefort, lecherous Russian holy man Rasputin, and countless other silver screen adversaries.

While somewhat resenting his villainous typecasting, Lee also realized early on that the bad guys got all the good lines — except when they didn’t get any lines at all.

Lee claimed he played the part of Dracula mute in the 1966 sequel “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” because the lines he was given were terrible. (For his part, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster claimed not to recall having written Dracula any lines in the first place.)

The true mark of a great actor isn’t how good he is with great material, or even good material, but how good he is with lousy material. By that standard, Lee was one of the greatest who ever lived.

Even without lines in “Dracula: Princess of Darkness,” Lee hisses and snarls and dominates the screen. Just as his dear friend and frequent co-star Peter Cushing did for the original “Star Wars,” Lee brings menace and gravitas to its prequels, which need all the menace and gravitas they can get. He took his roles, however outlandish, seriously, and when he is on-screen, so do audiences.

Occasionally, Lee’s perseverance paid off and he’d get a great role, such as his own favorite, Lord Summerisle in the 1973 version of “The Wicker Man,” or Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” But great role or not, he was a professional, bringing to his craft the same discipline that must have kept him alive during World War II.

Lee may not have won any Oscars, but he racked up the Guinness world records: most screen credits for a living actor (in 2007), tallest actor in a leading role (tied with Vince Vaughn), actor in most films featuring a sword fight, oldest video game voice actor, and most connected living actor (meaning Six Degrees of Christopher Lee is a lot easier to play than Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon).

The man of many roles was also a man of many contrasts. He was a British aristocrat often cast as the shadowy foreigner. He was prickly and reserved, yet warm and generous with those who got to know him. He sang opera, then later, in his 80s, recorded a heavy metal concept album. And he was a serious man who could become a babbling fanboy upon meeting his hero, J.R.R. Tolkien.

For most of the world, though, Christopher Lee was an unforgettable actor who often made even the most forgettable movies worth watching. And for an actor, there’s probably no better life story.

Victorians cast a long shadow

The cast of Showtime's Victorian horror series "Penny Dreadful" season 1.

They lived more than 100 years ago, but our Victorian forebearers cast long shadows.

Every so often, we get a TV show set in a recent decade, say the 1960s, and TV critics go mad for it. But the Victorian era (1837-1901), especially the latter half of it, seems quietly ubiquitous on our screens of late, much as it was 50 years ago, when Westerns dominated the airwaves.

This, however, is a proper Victorianism, a Victorianism of the city and not of its frontier periphery.

Last month, Showtime’s excellent horror series “Penny Dreadful” returned for its second season. “Penny Dreadful” is the latest from the sub-genre of Victorian literary mash-ups, which include Kim Newman’s recently reissued “Anno Dracula” novels and Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” comics.

(Fox turned “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” into a movie so bad it drove Sean Connery into retirement, and just last week news leaked that Fox wants a mulligan on the property. If at first you don’t succeed, and so on.)

Like its predecessors, “Penny Dreadful” weaves its narrative out of threads of late-Victorian fact and fantasy: “Dracula,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Jack the Ripper — and some pre-Victorian “Frankenstein” just for a bit of Romantic contrast.

But this would be trivia if “Penny Dreadful” were an isolated incident. It isn’t. BBC America has “Ripper Street.” NBC recently tried to give Dracula a makeover by turning him into Nikola Tesla. And Sherlock Holmes is always with us — doubly so at present, with the BBC’s “Sherlock” and CBS’s “Elementary,” which both transport the Great Detective from gaslit streets to Internet cafes.

When Holmes first met Dr. Watson, he greeted the doctor with, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and indeed Watson had just returned from a war in Afghanistan. No wonder Sherlock Holmes adapts so easily to the 21st century; even the historical particulars are still current.

Holmes isn’t alone. Whenever Hollywood returns to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” or H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” or some other Victorian best-seller, it’s as likely to bring the story forward to the present as leave it where it was. Wells’ Martians have invaded Earth three centuries straight, and may well do so again in the next.

You don’t usually see this with works and characters from other periods, excepting the occasional updated fairytale or gimmicky out-of-time, out-of-place stagings of Shakespeare. (“Richard III” set in a thinly veiled Nazi Germany? Why not?)

The human condition hasn’t changed much throughout history, although we’re slightly less violent nowadays, arguably. But the Victorians were the first people really like us — and by “us” I mean 21st century inhabitants of the small-l liberal, small-d democratic, small-c capitalist West.

Caricatured as pearl-clutching prudes both by those who like to feel superior and by those who’d like society to “go back” to the caricature, the Victorians were the first moderns.

The Victorians, both in England and the United States, had the first sizable middle class. They had the first mass-produced popular culture in the form of novels and magazines. They ordered from catalogs. They were wooed by advertisers. They consumed lots of pornography, then felt guilty about it and took cold baths. Their doctors turned every bad mood into a disease, especially when it came to women patients. They invented our modern notions of childhood and the serial killer.

It all seems familiar because it’s so like us. We have Netflix and iTunes instead of plays and the opera, but apart from the new wrinkle of mobile phones and instant communication, we’re little changed from the Victorians. They struggled with war and peace, science and faith, sex and family,  race and ethnicity much as we do.

With “Penny Dreadful” and the like, we continue to mine the Victorian era. It’s as far back as we can go and still feel we’re with people we really get. The main difference is the value of the penny.

Culture Shock 10.10.13: Argento's decline continues with 'Dracula'

Dario Argento's longtime musical collaborator, Claudio Simonetti of the group Goblin, leaves little doubt what kind of movie "Dario Argento's Dracula" is.

As soon as the falsetto warble of a theremin wafts into the opening titles, "Dracula" begins to feel more like an Edward D. Wood movie than an Argento movie. Is this how far Italy's reigning maestro of the macabre has fallen?

But I exaggerate. It's not really as bad as that. Unfortunately it's not as good as that, either. An Ed Wood film can be so bad it's good. Argento's "Dracula," playing on demand and in limited 3-D theatrical release, is merely bad in the uninteresting way.

Like fellow horror auteur John Carpenter, Argento is a filmmaker who has lost his moorings. His filmography, built on early masterpieces such as "Deep Red," "Suspiria" and "Tenebre," is now more misses than hits. Nowadays when he makes a good film, it is by accident. "Mother of Tears" (2007) works only because it is so ridiculously excessive it plays like a middle finger aimed at critics who thought Argento's previous films were excessive, a kind of "you haven't seen anything yet."

Argento's "Dracula" doesn't have that going for it, and period costume dramas have never been his strength. Before "Dracula," he had directed one period piece, 1998's "The Phantom of the Opera," and even his staunchest defenders throw up their hands at that one.

As "Dracula" opens, Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli ("Suspiria") tease us with visual reminders of Argento's earlier films, but what Argento really seems to be going for is the look of Hammer's "Dracula" films starring Christopher Lee. It's more than coincidental that Argento's version of Jonathan Harker, like the one in Hammer's "Horror of Dracula," is a librarian rather than a solicitor.

Yet Hammer's Dracula isn't the only one to which Argento turns for ideas. Dracula, played by Thomas Kretschmann, looks like Jack Palance in Dan Curtis' 1972 TV movie "Dracula," and the film's final act takes a romantic turn borrowed from Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula," although without bothering to set up the twist properly.

Argento is counting on our having seen these earlier movies so that we'll accept Kretschmann's dour, unlikable Dracula as a romantic antihero and won't think twice about the sudden revelation that Mina Harker (Marta Gastini) is the reincarnation of Dracula's long lost love.

As portrayed by Kretschmann, Dracula is so stiff and uncharismatic you'd think he's still in rigor mortis. He doesn't seem capable of mesmerizing anyone. Ironically, Kretschmann is cast as Dracula's nemesis, Van Helsing, in NBC's upcoming "Dracula" TV series. Here, however, Van Helsing shows up in the tired form of Rutger Hauer ("Blade Runner"), who knows he's on a sinking ship and seems resigned to go down with it.

Argento's daughter, Asia Argento ("The Last Mistress"), is wasted in the thankless role of Lucy, and would have been better suited for the meatier (pun intended) role of Tania, the peasant girl Dracula turns during the film's opening.

The most unfortunate performance is Unax Ugalde as Jonathan Harker, who will leave you wistful for Keanu Reeves. Only Gastini, who looks eerily like a young Meg Tilly, escapes with her dignity intact.

Lazy scripting and questionable casting aside, where "Dario Argento's Dracula" really falls flat is with its cheap, cartoonish CGI effects, which include the least convincing wolf since Lon Chaney Jr. and CGI blood where practical effects would do just fine.

Still, maybe Argento's "Dracula" is worth seeing for one thing: just so you can say you saw a movie in which Dracula transforms into a giant, CGI praying mantis.

As Jack Palance used to say, "Believe it, or not."

Culture Shock 10.27.11: Chuck Norris has met his match: Peter Cushing

Chuck Norris is no longer the toughest guy on the Internet.

Despite various "Chuck Norrisfacts" you may have heard — "Duct tape uses Chuck Norris to hold things together," "Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table because the only element Chuck Norris recognizes is the element of surprise," etc. — Chuck has met his match.

A few weeks ago, another Internet meme quietly started making the rounds. It said:

"Killed Dracula with a pair of candlestick holders. Blew up Alderaan. Fought Daleks. Has been to the Earth's core. Killed more vampires than Buffy. Outsmarted Moriarty. Verbally bitchslapped Darth Vader. I beg your pardon, but do you really think Chuck Norris can top that?"

And who, pray tell, fits that description? Only one man: Peter Cushing.

Although not as famous today as his longtime friend and costar Christopher Lee, Cushing was just as important to the success of the second great era of horror films, spanning almost two decades from the late 1950s to the early '70s. Working together and separately, Cushing and Lee were their generation's equivalent of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Cushing was arguably the finest actor of all of the horror icons. Whether playing an upright hero or a depraved villain, his performances were precise, measured and deadly serious.

His Baron Frankenstein in 1957's "Curse of Frankenstein" marked the first time the character was played as an outright villain, rather than as a flawed, tragic hero undone by hubris. And his Dr. Van Helsing in the following year's "Horror of Dracula" was a bold, energetic take on the character. For the first time, Dracula's arch nemesis was an action hero, and their final showdown remains the screen's best confrontation between the vampire and the professor.

Cushing was the face of British horror, both for Hammer Films and Hammer's chief rival, Amicus. Cushing appeared in virtually all of Amicus' signature anthology films, from "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" in 1965 to "From Beyond the Grave" in 1974.

Amicus also cast Cushing in numerous sci-fi films, most notably as the Doctor in two movies based on the BBC television series "Doctor Who" — "Doctor Who and the Daleks" and "Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D." — and as a scientist in the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation "At the Earth's Core."

Cushing was Sherlock Holmes in the first color Holmes film, Hammer's 1959 version of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and he also played the Great Detective on television for the BBC.

But in a way, what has become Cushing's best-remembered role outdoes them all.

As Grand Moff Tarkin, military governor of the Galactic Empire's outer rim in the original "Star Wars," Cushing put Darth Vader in his place. He then ordered the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan, population 1.97 billion, just because he could.

That's first-class villainy. It tops anything else in the other "Star Wars" movies and, let's be honest, Chuck Norris has no answer for it.

Yet, by every account, the real Cushing was one of the nicest people you could ever know. He was a man so in love with and devoted to his wife that when she died in 1971, he started to slowly waste away.

Although still active in films until the 1980s, Cushing was never the same. He died in 1994 at age 81.

Halloween is the perfect time to sample the work of this most unassuming of horror stars. Cushing stars in "The Gorgon" and "The Creeping Flesh," airing back-to-back Sunday beginning at 5 p.m. CDT on Antenna TV (locally on digital channel WHNT-19.2).

Then, on Halloween, Turner ClassicMovies will feature four of Cushing's films during a marathon of eight Hammer movies from 6:15 a.m. CDT until 7 p.m. First is "The Gorgon" again at 7:45 a.m., then "Curse of Frankenstein," "Frankenstein Created Woman" and "The Mummy" starting at 12:45 p.m.

And who wants to watch Chuck Norris movies at Halloween, anyway?

Culture Shock 10.13.11: An unexpected nomination for best 'Dracula'

Few literary characters, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, have been adapted to the screen as often as Dracula.

The creation of Irish novelist Bram Stoker, Dracula has appeared on film since the earliest days of the medium. Not counting a lost Hungarian film from 1921 titled "Dracula's Death," about which little is known, the cinematic Dracula first appeared in 1922 — with name changed and serial numbers filed off — as the horrifying, rat-toothed Count Orlok of F.W. Murnau's German expressionist masterpiece, "Nosferatu."

Dracula is again set to take to the screen next year in "Dracula 3D," directed by Dario Argento ("Suspiria," "Deep Red") and starring Dario's daughter Asia Argento ("The Last Mistress").

But of all the Dracula films both famous and obscure, one in particular is underrated and too often overlooked. Yet director John Badham's 1979 version of "Dracula" is arguably one of the best.

Take nothing away from Bela Lugosi's performance in the 1931 edition, and all due respect to Hammer's bold, energetic 1958 retelling, "Horror of Dracula" starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but Badham's "Dracula" is a complete package. It's a gothic fairytale with beautiful sets, imaginative set pieces and moments of truly inspired horror.

And it's just ambiguous, and ambitious, enough to be analyzed a couple of different ways. If you're into that sort of thing.

Like most of the better Dracula films, Badham's diverges significantly from Stoker's book. Don't get me started on Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula." That garish, parody-inviting misstep may be largely faithful to Stoker — apart from the addition of a standard-issue love story — but it looks increasingly ridiculous with age, done in mostly by bad acting (Winona Ryder, how could you?), non-acting (I'm looking at you, Keanu Reeves) and overacting (paging Anthony Hopkins).

In Badham's film, the characters of Mina and Lucy are essentially reversed, and Mina (Jan Francis) is the daughter of professor Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier), while Lucy (Kate Nelligan) is the daughter of an older-than-usual Dr. Seward (Donald Pleasence). Also, the setting is shifted forward from the Victoria era to the end of the Edwardian era.

Dracula himself also differs from Stoker's original. Played brilliantly by Frank Langella, who, like Lugosi, had first portrayed the role on stage, this Dracula is the seductive Dracula of popular culture, a romance-novel figure with feathered hair and open collars, who, in one scene, rides a horse through the evening fog, looking every bit like a Jane Austen hero. He owes as much to John Polidori's suave Lord Ruthven — a product of the same stormy night that gave the world "Frankenstein" — as to Stoker.

Yet he's still a brutal, bloody figure, and Langella gives his lines real menace, as when he says to Van Helsing, "In the past 500 years, Professor, those who have crossed my path have all died, and some not pleasantly." And, more importantly, this vampire doesn't sparkle.

Weaving through these proceedings is a grand, sweeping score by John Williams, fresh off his Oscar-winning "Star Wars" triumph and at the peak of his talents. It's one of his best film scores, and like the 1979 "Dracula" itself, it's unjustly neglected.

Badham's "Dracula" is available on DVD and Netflix streaming. The DVD includes a director's commentary.