Bath
In 1971, Hammer Studios put out Countess Dracula, starring Ingrid Pitt as an old aristocrat who accidentally discovers an age-reversing technique after pummeling a servant girl. Blood from a cut on the girl's face gets onto Countess Elisabeth's cheek. The cheek takes on a rosy hue. She has the girl brought to her, kills her, drains the blood out and emerges young and beautiful. This begins a twisted health craze, urged along by her attraction to a young nobleman who, like most others, believes she is the Countess's daughter (played by a young Leslie Anne Down). The daughter, on her mother's orders, has been kidnapped and held captive by a mute idiot. The Countess goes so far as to convince everyone not in the know that her daughter was killed in a flood while on her way for a visit with her mother. That she's willing to treat her daughter like this indicates the degree of her immorality, something long suspected in the town. The Countess is regarded as a servant of the Devil, a witch, a descendent of a seven-headed dragon, any number of supernatural identities. She's really just a desperate woman who, like Snow White's adversary, seeks to keep her youth against all obstacles.
There was a Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Bàthory de Ecsed (1560-1614), who tortured and murdered hundreds of women over a nineteen year span. After her trial, she was bricked into a cell with slits to pass food and whatever else back and forth. She spent the last four years of her life in there, a worse fate, actually, than Countess Dracula's, who, once caught, receives swift justice.
The strongest piece of this sometimes too ponderous film is Ingrid Pitt's performance. She spends a lot of the film in heavy makeup, playing the old version of the Countess, whose despair and pathetic nature combines disturbingly with cruelty. She's convincing as a nasty and wealthy old woman who treats her subjects like pieces of food to feed upon and then throw away. Corpses pile up, townspeople sometimes come across loved ones drained of blood. A miasma of despond and paranoia grows in the community. One scene with two children happily playing in the woods and then finding a dead gypsy girl (the Countess's second victim) is particularly effective, showing
innocence confronted with what must appear as senseless violence.
There is, however, sense to the mayhem, for the Countess will chew up the world to gratify her need. She isn't a vampire as the title suggests, but someone bathing in the blood of others to elevate herself, to recover a youth she once had. Her evil stems from depriving others of their youth.
Ingrid Pitt, of Polish and German origin, is the only movie star I'm aware of who survived a Nazi concentration camp. It could be that what she witnessed there from 1942 to 1945 provided her with an understanding of power as it's used to control the powerless. Her depiction of the Countess, despite the film's anti-scientific motif, remains a remarkable and strong performance exploring some of the contours of a psychopathic personality who's also an authority figure.
Vic Neptune
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