Film review: Horror of Dracula (1958)

For some reason there's no "the" in the title, which bothers me.  Anyway, this is the granddaddy of all Hammer Horrors, and we watched it as a kind of cozy horror to ease into the run-up to Halloween.  It's interesting largely because of the changes to the original.  It begins as usual with Jonathan Harker arriving at Castle Dracula (to be a librarian, though, rather than to sell real estate (isn't that what he does in the first one?  Anyway, he can't be doing that for reasons that shall become clear)) and he finds a meal waiting for him and a note that the count is away.  In the middle of the meal he drops a plate and while he's picking it up from out of nowhere a woman appears 

who begs him for his help but stops mid-sentence because she sees something behind him that terrifies her.  It is of course, the count (Christopher Lee) and she scuttles off.  Right off the bat (ooh, look what I did there) Lee both references Lugosi and draws a line between his performance and Bela's, because he says the line "I am Dracula, I bid you welcome," but delivers it in a completely clipped and off-hand fashion.  He then takes Harker to his room and shows a little too much interest in a picture he has of his fiancee, Lucy.  

He then tells Harker he'll be away for a while and then leaves, locking the door behind him.  Harker seems somewhat amused, and sits down to write a letter, that reveals the first really major difference from the original: Harker knows what Dracula is, and has come to kill him!  Alas, however, he is visited in the night by the woman who again begs him to help her escape (and now, of course, it makes sense that he would help her) but has she embraces him in her relief, the sight of his pulsating jugular is just too much for her and she takes a good ol' bite.  Just then Dracula reappears, and here you get the first taste of the Hammer gore, because his eyes are bloodshot and there is ample technicolor blood dripping out of his mouth.  

He intervenes, throwing the blood-crazed woman away from Harker (she has become feral and hisses at him) and in the tussle Harker is knocked out.  When he wakes up it is light (but is late in the day) and he escapes out of the window, first hiding his diary at a crossroads in front of the castle, then returning to find both vampires in their coffins in the crypt.  Foolishly, he stakes her first, and her scream awakes the count whose eyes swivel around to catch the failing light, at which a smile plays across his lips.  

Harker then stumbles over to the count's coffin, to find it empty.  Suddenly he realizes it's dark, and looks up to see the count closing the door to the crypt and advancing towards him...

Sidenote: this film zips along, largely because it is content to cut out scenes that later horrors would see as the main point of the film.  So we never see Dracula feasting on poor old Harker, we just cut to a figure arriving at a nearby inn, who is revealed to be the great Peter Cushing as (a rather young) Van Helsing, who has come to see what's happened to his pal Harker.  The innkeeper is very cagey and basically tells him the usual thing of we don't want your kind stirring up trouble, but his kindly barmaid (who is, of course, called Inge) slips him Harker's journal, so he finds out everything that's been happening and rushes to Castle Dracula.  As he arrives, a carriage that matches the description in the book, all black and gothic, rushes past him, obviously carrying Dracula away.  (Another big difference: there is no sea voyage because Harker, Van Helsing etc., live in the unnamed country just over the border.  This allows everyone to come back to the Castle at the end of the movie for the big finale.  And the reason they believe the Count is leaving is to claim Lucy as a replacement for his staked mate.  So there's no hint, as in the book, that he'd planned on going anywhere to do anything nefarious - it was all prompted by Harker.)

Van Helsing finds the now pointy-toothed Harker in a coffin in the crypt (as well as the mummified corpse of the woman) and you see him very sadly about to stake Harker, when again it cuts away.

Peter Cushing is listed first in the credits, and indeed, Lee gets very little screen time.  In fact, the second star if there is one is reliable British actor (see Doctor Who, and these films we've watched) Michael Gough, who plays Arthur, brother of Lucy, husband to Mina.  Lucy has already been bitten when we find Van Helsing telling Arthur (who is very suspicious of Van Helsing) and Mina about Harker's fate.  We see Dracula arrive to a clearly welcoming Lucy (very sexual undertones - racy for the 1950s, but not as racy as Hammer would soon get) to feast again on her neck.  Van Helsing is called in by Mina and he insists on garlic everywhere and locked windows, but the maid (Gerda?) is called in by Lucy and agrees to get rid of the garlic and open the windows, and so much for Lucy.  However Lucy comes back and almost makes a victim of Gerda's young daughter before Van Helsing intervenes.  Arthur is then convinced and he and Van Helsing visit the customs to find out where that black coach was heading.  They find out the address just as we see a messenger boy deliver a message to Mina (played by the comely, if rather dowdily coiffed and uncomelily named Melissa Stribling) back at home that Arthur wants to meet her at that address.  And she does, and is later seen with a very suggestively satisfied look on her face. 

Anyway, by the time our two men show up at the address (a funeral parlor) the coffin is gone.  They find out Mina has been bitten when Van Helsing presses a crucifix into her hand and she faints (and is burned - as Lucy was earlier).  They set her up as bait and wait outside the window, but little do they know Dracula has got in the house 

and gets to her a second time (to her credit, she looks a little less welcoming than Lucy this time

 - earlier we've seen Van Helsing recording notes to himself on a wax cylinder (very Professor Higgins) say that those affected are like drug addicts who hate themselves for it).  She is treated with a blood transfusion from Arthur, who is told to drink wine to replenish himself, but when he asks Gerda to get more from the basement, she says "ooh, after all the bad things that have happened when I've disobeyed orders, I'm not going to disobey the mistresses' order not to go in the basement" and Van Helsing instantly realizes (a) where Dracula's coffin is, and (b) how he got in without them seeing.  However, he finds the coffin empty, only to see Dracula just arriving, then locking him in the basement, grabbing Mina, and it's a race to the castle for the big standoff (which features the now iconic fashioning of a crucifix out of two handy candlesticks).  

Short and sweet!

This is a very solid film, surprisingly un-campy (apart from two comic-relief characters - the easily corruptible customs officer, who has to keep repairing his gate, and the drunken funeral parlor owner), which is in large part to the excellent leads, all of whom were already very respectable stage actors, and the dialogue, which is well-written and grounded.  A British film industry is (temporarily) saved! 

Flint Water Strikes Again

 So, the day before yesterday our, I would have said almost brand new (three years old, apparently) water heater started leaking all over the basement floor.  We called our favorite plumbers and they came and gave us a new one, which, thanks to rocketing prices, set us back almost two thousand dollars. (My first car cost me $500.) Once again, it was incredibly heavy because of silt building up inside it.  As a pure coincidence, they were working on the pipes in our neighborhood not so long ago.  Well, this one's insured for six years at least...

 

Another camera dump

Summer segues into Fall, and we visit Shiawassee bird sanctuary for the first time in ages.  It was misting and cool but the mosquitoes were rampant.

 

 Holly rec, and an interesting addition to a little park next to a community center:

The view from the top of the Northbank Center shows interesting work on the old concrete riverside park: 

The Lone Dahlia

You do not want to know how much I spent on dahlia bulbs in the depths of February because I thought they looked cheerful and perky.  When it was FINALLY warm enough to put these out in late spring (which was the end of May--very late for this part of the world), everyone else on the internet was bragging about seeing their dahlia tubers producing healthy green shoots.  I had to wait at least a month for runty sprouts--and even then it was only about half of the tubers that did anything. About 1/4 got soggy and rotted and another 1/4 stayed dormant. How many springs do they need to spring to life?  I am saving them and am going to try again next year if I can remember where I store them during the winter...

By mid-July all the tubers that sprouted had formed bushy plants--nice, dark green leaves and very strong stems.  A lot of dahlia enthusiasts online bemoaned that their dahlias were too weak to hold up their COLOSSAL flowers--humble brag much?  In August, when everyone else talked of dead heading spent flowers and preparing them for their end of summer cool down, I was still waiting for ANY sign of a flower bud.  Finally, in the first week of September, when everyone else is digging up their tubers in preparation for winter, I saw four TINY buds form. And now, with October just 12 days away, we have one single flower, and three smallish buds hovering in the background.  Of all the kinds I bought, this was not high on the list that I was hoping to see bloom: I collected every dark velvety red flower that I could find and this orange pom pom thing was tossed into the reds mix.  (Those red flowers in the background are geraniums which grow like dandelions here--not much to get excited about there.  Apparently their stench repels pests. And they seemed to, so they are in my good books.) Obviously this dahlia is producing to spite the prettier ones.  

Flint has its first frost date in mid-October, just under four weeks from now.  Given the forecast and recent weather patterns, I think that is unlikely. In fact, it really seems unlikely we will have any sort of winter as we are stuck in monsoon doldrums--endless warm rainy days and muggy, sweaty evenings. Regardless, I don't think I am going to see any more dahlias this year.  I am going to to dig them all up, dry the tubers out, find a way to store them where they stay dry and cool (but not cold--never cold) and try this whole rigamarole all over again next May. (And, no, you cannot start them early and plant them out as, apparently, they are EXTREMELY tender and do NOT LIKE having their roots "disturbed".)

The Body of a Girl by Michael Gilbert

Here is another stand-alone police procedural that Gilbert published in 1972.  It's very satisfying and has that modern twist of the story being told from a not completely transparent character's point of view. The story begins in a small village located in the "upper reaches" of the Thames River when a couple of boys swimming and playing around in a wooded area of an island in the river see a leg of a person sticking out of the mud near the water's edge.  They run to get the police much to the chagrin of the police chief who is ONE MONTH away from a not-so-well deserved retirement.  (Let's just say this guy likes to ignore crimes that make his life difficult.)  To everyone's amazement (and the police chief's great relief) the next day a Detective Chief Inspector Mercer of the Scotland Yard arrives to take over the case. Not that the locals had actually done anything.  Indeed, they are sort of amazed that Scotland Yard had even heard of the case...Regardless, Mercer is assigned a small team of detectives who are eager to do something--and eager to blame Scotland Yard if it all blows up in their faces.  Because it turns out that the body has been dead over two years, there is no missing person report that remotely resembles the (it is inferred) young adult female, and any clues (like clothes, shoes, wallet) are LONG gone.  

Mercer is in exhaustible and not only sets up a police cordon around the area where the body was found and then orders police officers to start digging up the whole island in case there are more bodies. Not only does Mercer explain to no one what he is up to, he spends a lot of his efforts asking people about local characters who clearly have NOTHING to do with this murder: a guy who owns the only successful garage in town, the half-hobo/half-conman who lives in a hut on the island and sells "girly pics" to teen boys--a seedy but beloved piece of local color, and anyone who worked with or knew a police officer who killed himself over a year ago...Well, it doesn't take long before Mercer has no friends on the force and few friends in town. And it doesn't take long before the Police Chief, Bob Clark to complain to everyone who will hear about how Mercer is messing things up.  And soon the talk is that Mercer is not only messing things up but perhaps criminal himself.

So what is Mercer's story? Well, even though he is the main character and we (the reader) move through the world with him, he does not share his innermost thoughts with us.  His past is a completely blank book--we know nothing of him other than the fact that he states he is a detective with Scotland Yard.  We have no idea why he tells the police officers to keep a 24 hour watch on a local garage owner.  We have no idea why he hangs out at a bar after closing time and pretends to get drunk with the people who hang out there. 

I won't give away the big reveal, but after spending almost 200 pages looking over Mercer's shoulder (but having no access to his thoughts), his workmates' suspicions of him start to make sense.  Is he intentionally sabatoging the whole investigation?  You'll have to read it yourself to find out.

Camera dump: Escher, chimneys, etc.

 

From the right angle, and at the right time of year, Flint River can almost look nice.  They recently got rid of a weir that they'd only installed a few years previously to replace an old crumbling pipe/bridge thingy.  Now the river babbles over giant rocks.

 Hogbacks.  Looking forward to more crisp sunny days.  Still mostly muggy, but this was an exception.

 

There's been an M.C. Escher exhibit at the FIA since May, and it ends tomorrow, so I finally visited it this week.  My conclusion is that Escher had the aesthetic of me aged around 12, when my art teacher said I had a future painting posters for horror films, but the skills of a mathematician.  Truly the nerds' favorite artist.

The demolition of the old Flint Central High continues slowly.  Here's the chimney for the old welding lab that was already abandoned when we arrived in Flint in '99... 

...and now it's gone.  Sigh.

Still, the weather was nice again yesterday.  This is Holly Rec., which we haven't visited much recently, because we normally swim here but they've drained the lakes slightly for some reason (apparently they'll be back to normal next year).

 

The Empty House by Michael Gilbert

This novel (no short stories here) was published in 1978 and is the classic "regular guy who just wants to go about his business but gets swept up into government agents manipulating Israeli and Palestinian spies who kill each other at night in tiny English seaside town" stories. One book cover review compares it to The 39 Steps--that seems about right.

Our hero is Peter Manciple who is relatively young (late 20s?) and works for a very large (therefore cautious) insurance company.  One of their clients, a Dr. Wolfe, is a researcher who works for the military (they offered him what he couldn't refuse: an unlimited budget and access to whatever lab equipment he wanted--the only problem was that they view him and all his discoveries as theirs to use for their own purposes) just died in a most astonishing way: he drove his car along a cliff edge (off the main road, on a camp trail) and then drove straight into a guard rail and down onto the rocks below.  Well, that's strange enough since the day was sunny and the weather fine. Was he drunk? Did he lose consciousness?  We'll never know because the car and everything in it was sucked down into cracks and caves underneath the water's churning surface. Was he even in the car?  Yes, several people who knew him saw him drive past--indeed, he timed his drive perfectly to coincide with a time that had the most people walking around an otherwise desolated area so they could verify that it was him driving the car.  So was it suicide? But he was so happy and outgoing! He just wasn't the type. Hmmm.

In comes the insurance matter: Just a few months ago, Wolfe took out a very large life insurance policy that has a payout of £100,000 (remember, this is in 1978) to go to his sister (his only living relative) if he died by drowning in a sea. Well, that was prescient of him...In fact, it's just so damned strange that the insurance company won't pay out until they send the guy in the office that no one really gets along with (they don't say it, but it's clear to me that he's aspie--he has photographic memory and is a perfectionist to the point that even insurance adjusters get annoyed), Peter Manciple. Of course, Peter has his own ghosts to deal with: his father died under very suspicious circumstances (the official report says "took his own life") but his mother (who is convinced that "they are out there, always watching") thinks he was killed because he was part of the French Resistance. Peter's older brother couldn't take the family drama and fled to Australia and their only contact with him is a card at Christmas.

So, Peter's attitude is "Life is short and death is coming for you so you might as well make both as quick and painless as possible." You can see why his boss tells him to "take as long as he needs" to find out whether or not Dr. Wolfe is really dead and, if so, really died by drowning. So off Peter heads to a sleepy seaside village just as school exams are wrapping up (Blundell's School in Tiverton plays a key role in this novel) and hotels are waking up, getting ready for summer tourists who are set to arrive in two weeks.  

And immediately, things get weird: he keeps seeing the same two guys wherever he goes (train station, car rental office, gas station, outside his hotel).  Afraid of sounding as crazy as his mother, he unwisely ignores all his instincts that tell him something is terribly wrong.  He then heads out to the site of the broken guardrail and concludes that, if Wolfe is in his car, his body is NOT going to be recovered by anyone for an autopsy. Suddenly up pops a Colonel from a nearby military base which is overseeing an "archeological dig"--some excuse about them needing to find all the precious pottery shards before soldiers start practicing with mortar bombs--all run by young Palestinian men who have aglicised names on their name tags ("Stephen" and "Rupert", to give two). Then out of nowhere appear two "Irish" people, a "brother" and "sister", who claim they are trying to trace their roots by finding all the sites mentioned by Blackmore in Lorna Doone.  Indeed, they talk so obsessively about Lorna Doone that their repeated invitations to Peter to join them to look for yet another tributary that feeds the rivers in Doone Valley are always politely but firmly turned down, ensuring that the "siblings" are able to explore the surrounding areas completely unobserved. (Note to self: When you want to poke about and spy on people, talk obsessively about something really boring so anyone who would otherwise get suspicious runs away from you the second they see you.)

Well, one thing leads to another and Peter finds a dead body, then a guy dies in Peter's arms, and then a third guy explodes seconds after Peter wishes him well. It's starting to look like Peter is not the "insurance agent" he claims he is.  Then the hills are crawling with Israeli and Palistinian solders (wait--so that isn't an archeological site?) and the bodies really start piling up. I'll leave it at that so I don't give the mystery away.

Over all, this is a good novel: the writing, as usual, is excellent and there is well placed humor to ease some of the tension.  But the fact is, the issues raised in this story are super depressing--and current events in Palestine don't make them less depressing.   

Garden: Taking Stock

So I went into gardening this year viewing the whole thing as an experiment, trying five different ways of gardening so I could compare the results: the straw bale method, the raised bed method, the hydroponic method, the small containers on the garage wall (so off the ground) watered by a solar panel system, and the giant fabric bags on the ground method.  So far, the results are mixed.  I'll mention two now and get to the others in the next few days.

Fabric bags for potatos, sweet and regular.  

I followed the directions for growing sweet potato slips to the letter and we also had dozens of potatos that had grown eyes that I cut up, let dry a bit and then planted. I also filled the bags exactly right: straw, loose soil, straw and loose soil only about 5" deep and as the tato greenery got bigger I topped up the bag until the bags were full.  I tried two different sizes, the sweet potatos in three 25 gallon bags and the regular tatos in five 15 gallon bags.  Here is the sum total of the sweet potatos: 

I think I showed a picture a few weeks ago of all the red and russet potatos that grew.  There were about 30 or so, all around 1" diameter, though otherwise perfectly shaped and tasty--just not worth the real estate they took up.  Generally, I've seen a lot of people online saying that they couldn't grow potatos in our area of the country--it just wasn't hot enough for enough days.  Also, on the cooler days, it was usually clouded over.

So I think I am bored with potatos of all kinds, and will not do that again.  I am seeing a lot of damage done to the tomatos (someone is eating exactly 1/3 of every large green tomato I see growing) and I had the brilliant idea of growing THOSE in the fabric bags on the balcony, where it is piping hot all summer long and the ground hogs cannot possibly get to them.  Plus, with the amazing solar panel watering system, I can ignore them for weeks on end. (I cannot rave about solar powered watering systems enough.)

Fabric bags:  in short, I think they are ok (they certainly make dumping the bags out and reusing the soil again easy) so I will give them one more shot.  If a balcony-load of fabric bags gives us no tomatos next summer, then the fabric bags are going to goodwill next Fall.

Straw bales in the front yard:

This photo was taken yesterday when it was sunny for about 5 minutes.  (It's completely clouded over today.)  In March, when I was trying to plan out a relatively easy way to start up a garden, I strongly suspected that the soil in the front yard would be polluted.  It's nearly impossible to grow anything in it except the hardiest weeds.  I know that copper and arsenic prevent plants from growing healthily and when we got our soil tested, those were the metals that showed up at alarmingly high levels.  So, it was either raised beds or straw bales.  The idea with the straw bales is that they are WAY cheaper than raised beds (they cost about $5 each whereas raised beds cost about $40 each (and then you have to buy the soil, too) and, if you want to build them (given current tarrifs on all lumber that comes from Canada--so, all lumber sold in the US), the cost would be simply impossible.  So I went with straw bales.  Besides being inexpensive, they also completely rot down over winter so you end up amending your soil--which I really wanted to do.  So I made two rows (I think 5 bales on each side) and put up the trellis (inexpensive cattle fencing--in general, if you buy from a hardware or DIY store, the prices are outrageous but if you buy stuff from a farm supply, the prices are really low).  Then you just put fertilizer on the bales until they start to compost, water regularly and let the seedlings do their thing.  It is a very hands-off system, which I wanted, as I don't like being in the front yard as it is noisy and hot.

Well, you can see the tomatos and basil, but everything is very runty--especially compared to the tomatos (same kinds) in the back yard, which are three times the size of these.  And everything is delayed a month or so: in the back yard, tomatos are big and just starting to turn orange.  In the front yard, it is mostly blossoms still.  I can't explain it, but there you go: the plants are lush and strong and there is not a sign of pest problems (ground hogs don't like the front yard either, it seems).   But I am not going to do this again.  I think in Fall I'll just cover the whole area with a tarp, let it "cook" over winter and next year try growing "cut flowers" (annuals that bloom by the billions of you cut off the flowers as they bloom to urge more flowers to grow). I doubt cut flowers need perfect soil.  We shall see.  I think pollinators may dare use the front yard if there are a lot of flowers there. (Though maybe not--I never see bees or butterflies in the front yard--I don't even see birds there).  

You can just see the bit of black tarp in the upper left side where I have covered over about half the front yard that is mostly shaded.  It gets sun from about 11 am until 3 or so and then the trees shade it.  So I'm going to be trying to grow dry/shade things there next year.  Hostas are super easy to grow here and we never get slugs or snails (don't know why, but I have probably seen four or five tiny ones in all the years I have lived here but I think our possums (of which we have a LOT) eat them. Also, we have a skunk family that moves into our garage in the winter (I don't know where they live in the summer--probably camp in bushes) and I skunks eat snails, too. If only ground hogs were that USEFUL.