Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Having played Dracula on Broadway, Actor Frank Langella is now in Cornwall, sinking his teeth into the same role for a film. Although the movie will have a different script, approach, director, cast and special effects, Langella wants to maintain his conception of the role of the sanguineous count. Dracula, he feels, has been misunderstood. "I don't play him as a hair-raising ghoul," says Langella. "He is a nobleman, an elegant man, with a very difficult problem...
...first, a New York errand boy (Harry Hamlin), affronted by a contender, knocks him out with a single punch and is induced to abandon his quest for a night-school law degree in order to enter the square circle (about the only cliche not to be heard in the script), in order to earn money for an operation to save his sister's eyesight. "You'll be on the next train to Vienna,'' he tells her, his dimness about geography matching his dimness about the fast women and corrupting mobsters he meets on his rise...
...life. His parodies of Greek tragic conventions sometimes tend to be either too subtle or too overdone but in general the play keeps up a lively pace, largely because Fry knows that words like "come" get a laugh--legitimate or not--if they are repeated suggestively throughout the script...
Director David Montgomery allows Fry's witty script to carry much of the humor by having his actors deadpan as if they were indeed acting in Antigone. But no one was fooled, and the audience groaned and howled as if cued by the double entendres and pompous orations. The combination of a good script and a willing if not polished cast make for an enjoyable hour...
...South Crews presents in his novels (Car, A Feast of Snakes, and The Gypsy's Curse, to name three of the better ones) is inventive, absurdist, existential, savagely funny--like a script by William Faulkner and Jean-Paul Sartre. Good books, some of those novels, but sometimes just too frustratingly weird. Crews also used to write a column called "Grits" for the pre-Felker Esquire, and the best of them stick in your memory like Georgia mud to your boots--an old, nearly-blind mule trader sagely discusses the art and artifices of a trade that is almost dead...