The "movies Cop watches"-thread...

Still, he should've quit while he was ahead ...

What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire. There have been so many Draculas (Bela Lugosi played him three times, Christopher Lee five) that the tragic origins of the character have been lost among the gravestones, the fangs and all those black cloaks. This “Dracula” restores the character to the purity of its first film appearances, in F.W. Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu" and Bela Lugosi's 1931 version.

It achieves that in two ways. First, through the Frank Langella performance. I didn't see his Broadway “Dracula”, but the long stage run must have given him the opportunity to think more deeply about the strange character he was playing. Most of the previous Draculas we carry in our imaginations share two things: fangs and overacting. They come on so strong that potential victims shouldn't let them within yards of their necks. Frank Langella gives us a character who “acts” as if he's a count: He has royal manners, he is irresistibly attractive to women, he would have impeccable table manners if only, of course, it were not forbidden for him to eat.