Countess Dracula

Countess Dracula, written by Jeremy Paul and directed by Peter Sasdy, is the vampire myth explicitly reorganised along class lines. jettisoning well-heeled foreigners and smoky seductions to focus on structural power imbalances and how the rich and influential can literally prey upon their social inferiors. Ingrid Pitt plays Countess Elisabeth Nadasdy, an ageing and recently bereaved aristocrat who, quite accidentally, discovers that she can recapture her looks if she treats her skin with the blood of young women. Nadasdy, and her court of browbeaten servants and assorted hangers-on, see no crime or even moral complication in these actions. These innocent, virginal, women (some barely more than children) are fulfilling the function they have been 'bred' for - they serve their master to an ultimate degree. 

Sasdy's film is hilariously callous even in its opening moments - on her way home from her husband's funeral, the Countess' carriage crushes a starving peasant beneath its wheels, his shattered body left in the street for his weeping wife and children to discover. Similarly, the Countess' older, latterly cuckolded, lover (himself the other man in Elisabeth's marriage) isn't the least bit concerned about her bloodlust, he's more focused on getting some assurance that he will get his turn with a rejuvenated Nadasdy. In the midst of this hard-hearted feudalism a sense of grim acceptance and even collaboration is ever present. Leon Lissek's well-fed bailiff posts up in the castle kitchens, shouting down any hint of insurrection, telling his fellow serfs to be not just satisfied but appreciative of their defeated lot. This impotent sense of discontent pulses through the film, offset by Pitt's painstakingly plotted binges. 

Obviously Pitt carries Countess Dracula, the actress managing to transmit a mixture of venom and thwarted desire from underneath an increasingly distorted, and plastic looking, hag's mask. Despite breakneck transformations - back-and-forth - between mouldering widow and enchantress, Pitt clearly establishes a consistent, flirtatious, persona, one that, quite apparently, the Countess has never been able to fully embrace. Pitt radiates excitement, literally drunk on the colour that her character has drained from the rest of the cast. Pointedly, her coquettishness is embraced when she is youthful but deliberately ignored when she reverts to her dotage. Sandor Elès' Lieutenant Toth, summoned as an age appropriate suitor for Elisabeth's daughter, remains her preferred target throughout, the pleasant but dim-witted man anonymously appraised through a mourning veil while Elisabeth's husband is being committed to the ground. Toth little more than an accessory in an increasingly manic, thrashing, tantrum against the passage of time itself.