Paul Landres’ The Return of Dracula (1958) had the misfortune of opening just weeks before Hammer’s Dracula (1958) and, despite having many unquestionable charms of its own, Landres’ film was simply no competition and the film fell under the not inconsiderable shadow of Terence Fisher’s vivid, full-colour re-imagining of the tale. In the UK, perhaps to avoid confusion, The Return of Dracula was given the absurd new title The Fantastic Vanishing Man which made it sound more like an invisible man film than a vampire movie (it has also surfaced under its shooting title, The Curse of Dracula).
In Eastern Europe (a sign at a railway station appears to be written in Hungarian) a group of vampire hunters fail to kill their prey (Francis Lederer) who gives them the slip and boards a train. He murders the artist Bellac Gordal (Norbert Schiller), assumes his identity and continues his travels to America where he ingratiates himself into the household of the Mayberry family, who believe him to be their long lost cousin – mother Cora (Greta Granstedt), teenager Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) and young Mickey (Jimmy Baird). Rachel’s boyfriend Tim (Ray Stricklyn) is the only one suspicious of “Cousin Bellac’s” true identity who passes himself off as an artist with eccentric sleep patterns and turns his attentions to the blind Jennie (Virginia Vincent), a friend of Rachel’s. With an immigration official, Mack Bryant (an uncredited Charles Tannen) on his trail, Gordal vampirises Jennie and then sets his sights on the religious Rachel.
Screenwriter Pat Fielder was quite up front about how she’d borrowed the plot for The Return of Dracula from Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and you only have to be on nodding acquaintance with the Hitchcock film to spot the similarities. Yet despite the blatantly derivative nature of the film (Landres also does his own version of the “Lewton bus” – at least he stole from the best), The Return of Dracula has much to commend it, not least the moody photography from Jack MacKenzie (sometimes compromised by some money saving day-for-night filming) who brings with him some of the noir inflected creepiness he’d brought to Mark Robson’s Isle of the Dead (1945) and a glorious score from Gerald Fried. The script introduces a few innovations, most notably the creepy idea that the vampire’s victims can hear him talking to them though the audience can’t and Landres very briefly switches from black and white to lurid colour for when Jennie is staked in her coffin.
There are plenty of little flourishes like this that lift The Return of Dracula out of the usual rut – the callous moment when Gordal briefly restores Jennie’s sight before he kills her; the ghostly Jennie luring Bryant to his doom at the fangs of Gordal in his lupine form; the gang of vampire hunters who anxiously await the first rays of dawn before opening their prey’s coffin; and there’s something satisfyingly amusing that in this version, the Van Helsing character is an employee of the Department of Immigration, checking up on the vampire’s (illegal on many levels) status.
Despite the title, The vampire is never definitively identified as Dracula – the closest we get is when Merriman suggests that he’s “possibly Count Dracula himself.” In fact we never do find out his real name and by the time of his fateful encounter with those wooden stakes (you’d think he’d be a bit more careful than to set up shop near such an obvious death trap) we know no more about who is really is than we did at the start. But he’s nicely played by the Austrian-born Lederer who brings a touch of dignity and class to the role. Elsewhere, Norma Eberhardt and Ray Stricklyn are rather insipid juvenile leads though old hands Greta Granstedt and uncredited Charles Tannen are more fun. Virginia Vincent who plays the ill-fated Jennie later turned up as the Carter family matriarch in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
The Return of Dracula (or whoever he actually is…) is very much a B-movie but it’s a literate and engrossing one nonetheless and as a very modern vampire, the undead protagonist is an ancestor of the likes of Count Yorga (like one of Yorga’s brides, Gordal is desperate enough to feed on a cat in lieu of more substantial victims) and Blacula who would turn up a decade and a half later. It may be wholly derivative (the plot is not only lifted wholesale from Shadow of a Doubt but is largely a retelling of Bram Stoker’s original novel, though the author isn’t credited) and it was about to be made redundant within weeks of its release but in retrospect it’s a decent enough film that seems like a stepping stone from the Universal Dracula films to the more dynamic and sexier Hammer films.
Lederer played a vampire again, this one most definitely identified as Dracula, in the Night Gallery (1969-1973) episode The Devil is Not Mocked in which the Count regales his grandson with tales of how he fought the Nazis during World War II, an episode directed by Gene R. Kearney, writer of the excellent Games (1967) and the very far from excellent Night of the Lepus (1972).
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