Francis Durbridge Presents: Bat Out Of Hell (Alan Bromly, 1966)

Author and playwright Francis Durbridge may be best known for his creation Paul Temple - the iconic dilettante crime author-cum-detective whose adventures (alongside his faithful other half 'Steve') have been portrayed in print and on the radio, as well as the screen large and small - but was also the author of a prolific amount of other, non-Temple related serials for radio and television.

Broadcast in five instalments of twenty-five minute episodes from November 26th to December 24th (a nice bit of a thriller for a cold Christmas Eve) 1966 on the only two years old BBC 2, our taut little tale Bat Out of Hell (the late Meat Loaf not included) begins with an establishing scene of Ibsenesque upper middle class domestic disharmony - the sniping betraying the animosity boiling beneath the genteel veneer of respectability - as we are introduced to the Stewarts; Geoffrey (Noel Johnson, a familiar face to watchers of cult UK television and film - he was a star of both the original A for Andromeda as well its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough, a twice Doctor Who guest star as King Thous of Atlantis in 'The Underwater Menace' and the treacherous Sir Charles Grover of Operation Golden Age in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' as well as the Judge in Pete Walker's Frightmare and the gin-sodden General in Bruce Robinson's seminal and semen-stained Withnail and I; away from the screen he was a familiar voice on radio as Dick Barton) and Diana (Sylvia Syms - I don't really have to tell you who she was, do I?  Oh all right, she was Sister Diana from J. Lee Thompson's wartime ambulance frolic Ice Cold in Alex, Sister Mitya in Ralph Thomas's Conspiracy of Hearts, Mrs Crosby in Michael Winner's Dirty Weekend and Margaret in Martin Clunes vehicle Staggered.  She may have have been more proud of some of those than others.  Of course, she was also a guest star in Doctor Who, essaying the role of Mrs Pritchard in the wonderful 'Ghost Light').  Our couple are locking horns whilst getting ready for a trip away to Cannes, and Geoffrey's employee Mark Paxton (Morse himself, John Thaw, star of not only Inspector Morse and The Sweeney but also Edgar Wallace second-stringers Five to One and Dead Man's Chest, Home to Roost, the definitive Sherlock Holmes Jeremy Brett's version of The Sign of Four as the maniacal monopod Jonathan Small, and the frustratingly elusive Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition which I've still not managed to track down after a decade of trying) calls in to lend a hand and new packing case for the trip.

Before leaving for their holiday, Geoffrey visits Ned Tallboy (Stanley Meadows, who had small roles in Hammer's 1959 The Mummy and Vincent Price's 1964 The Masque of the Red Death before starring in Montgomery Tully's 1967 sci-fi romp The Terrornauts) to confirm their lift to the airport before going to the office to be told by Paxton that a long-vacant country house has found a prospective purchaser and so the businessman - in his suit and tie - goes out to the lonely property and explores the empty edifice until he runs across his erstwhile employee who is waiting for him with a gun.  Mark and Diana have been engaged in an illicit affair you see, and this is their chance.  Shooting Geoffrey and bundling his body into the car, Mark tells Diana that he plans to dump the body in some roadworks which are being filled in with concrete in the morning: her husband will never be found.  Dutifully reporting her husband's absence to the authorities, she is paid a visit by the genial-seeming policeman Inspector Clay (Dudley Foster, another familiar face in vintage telefantasy being jarringly-named space pirate Maurice Caven in Doctor Who's 'The Space Pirates' as well as  guesting in the original '50s Invisible Man, three instalments of The Avengers, and episodes of Danger Man, Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased and Jason King before his sad suicide at the age of only 48) who says that her missing spouse will be looked into - then Diana receives a phone call from a familiar-sounding voice and Mark finds that the corpse has vanished from the vehicle.  This is truly Diabolique-al.  Contacted by Clay to say a body has been found in the roadworks, Diana dutifully identifies the unknown body as her husband as per the menacing telephone voice's instructions.

As paranoia mounts, Diana and Mark begins to panic and unravel under Inspector Clay's watchful gaze.  The Stewarts' family friends Thelma (June Ellis) and Walter Bowen (Emrys Jones, the Master of the Land of Fiction from 'The Mind Robber' as well as Robbie Ross in The Trials of Oscar Wilde) stop by, and Thelma passes on a cigarette vase that was in the pocket of Diana's mink coat that she took to get cleaned - a cigarette case that the shocked Mrs Stewart maintains that she has never seen before in her life, that is nonetheless inscribed:

"To Diana - who came like a bat out of hell.  Geoffrey."  About their wedding night, perhaps?  I  bet she did, you sly old dog.  I bet she did.

Walter warns that Inspector Clay might seem like "he doesn't know his arse from his elbow... but he does".  Perhaps like Babylon 5 no one here is exactly what they seem.  Diana follows more phone instructions from the purported 'Geoffrey' (via Thelma), making her way to the Chichester Motel against Mark's cautioning only to find Clay already there with a cadre of police: the bullet-riddled corpse of the actual kosher Geoffrey has been discovered there; meanwhile Mark is contacted by Miss Kitty Tracey (Patsy Smart, make an 'orse sick she would as the elderly ghoul in 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang') who says she knows what is going on - especially concerning the "bat out of hell"...

As Clay continues to question, it emerges that the dead man identified as Geoffrey was named Ken Harding, and that he was wearing Mr Stewart's clothes and carrying his wallet and notebook - the notebook bearing a number of monetary payments to a 'T' - as well as a note written in Italian translating to the same 'bat out of hell' inscription as on the cigarette case.  Paranoia and fear of blackmail from the cryptic Miss Tracey take Diana to her little shop on the high street, where she finds a bloodied knife and sees Thelma's body;  the shaken and not very merry widow's straightened state of mind is not helped when the very much alive Thelma turns up at her house with her her husband and the Inspector in tow.

Another unexpected complication and Mark ad Diana's otherwise damn fine plan arises in the sultry Italian form of Diana Valesco (Paddy Glynn), Geoffrey's secret side piece to whom he has left the bulk of his estate in his will prompting Paxton to bloody thoughts of murdering the doxy.  Plots, counterplots, suspicions and burning resentments begin to surface in a boiling web of mayhem that some of the antagonistic protagonists shan't make it out of alive.  But fear not, Clay is on the case.

This classic thriller, a somewhat forgotten  gem of '60s television, is currently being run in the UK on the Talking Pictures channel on Monday evenings, which is what finally prompted me to crack open and watch the DVD which I've had for about five years.

The presentation on the DVD from Danann Publishing (mmm... Danann) through Luxin is a beautiful restoration that really showcases the deft direction by Alan Bromly, a prolific TV veteran who also helmed the charming Diane Cilento fantasy The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1954) and was eventually driven to the point of a nervous breakdown - allegedly - by Tom Baker's booze-fuelled misbehaviour on the fraught set of 'Nightmare of Eden'.  A nightmare indeed.

Dracula in Istanbul ([Drakula Istanbul'da] Mehmet Muhtar, 1953)

Vamping all over the world.

It is perhaps appropriate that since the legends of vampires and associated blood-drinking monsters originated all across the globe - from the cradle of civilisation itself Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent stalked by Lilitu, Rabisu and Edimmu, to the Jiangshi, Aswang and Pontianak of the Far East - the cinematic vampire has also had a truly global career.

From the flickering shadows of the Expressionist Teutonic Lichtspielhaus (go on, you thought I'd use 'Kino' or 'Kinematograph', didn't you?) where F. W. Murnau unleashed Max Schreck's verminous ratkin Graf Orlok the protean undead spread across the silver screen to take shape in Italy in the bewitching guises of Gianna Maria Canale, Barbara Steele and Rosalba Neri; in Spain they were embodied (as were most famous monsters of Iberia) in the hulking form of Paul Naschy as well as the seductive guises of Britt Nichols, Patty Shepard and Emma Cohen; in Mexico the Cihuateteo and Tlahuelpuchi coalesced as German Robles, Eric del Castillo (as a side note: the guy who played the vampiric Baron Draculstein  [what a character name!] has had an amazing career of over 300 movies including Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel as well as a life as strange as fiction, such as his daughter Kate's controversial dealings with El Chapo) and Lorena Velazquez, then as David Alvizu and Aldo Monti to take on masked wrestling superheroes Santo and the Blue Demon in separate films.

The Gallic vampire beguiled in France and Belgium as Delphine Seyrig, Erika Blanc and eventually even Emmanuelle herself Sylia Kristel, whilst Jean Rollin beautifully photographed numerous nebulous nymphets in Sapphic embrace; across the oceans in distant Japan the golden-eyed kaijin Mori Kishida stalked dreamlike and nightmare-making through lake and school whilst the alluring Yukiko Kobayashi wafted ghostly and vengeful to murder her father; Lam Ching Ying valiantly fought the hopping revenants of China whilst Peter Cushing's Professor Van Helsing seemed oddly incongruous amidst the battle against the Seven Golden Vampires; in the jungles of Malaya Maria Menado, made magnificent by magic, slithered like a serpent to suck sanguineous spurts.

I have seen most - if not all - of the films referenced above, but in the vast sphere of non-Anglophone vampire films around the world there are a couple of note that I have for reasons passing understanding heretofore not gotten round to actually sitting down and watching.  The one we're doing today I've known of for many years; I think I first came across reference to it in David Pirie's highly recommended and invaluable to my inchoate adolescent self The Vampire Cinema.  I feel delighted I can now, at long last, tick it off the list.

Not that I made an actual list - I'm not quite that anal.  (Believe that and you'll probably believe in the vampire of Croglin Grange. I know that I do.)

Anyhow: 1953's Dracula in Istanbul shares its title with a book credited as being penned 'by Bram Stoker and Ali Riza Seyfioglu' - a "bootleg" - i.e.: unauthorised - novel published in 1928 under the title of Kazikli Voyvoda or The Impaling Voivode (or as it's referred to in the dodgily-subtitled credits Voyvoda, The Poker which I suppose gestures in the direction of conveying the same meaning) and the first to explicitly link the Transylvanian vampire Count with Prince Vlad III of Wallachia, alias Vlad the Impaler, and thus presenting Dracula not just as an undead menace but also the ancient enemy of the Turks.  Incidentally, the book was among the last to be published in the older Turkish alphabet before the sweeping reforms of November of 1928 making it - like the Count himself - the relic of a bygone age.  Seyfioglu, whose work was usually published under the shortened pen-name of Ali Riza, lifted the tale out of its usual Victorian Gothic milieu to the then-present and the film does likewise: beginning with shots of a steam train chugging into 'Bistric' (presumably a Turkicisation of Bistritz) station reminiscent of the opening scene of Jess Franco's 1970 adaptation of Stoker's novel where we meet our Jonathan Harker analogue Azmi (Bulent Oran) who, as standard, stays at the local hotel where the innkeeper and his wife give vague warnings about travelling on the night of the fourteenth of the month when strange spectres walk abroad.  Azmi is given a letter left for him by the client he is travelling to meet, prompting the startling line to the innkeeper's wife - surely a glitch in the translation of the subtitles - "Honey, who the hell is this Count Dracula?"  Who knew that when a Turkophone tries to communicate with someone whose primary language is Romanian, it is customary to default to Jive?

It's interesting, too, that the Transylvanian natives at the hotel are the only people we see crossing themselves - Romania being a majority Orthodox Christian country - while everyone else in the film is Muslim.  Engaging the services of the town's only motor car and its driver to convey him to 'Vucabina' rather than Bukovina (probably another subtitler slip-up rather than the text substituting a made up Vasaria-style locale for a real life one), Azmi finds himself swept along in this sprightly roadster to the assigned pass where he is picked up  by the Count's coach - this time an actual horse-drawn carriage rather than a motor coach.  So far, so modernised for the early '50s Stoker,  The Count as coach driver doesn't really bother with disguising himself; where Max Schreck at least made an effort to cover his vulpine visage and Carlos Villarias was nose deep in muffler (even if his contemporary English language Universal Dracula Bela Lugosi didn't bother - though he at least donned a hat), Atif Kaptan's Count has but a top hat jauntily perched atop his bald bonce.

The ride in this phantom carriage conveys Azmi to the castle where he is greeted at the door (after a quick change, obviously; I've never thought of it before, but I find myself wondering what other rudimentary magic tricks Dracula can manage - balloon animals perhaps?) by the Count who politely greets him and offers to carry his bags up to his room with an enigmatic remark about ignoring the clock as "time has no meaning here".  Events play out in a similar fashion to the Stoker novel and sundry adaptations thereof, with Dracula serving Azmi/Harker a meal but excusing himself saying that he has already dined, praising the wolves howling outside the castle as "the music of the night", and so on.  Next morning, Azmi rises and begins to explore the seemingly deserted castle until he is accosted by the Count's hunchbacked servant Usak (Kadri Ogelman) - a peculiarly Universal horror addition to the mythos - who gives him the key to the Count's private library, where he finds a passageway and winding staircase leading to a dusty, long-unused room.  Ignoring the crookbacked chamberlain's enjoinder to not sleep anywhere in the castle but his own room he falls prone to the predations of a sole vampire bride - Sir Chris of Lee only had the one in Hammer's '58 version too; the 1950s was obviously a lean decade that could ill afford the full compliment of three Brides of Dracula - before being 'rescued' by the Count and returned to his room.  When Usak prevents Dracula from feasting on the sleeping solicitor by draping him with a garland of garlic, his bloodthirsty employer bites him instead before escaping through the window and performing his lizard crawl down the face of the castle wall, Spider-Man style - another cinematic first that wouldn't be seen again until Hammer's otherwise unremarkable Scars of Dracula in 1970.

The action then shifts from the mist-shrouded peaks of Carpathia to the bright lights of bustling '50s Istanbul where we meet Guzin Arsoy (Annie Ball), our Mina Murray equivalent, who instead of being a schoolmistress like her literary predecessor is a dancer in a burlesque review who has to worry about her absent husband and the wellbeing of her best friend Sadan (Ayfer Feray, as our Turkish Lucy Westenra) while dodging the amorous affections of greasy stage door Johnnies.  Getting away from the big city to stay at the country pile of Sadan (who appears in this version to be her cousin; unless her referring to Sadan's mother as "auntie" is a cultural thing with your elders in Turkey, I dunno) and her fiance Turan (Cahit Irgat, our Arthur Holmwood), Guzin frets about her missing significant other and so Sadan takes her for a walk to the seaside (this being Turkey's Whitby, complete with a vertiginous stone staircase in the open air) where the two young ladies - one blonde, one brunette like in Franco's version and the Ladybird book (yes, there was a Ladybird children's version of Dracula I read as a kid: it was great) - some across some seamen handling a large box.  This particular prodigious package is full of earth from a ship  from Romania - a vessel the mariners describe as cursed.  Once the Count is installed and firmly ensconced in the neighbouring environs, Sadan begins her somnabulistic nocturnal shenanigans once again to visit the vampire; family quack Dr Akif (Munir Ceyhan, as our surrogate Seward) is baffled by his patient's sudden anaemia and exhaustion.  As she fall prey to further nocturnal emissions from the grave, the muddled medic calls in a specialist.  Dr Nuri (Kemal Emin Bara) is our fearless vampire killer Van Helsing, and he quickly sets about trying to protect his Turkish patient by prescribing a blood transfusion from Turan and placing a garland of garlic around the sleeping girl's neck.  Alas, her fretting mother removes it leaving Sadan wide open to Drac's nightly attacks and she swiftly dies and rises again as the bloofer lady of the Bosphorus, predating upon local children.

While the Professor leads the expedition to open Sadan's tomb, Guzin receives a visit from the Count after Annie Ball treats the audience to a presumably extremely racy for early '50s Turkey bath scene (not a Turkish bath, but a bathtub in a Turkish film).  Sadan is dispatched via stake and decapitation after returning to her tomb at night (dropping the child she has brought back to feast upon and advancing on her betrothed very like Sadie Frost's Lucy in the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola joint), and Dracula attacks Guzin once again - saying "Tonight you will dance only for me!" before making a pianoforte preturnaturally play by itself whilst Guzin performs a Terpsichorean turn upon the stage.  Azmi tracks Drac back to his grave and ends his reign of blood by hammering a stake through his heart and using the slumbering cemetery keeper's knife to hack off his head.  We end with Azmi and Guzin settled back into normie matrimonial bliss, and an awful sub-sitcom joke about her cooking and him not being able to stand the stench of garlic any more.  Don't go to France, mate.

Considered a lost film for decades, it wasn't rediscovered until the 2000s and now can be found (in better condition and with far better translated subtitles than the copy I was working from) on Ed Glaser's wonderful Neon Harbor Youtube channel, and can stand proudly as a fine example of cross-cultural pollination and the first fanged foul fiend on film since Max Schreck's Graf Orlok, among such other innovations of the vampire cinema.

The Count is Un-Dead.  Long live the Count.  For the blood is the life, and what better and more appropriate time than Easter Sunday to rise from the grave?