Godfather (58 page)

The cast and crew reconvened in the early fall of 1992 for retakes. On October 28, Coppola wrote in his journal that he was confident that he had corrected the flaws that had been observed by the preview audiences: “I think I did gain by doing the Denver preview, and certainly by being so stubborn about getting these changes into the final picture.”
¹⁸
Dracula
premiered on November 13,1992, and swiftly became a box-office bonanza.

Bram Stoker's Dracula
begins with a prologue set in 1462. Van Helsing, the narrator, states, voice-over on the sound track, “Muslim Turks swept into Europe, striking at Romania, threatening all of Christendom.” A Romanian knight, Vlad Dracula, known as the impaler, and his crusaders defend their Christian homeland against the infidel Turks. In order to film the opening battle sequence economically, Coppola used rear-screen projection, whereby the actors performed in front of a screen on which the silhouettes of additional fighting men were projected in the background. In the middle ground, he also employed puppets in silhouette, representing dead Turkish soldiers impaled on stakes, receding into the background. In this manner, Coppola was able to give a sense of depth to the scene and to suggest a much larger number of fighting men on the battlefield than was actually the case.

The victorious Vlad and his troops drive the Turkish invaders from Romania. As a parting shot the vengeful Turks shoot an arrow containing a note into the castle for Vlad's wife, Princess Elisabeta. It falsely claims that Vlad has fallen in battle. “Just like in
Romeo and Juliet
,” Coppola comments, “she decides that, if Vlad was dead, she could not go on living herself,” and so she commits suicide.
¹⁹
Vlad returns to his castle only to find Elisabeta's corpse lying in state in the chapel. Father Chesare and his fellow priests pronounce judgment on Elisabeta: because she took her own life, she is damned and therefore prohibited by Church law from having a Christian burial or being buried in consecrated ground. (Suicide at the time was considered “the unforgivable sin.”)

Vlad responds by renouncing the Christian faith he has so valiantly defended against the infidels. Vlad the Impaler then angrily impales the enormous cross above the altar with his sword, and blood streams forth from it. He catches the blood in a sacramental Communion chalice taken from the altar and drinks it. Through “the reaction of these holy men,” the scene shows the degree of Vlad Dracula's blasphemy, comments Coppola.
²⁰
Vlad Dracula has condemned himself to becoming a vampire by cursing God and defiantly proclaiming that he is now in league with Satan, the Prince of Darkness. As one of the infamous undead, his existence will be prolonged by drinking the blood of his victims, just as he sacrilegiously consumed the blood that spurted from the cross.

The previous film versions of Stoker's book, as we know, were primarily based on the Deane-Balderston stage play, which omitted Stoker's prologue. Hence Coppola's film is the first screen adaptation to depict the
historical background of the novel. After the prologue, which serves as an overture to this symphony of horror, the story leaps ahead to nineteenth-century London. Jonathan Harker, an ambitious young solicitor, travels to Transylvania to complete negotiations with Count Dracula for some London real estate. Jonathan's predecessor, Mr. Renfield (Tom Waits), had been sent to conduct this business with Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian wilds, but he inexplicably returned to London suffering from a complete mental breakdown and was summarily consigned to an insane asylum.

Jonathan sets down his harrowing experiences at Castle Dracula in a diary. We see his hand take pen to paper as he begins to narrate the events in voice-over. Jonathan initially views Count Dracula as an elderly eccentric living in a decrepit castle, but he soon discovers with increasing dread that the count is a sinister phantom. Dracula says to Jonathan at one point, “Listen to them,” referring to the wolves howling at his castle gates, “the creatures of the night—what music they make!” To Jonathan's great consternation, Dracula himself is likewise revealed to be a creature of the night—a vampire. Indeed, Dracula possesses the preternatural power to transform himself into a bat or a werewolf.

When Dracula spies a photograph of Jonathan's fiancée Mina Murray, the count is amazed to recognize her as the reincarnation of his beloved Elisabeta. Dracula therefore decides to detain Jonathan in his castle, while he goes to London in search of Elisabeta/Mina. He orders his three concubines to overpower Jonathan, seduce him, and hold him captive in the castle. Jonathan eventually manages to escape from his imprisonment, however, and takes sanctuary in a nearby convent where the nuns nurse the wretched young man back to health after his dreadful ordeal. Although he later admits to having been unfaithful to Mina when he was seduced by these demonic females, he steadfastly maintains that he never once tasted their blood. He therefore was not infected by them with “the disease of Venus,” the Victorian euphemism for venereal disease.

Meanwhile, Dracula voyages across the sea to London, where he searches for Mina Murray. He then reflects that he has “crossed oceans of time to find her.” Coppola notes that “
Dracula
is a dark, passionate, erotic drama.” It depicts “feelings so strong that they can survive across the centuries—like Dracula's love for Mina/Elisabeta.”
²¹

Dracula changes himself into a young Victorian dandy with a stovepipe hat. He prowls the London of foggy streets and gaslight in search of his true love. He finally discovers Mina, a demure schoolteacher, and introduces himself as a nobleman from the continent. He escorts Mina to view an early silent movie, shown on a cinematograph, a primitive version of
the motion picture projector. The movie they watch is in fact the battle scene from the prologue of this film—a sly cinematic joke on Coppola's part.

Dracula woos Mina, who has lost contact with Jonathan, by plying her with absinthe in the smoky Rule Café. (He implies that absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.) “Absinthe was sort of the LSD of the Victorian era,” Coppola explains. It was like a sexy seducer “who got into your brain. That's the kind of drugged, decadent, Oscar Wilde level that Jim Hurt tried to lay into the script as the spirit of Rule's Café,” a bistro that Wilde did in fact frequent.
²²
Just as Mina is about to succumb to Dracula's blandishments, she learns that Jonathan has been imprisoned in Dracula's castle and has escaped. She hurries off to Transylvania to marry him in an elaborate Catholic ceremony. A priest blesses the couple at the altar as they receive the sacrament of holy matrimony. Coppola offers the wedding scene as a stark contrast to the unholy seduction of Jonathan by the vampire brides and of Mina by Dracula.

When the married couple return to London, Jonathan turns over to Professor Abraham Van Helsing his account of his dreadful experiences in Castle Dracula. Van Helsing is shocked to learn that Dracula, in the guise of a foreign aristocrat, has sought to lure Mina away from Jonathan. Before Van Helsing can intervene, Dracula bewitches Mina by convincing her that she is the incarnation of his long-lost Elisabeta. He then possesses her in order to be reunited with Elisabeta. Too late, Mina finally realizes that she has fallen into the clutches of a vampire, and that Dracula's promise of “eternal love” means that she is condemned to endure the curse of living death with him.

Thereafter Mina slowly sickens and becomes listless and pale. Van Helsing suspects that she has fallen under Dracula's satanic spell. He touches her forehead with a sacred Communion wafer consecrated at Mass, and it sears her skin, leaving a red mark branded on her forehead. When Mina recoils from the sacramental wafer, Van Helsing is convinced that she is in Dracula's power. Just as Coppola incorporated elements of Catholic ritual in other films (baptism in
The Godfather
, First Communion in
Godfather II
), so, following Stoker's lead, he includes similar references to Catholic ritual in this film, for the movie, like the book, reflects a Christian outlook on sin, guilt, and redemption. Thus Van Helsing is committed to saving Mina from damnation. Van Helsing, the fearless vampire killer, vows to vanquish Dracula. He carries with him a silver cross, since Christ's cross is the adversary of Satan. Brandishing the cross, he proclaims, “Dracula's war against God is over. Now he must pay for his crimes.”

Van Helsing enlists three vampire hunters, including Jonathan Harker, to pursue Dracula to his lair in Transylvania by an arduous journey through the Transylvanian Alps in a relentless snowstorm. This episode, like the prologue, has never before been portrayed in any previous movie of Stoker's book. At the film's climax, the vampire killers attack Dracula with knives, and he lies on the floor, bleeding from his wounds. There follows a brief concluding scene between Dracula and Mina, whom Dracula had spirited away with him to his castle. Coppola decided to reshoot this scene in the wake of the negative response it evoked at the previews. The original ending is printed in the published edition of the screenplay (which does not include Coppola's last-minute revisions of the script.)

As originally filmed, Mina kisses Dracula, and his youth is miraculously restored. He is once again the Vlad Dracula of four centuries before. Dracula then beseeches Mina to plunge a knife into his heart. By doing so, she thereby bestows on him at long last the eternal peace of death. The scene ends as Mina rushes into Jonathan's arms, and they embrace. The shooting script states at this point, “Jonathan holds her, understanding what has happened.”
²³

Jonathan may have understood what happened, but the preview audiences manifestly did not. “The end especially let them down,” Coppola wrote in his journal after the Denver preview. “They wished for a more dramatic kill of Dracula. They were vexed that it wasn't clear whether Mina was a vampire or not at the end; and they hated that she went from Dracula to kissing Jonathan at the end…. I will see if I can come up with a new final moment with Mina and Dracula, perhaps even involving his head being decapitated,” since in folklore that is the only decisive way to make a vampire meet death and cease to be cursed as one of the undead.
²⁴

In conferring with Hart, Coppola revised the final scene as follows. After Dracula is stabbed by the vampire hunters, he is moved into the castle chapel. As he lies dying in the chapel where he had cursed God four hundred years before, he gasps to Mina, “Why has my God forsaken me?” He is actually uttering Christ's own words as he died on the cross on Calvary, thus implying that Dracula, who had defended Christ's cross as a crusader, may yet be redeemed by the cross of Christ. In fact, as Mina kisses Dracula, a celestial light shines down from the huge cross over the altar, transforming him into the young Vlad Dracula of four centuries past.

Mina then says, voice-over on the sound track, “There, in the presence of God, I understood how my love could release us all from the powers of darkness.” After all, as Richard Corliss notes, “Dracula is a cursed soul in need of exorcism; and only Mina, the avatar of his dead wife, can
provide it.”
²⁵
Dracula murmurs, “Give me peace.” Mina stabs him in the heart and kisses his dead eyes. At this point Coppola makes a very crucial addition to the scene: Mina pulls the knife from his heart—and cuts off his head. She thus liberates herself from his curse by severing the bond between them, while granting him the eternal rest he craved. Then she gazes at the painting on the ceiling, which depicts Elisabeta with Vlad Dracula as they were centuries before. Vlad Dracula and Elisabeta do survive, “frozen in flight across the sky in a painted cupola, high above the carnage.”
²⁶

Coppola was confident that the retakes represented a marked improvement in the final cut of the movie. The new ending, says Coppola, shows “that love can conquer death, or worse than death—that Mina can actually give back to the vampire his lost soul.”
²⁷
Consequently, Coppola ended the film focusing on Dracula and Mina being freed from the powers of darkness, rather than with Mina inevitably returning to the arms of Jonathan.

I have examined the alternate endings of
Dracula
in some detail because most commentators on the film have failed to do so. Clearly, Coppola did a better job of tying up loose ends in the finale that is in the movie's release prints than in the original ending in the shooting script, which left the fate of Mina in doubt.

Critics and filmgoers alike celebrated Coppola's return to form with
Bram Stoker's Dracula. “Dracula
is Coppola's illuminated manuscript of Stoker's classic,” writes Hal Hinson, “as if the book were actually coming to life before our eyes.”
²⁸
Corliss raves that Coppola “powerfully reimagines the Victorian myth … and brings the old spook story alive—well, undead—as a luscious infernal romance.” More recently, Carol Fry and John Craig have declared
Bram Stoker's Dracula
a closer adaptation of the novel than one finds in most Dracula films. Although Dracula remains a monster, a creature of the night, in Coppola's film, Coppola gives him a touch of sympathy, making him something of a tragic figure with redeeming qualities—for his undying, centuries-old love of Elizabeta/Mina lives in his heart. Coppola has made a stylish rendition of a musty formula, the most visually stunning of Dracula films.
²⁹
In other words, Coppola raised the stakes for his screen version by promising the definitive version of Stoker's novel, and that is precisely what he delivered.

Bram Stoker's Dracula
is an affectionate homage to the golden era of the horror film. The fabric of the eerie milieu provides a near-perfect setting for Coppola's more baroque tendencies. The bold expressionistic color scheme of the film's design is quite appropriate for a horror tale. Furthermore, the visual effects complement the story—a horror film rarity. This darkly seductive, flawlessly edited film is worlds away from most horror
flicks. One can shake off the scare, but the sorrow at the heart of the picture lingers long afterward. At a time when the science-fiction genre was in the ascendancy, thanks to
Star Wars
and
Star Trek
, Coppola conjured up magic from fantasy, not technology, from swords, not lasers, and from the past, not the future.