In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Still trying valiantly to catch up, here...


1. Marcus Sedgwick (2006), My Swordhand is Singing - a YA novel set in seventeenth-century Transylvania and drawing deeply on local vampire and other folklore. The protagonist, a teenage boy named Peter, has to deal with his alcoholic, troubled father, the cold and poverty of life as a woodcutter in a Transylvanian forest, his feelings for two different girls and of course corpses rising from their graves. My main abiding impressions are of snowy forests, a night in a hut besieged by a vampire, and the family horse, Sultan, who is as much of a character as any of the humans in the book.

2. Tim Lucas (2005), The Book of Renfield: a gospel of Dracula - an attempt at giving Renfield a fully fleshed-out backstory explaining his life and character beyond what Stoker includes in Dracula. In essence, he's been being visited by a divine/demonic being whom he knows as Milady, and we later learn also manifests as Dracula, since his childhood. It engages very closely with Stoker's novel, using an epistolary format and incorporating chunks of the original text (printed in bold type to identify them). But I must say it isn't the backstory I'd have written for Renfield, and in particular I wouldn't have made Dracula so straightforwardly godlike. Some subtlety was lost, there.

3. William Trimble, ed. and Anna Berglund, trans. (2022), Powers of Darkness: the wild translation of Dracula from turn-of-the-century Sweden (read on Kindle) - this is the full, original, free adaptation of Dracula which the Icelandic version found a few years ago turned out to be only about the first third of. It's as much a completely different story as the loosest screen adaptations of Stoker's novel, in that although it does still cover its major outlines, it goes to some completely different places, and ends with Draculitz's (i.e. Dracula's) destruction in London rather than after a chase back to Transylvania. I can't begin to go into detail about it here, and indeed wrote a comparative review of this and the other English translation by Rickard Berghorn released a couple of months afterwards for the Dracula Society zine, Voices from the Vaults anyway, so my thoughts are on record elsewhere. But it was certainly an intriguing read, if not exactly brilliant literature. It's basically hastily thrown-together pulp fiction, padded out with passages borrowed from multiple sources (not just Stoker) and markedly interested in theories of evolutionary degeneration and the supremacy of a superior race. Not unusual stuff for the turn of the century. It will be interesting to see if anyone ever manages to solve the mystery of who wrote it, but a mistake to assume (as several people working on the question have) that the author would be the same person as the author of any of the texts which were plagiarised in the process.

4. Jeanne Kalogridis (1994) Covenant with the Vampire - not recommended. The essential set-up is that the main character and his wife return from nineteenth-century England to his ancestral home in Transylvania, where they are frustratingly slow to realise that the great-uncle and patriarch is a vampire (specifically, of course, Dracula). Later on, it transpires that the family covenant requires the latest male heir, now the main character, to help the vampire cover up his killings in return for him and his own family being protected. In fairness, once this comes out, the very dull process of slow realisation is replaced by a great deal of gory and transgressive detail, including dismemberments, incest and necrophilia. Let's just say that I really did not want to read the word 'thrusting' in that latter context.

5. Jim Shepard (1998) Nosferatu in Love - I picked this out of a box of books being given away by a colleague moving to another university, and it's absolutely the best book I read this year. It might as well be called 'Murnau in Love', as it's the story of his loves and losses over his lifetime - particularly Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele. The main narrative covers Murnau's youth in Berlin, the production of Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann and Tabu, before a coda returning to 1915 and then his death in 1931. It's lightly unconventional in style without being overly mannered, in that it starts off in the third person, then switches to first-person diary entries from Murnau while shooting Nosferatu, and then moves between the two in the section on Tabu. Its characterisation is great and it's highly readable, but it's also extremely insightful about how silent film works and what it can do, on a level I'd usually expect to encounter in an academic book on film rather than a novel. E.g. in Murnau's diary entries: "We're no longer astonished by the technically unheard-of. We're surprised on those days the newspaper does not trumpet new breakthroughs. So we look for the fantastic within ourselves. We notice the child or the dog who walks to the mirror, caught by the miracle of the doubled face. We wonder: If this second self, the Other, were to come out of the mirror's frame?...." and "For the vampire's arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience." It of course also captures the context of Germany in the 1910s and '20s, including the First World War, post-war inflation, and growing antisemitism (e.g. Murnau and his classmates at Reinhardt's theatre school defend a Jewish student against an instructor's prejudices), and tries to show how some of this shaped Murnau as a film-maker. In flying school at the beginning of the war, Murnau begins to think about the implications for film of a moving perspective, like a plane flying through and across the landscape, and later develops camera tracks to try to replicate it for Der Letzte Mann. But the main impacts for him are of course the losses he experiences: "The war was drinking the blood of millions. Allmenröder was gone. Hans was gone. The war had taken his partner in sadness and, before that, his lover." Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Murnau's films.

6. Robert Aickman, ed. (1966), The Third Fontana Book of Ghost Stories - bought serendipitously at an instance of the Leeds Alternative Market (a biannual goth market) because it was edited by Aickman and contains a story by him. I read it in the run-up to Christmas, because I like to make a point of reading compilations of ghost stories around that time of year, and discovered in the final few pages that the last story (Aickman's, 'The Visiting Star') actually culminates on Christmas Eve - though I think I ended up reading it on Boxing Day or something like that instead. Just the ticket.

7. Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac (2012), The Theology of Dracula: reading the book of Stoker as sacred text - argh, this book was so frustrating! I bought it because I could see from Google that it had quite a lot to say about the references to Classical deities in Dracula (Demeter, Morpheus etc), and I wanted to read it for my Classical references in Dracula paper. It gives more attention to that material than any other publication on Dracula that I've seen, and contains some good insights. It also deals with various earlier vampire stories, especially the various theatrical and operatic adaptations of Polidori's 'The Vampyre', and makes good points about their pagan and mystical elements too. But unfortunately the author totally undermines the value of those points by writing throughout as though his reading of the text is a profound revealed truth. Basically, almost every sentence is like this, and it very quickly becomes unbearable: "Feet planted on the Earth, silhouetted against a darkening night sky that glitters with its brilliant inhabitants, crushed serpent, Little Dragon, at her feet, Mina presents an Isaian or Marian figure and returns the narrative to its beginning and the rosary." I would have abandoned it half-way through, except that I had to read so much of it for my paper that it then became a sunk-cost issue, and I persisted out of sheer bloody-mindedness so that I could say I'd finished it.

In a further effort to clear the review slate, here are the books which I read in 2020 but haven't reviewed and am clearly now not going to.


9. Ali Riza Seyfioğlu (1928), Kazıklı Voyvoda / Dracula in Istanbul, trans Necip Ateş (2017) - like the Swedish and Icelandic versions, this is a bootleg of Stoker's Dracula, published within Florence Stoker's lifetime, but quite clearly without her knowledge, and is the source text for the film Drakula İstanbul'da (1953; LJ / DW). I think what I like about it best is that because it was written from a Turkish perspective and the Turks know all about the Impaler Prince who gave Mehmed II a kicking, Dracula in this version absolutely is Vlad Dracula the Wallachian voivode, or Kazıklı Bey as the Turks called him, with no ambiguity about it.

10. Michele Slung (1993), Shudder Again - bought for the story 'When The Red Storm Comes' by Sarah Smith, which is about a young woman living in a seaside town shortly before the First World War who is made into a vampire by a dashing gentleman who shows her visions of the approaching future calamity from which she will now be safe. It was OK, but not quite as 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' as I'd hoped when I heard it described at a conference. The rest is a mixed collection of short stories from different eras, all broadly horror but ranging between serial killers, gothic horrors, and the generally disturbing, with a central theme of being in some way about the relationship between sex and death. One was Robert Aickman's 'Ravissante', about a painter's surreal visit to the home of a Belgian symbolist painter's elderly wife which is probably all a big metaphor for the narrator's subconscious and has a framing device as a found document.

11. Anonymous author for Galley Press (1981), The Dracula Collection - basically a collection of fairly low-rent vampire images, including the one of Louis de Pointe du Lac holding a candelabra used for the cover of the edition of Interview with the Vampire which I have, and strung together with a narrative about Dracula showing a curious human visitor to his castle around his family portrait gallery. But the framing narrative includes some great scenes where the narrator has to imbibe strange substances, enter into and travel through another dimension in order to reach Dracula's castle. A surprisingly compelling fantastical narrative for something I had zero expectations of, and which my friend S had found for me in a charity shop.

38. Death Line (1972), dir. Gary Sherman

This is a firm favourite which I've written about in detail before (LJ / DW). I still very much stand by that previous review and indeed can only add minor points to it. One is a nice piece of narrative construction which I don't think I'd previously noticed. At the start of the film, the reason there is a policeman around in the underground station at all to approach for help when the young couple find James Manfred, OBE, unconscious on the platform is precisely because of his actions in the previous scene, as the copper is talking to the sex worker whom Manfred had propositioned before being attacked. Another is that the last surviving tunnel-dweller only says the words "mind the doors" to surface-dwellers, not for example his fellow tunnel-dweller who dies part-way through the story. So it's not just that that is the only English-language phrase he knows how to say, and which he uses in all situations - he specifically thinks of it as 'their' language, and is trying to use it in the appropriate context to communicate with them. It's another example of the very thoughtful and humanising characterisation used to create him.

The only small plot issue which niggles at me with this film is the question of when exactly the survivors of the original roof-fall broke back through the blockage, allowing the man we see in the present day to get through to the platforms and attack his victims. You would assume that if it had happened while any of the original generation of construction workers were still alive, they would have wanted to come out and return to normal life rather than stay underground, but it's also rather hard to believe that digging their way out would have taken that long, as it really doesn't appear to be a very large roof-fall in the film. The best explanation I can come up with is that they had been there long enough to have become so disillusioned with the society which had caused the fall and then abandoned them that they chose not to return to it. In that scenario, the main motivation for digging through the roof-fall would have been (or become if it wasn't initially) simply to reach a food source, rather than to escape.


39. Therapy for a Vampire (2014), dir. David Ruehm

I'd never heard of this film until Joel suggested watching it, but it's really lovely and was well worthwhile. It's a horror comedy about a vampire in 1930s Vienna who goes to Sigmund Freud for therapy. He's unhappy with his marriage, largely because his wife is driven mad by her inability to see her own face in the mirror and desperate for any kind of reassurance that she is still beautiful. Sigmund offers the services of a struggling young artist to paint her portrait, but the vampire is more interested in the painter's girlfriend. This is for a reason which I often find annoying, in that she is the reincarnation of his lost love, Nadilla, who died centuries earlier. However, in this context it's a trope which is knowingly undermined, so it was all part of the film's lightly-satirical approach to its subject matter. The story overall is quite touching, and it's very nicely shot, with a slightly fantastical style achieved via strong colours and contrasts and well designed sets. Some scenes even struck me as not just coincidentally being set in the same city, but deliberately designed to recall The Third Man, such as the cafe where the girlfriend works and a street fountain.


40. The Invitation (2022), dir. Jessica M. Thompson

Seen with Joel at The Light, using some free Vue cinema vouchers which are one of a choice of perks you can get with the bank account I have. Briefly, the heroine, Evie, is American, and working in temporary catering placements when the story begins. She discovers via a DNA test that she has English relatives, who prove to be an aristocratic family and invite her over to their mansion at their expense for a wedding. There, she meets the supposedly extremely attractive (but actually hugely skeevy) head of the household, Walter De Ville, but soon also begins having scary and unexplained experiences. It turns out he's a vampire, and she has been brought over to be converted into a vampire herself and complete his coven of three brides.

It's supposedly 'inspired by Dracula', which was why we went to see it, and in fairness there are plenty of references to Stoker's novel. One branch of the family is called the Billingtons and are lawyers from Whitby; the name De Ville is used by Dracula as a pseudonym; he also mentions that he was once known as Son of the Dragon; and lines from the novel (or close paraphrases of them) crop up periodically (e.g. "Tonight is mine, tomorrow is yours"). The basic set-up in which a mixed-race, working-class American woman gets to defeat a load of literally and metaphorically vampiric British aristocrats is obviously also good fun.

However, it spends rather too much time lingering over the rom-com it's initially supposed to appear to be rather than getting on to the vampirism. The plot set-up means it kind of has to, because if Evie really understood her true situation at any time before the wedding feast where it is finally revealed, she would obviously never have agreed to go into the room. So to preserve that big moment of revelation, as the producers obviously wanted to, she can only experience a few relatively minor doubts and concerns before that point - hence being stuck in boring rom-com mode for too long before going from zero to full blast on the horror. It's also just extremely unsubtle in almost every respect. The Dracula references are all repeated multiple times, Walter De Ville is blatantly villain-coded from his very first appearance, and it's full of jump scares rather than tension and atmosphere.

But what all that comes down to saying is that it was not produced for us, seasoned horror-viewers and massive Dracula geeks. It was made for the other people who were there in the cinema auditorium with us - c. twenty-year-olds with no particularly strong adherence to the horror genre. Whether it actually worked for them, I don't really know, but I guess for us it did at least assuage our curiosity about the latest entry in the ever-expanding universe of Dracula-inspired narratives. Lord knows, I have seen plenty of shitty films in my time in pursuit of that goal!

I rewatched Nosferatu in May ahead of the World Dracula Day lecture I gave (LJ / DW), because this year marks the centenary of its release and I’d themed my talk around a series of such vampire-related anniversaries. I’d wanted to watch it at some point this year anyway, as I will be going to Slovakia with DracSoc at the end of August on a primarily Nosferatu-themed trip which will encompass Orava Castle (the location used for Orlok’s castle), so that killed two birds with one stone. Many of the thoughts and responses I had on watching it went into my lecture, but it’s a very rich film, so the process of watching it and reading up on it to prepare the lecture left me a bunch of surplus thoughts which didn’t have a place in the lecture. This post is mainly about capturing those.

( The film's survival history )

( Echoes of epistolarity )

( Ellen )

( Editorial cuts )

( Antisemitism )

( Influence on Hammer )

Right then, I think I might finally have written down everything I wanted to say about Nosferatu – for the time being, anyway! Next stop Orava Castle! 😍😍😍

I don't think I've even mentioned this here yet due to being busy with other things, but I have agreed to give a lecture in Bradford on 26 May to mark World Dracula Day. As it's the 125th anniversary of the publication of Stoker's novel, I'm going to lean into the theme and talk about how Stoker himself uses temporal resonances in the novel, and then about how people have responded to it since its publication in 25-year snap-shots, and how they have made use of round-number anniversaries in their own right. It's something I should be on pretty solid ground with, between my knowledge of vampire film and literature and all the thinking I've done about anniversaries and how they work in the context of my work on Augustus.

Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching ( this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night )

Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...


Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.

Onwards with the Cellar Club tweet-alongs... Films 6 to 9 of 2022 were a bunch of Hammer vampire rewatches connected with the live webcast I did about them, and I wrote those up separately at the time (LJ / DW). So this entry covers 10 onwards.

( 10. Burnt Offerings (1961), dir. Dan Curtis, broadcast 18 February )

( 11. Theatre of Blood (1973), dir. Douglas Hickox, broadcast 25 February )

( 12. Scream and Scream Again (1970), dir. Gordon Hessler, broadcast 25 February )

( 13. Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 11 March )

( 14. The Vampire Lovers (1970), dir. Roy Ward Baker, broadcast 18 March )

( 15. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), dir. Curtis Harrington, broadcast 25 March )

( 16. The Return of Count Yorga (1971), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 1 April )

( 17. The House of the Long Shadows (1983), dir. Pete Walker, broadcast 15 April )

YES I DID IT! 🥳 I am now up to date on my film write-ups. Just a honkin' great pile of books to tackle... 😬

It's been a lovely weekend. I've done some errands, gone shopping, lounged about in lady_lugosi1313's garden, worked out some ideas for a lecture on Dracula I've been asked to deliver, eaten some lovely food and of course live-tweeted the latest Cellar Club film. Just the kinda stuff a girl can do when she's no longer devoting all her evenings and weekends to a largely hopeless cause! Anyway, talking of live-tweeting, I thought I'd get another few Twitter threads down here.

( 18. Sing-along-a-Wicker-Man in Sheffield, 20 November )

( 19. Island of Terror (1966), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 26 November )

( 20. A Candle for the Devil (1973), dir. Eugenio Martín, broadcast 10 December )

In September 2021, Talking Pictures TV launched the Cellar Club, a Friday-night horror / SF triple-bill introduced and hosted by Caroline Munro. Usually they start with a good solid classic, followed up by two more films which are - shall we say? - usually more deservedly obscure. For the first three weeks, the top-billed movies were Hammer's Golden Trinity: The Mummy, Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein (working through them in backwards chronological order of production for some reason). Combined with Caroline Munro hosting them, of course I was going to make the effort to watch those live. And, as I could see that lots of my friends were also talking about them excitedly on Twitter, somehow it felt right to live-tweet them during broadcast.

I don't usually live-tweet films. It's not really a great way to watch a film you haven't seen before, because half the time your eyes are on your device rather than the TV, so you miss visual details and quite often plot points too as you write about the last thing which happened. But I gradually realised there was a whole community of people watching and live-tweeting the top-billed Cellar Club film each week, led by the TheFilmCrowd account. Soon I was not just tweeting my own thoughts into the void, but engaging with other people's and getting feedback on mine. So, although it's still not how I would watch a film I really wanted to engage with deeply, I've come to consider it a different but fun way of watching in its own right. I've also made a bunch of new Twitter friends that way and really enjoyed interacting with them, including between the live-tweets.

The whole thing has posed a problem for the way I record my film viewing in this journal, though. I've been writing at least something here for every film I've watched since 2007. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it absolutely definitely means I don't watch as many films as I might if I didn't do it, because the 'cost' of watching any film is that I have to write an LJ / DW post about it. Although I tried to set a rule at the beginning that they didn't have to be extensive reviews, and just a record and quick reaction would be fine, that simply isn't what I'm like. I always have a lot of thoughts I want to record, which in turn becomes a burden. On the other hand, though, the knowledge that I'll need to write something down after watching has definitely made me more attentive to what I see, and the regular practice of articulating my thoughts has probably made me a better film critic. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why my Cellar Club live-tweets ended up getting me invited onto a live webcast to discuss Hammer films on Sunday.

But I've been struggling with what to do about the fact that I've been gaily watching all these films, and without yet 'writing up' a single one here. Initially I told myself these views 'didn't count', because I wasn't watching 'properly' (due to looking at my device half the time), and at least initially had seen the films before so had written up 'proper' reviews here on earlier occasions anyway. But increasingly as the Cellar Club moved onto films I hadn't seen before, including some I'd been meaning to watch for a while, that position has become unsatisfactory. And in any case, the very nature of the whole thing means that I do have a written record of each film anyway. That's what the live-tweets are! They just aren't here.

So, all this is by way of saying that I'm now going to perform the rather tedious (probably for both me and my subscribers) task of importing the content of these threads here, so that I can integrate them into the record of my other LJ / DW write-ups. Thankfully, every live-tweet is neatly threaded - something I did in the first place mainly to avoid swamping followers who weren't interested with a barrage of tweets about a movie they weren't watching. So my plan in each case is to link directly to the first tweet in the thread, which will mean I can see them again easily in their original context in future. But I'm also (this is the most tedious bit for me) going to copy and paste the content of each individual thread into the body of an LJ / DW entry, so that I don't have to go to Twitter for the details, and indeed I have an independent record in case some day Twitter ceases to exist. (More likely for LJ at the moment, but that's why I also use DW.)

Some of the individual tweets won't make sense any more out of context, even to me, but that's the nature of the thing. I reserve the right to quietly correct typos, break hashtags which I don't want LJ to replicate or insert editorial comments where I can remember the context and want to clarify it, and indeed to include a paragraph of prelude or commentary where I want to say a bit more here than was included in the original thread. It'll take a few entries over a few weeks, so sorry for the spamminess while that's happening. Each thread will always be under a cut anyway, so hopefully not too annoying. And then once I've brought things up to date, I can just keep up the habit on a weekly-or-less-frequent basis, and I'll be back to business as usual but with a better record of my film viewing. Phew!

( 12. The Mummy (1959), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 3 September )

( 13. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 10 September )

( 14. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 17 September )

OK, that wasn't too bad actually. I think I can catch up in this way reasonably quickly. Probably not this week, as I'm going to Oxford on Thursday and need to pack for that tomorrow evening. But judging by this first experiment, it seems feasible and a reasonable compromise for the sake of my record-keeping. Cool.

Hey there, LJ / DW. I did All The Things for a few weeks there, and I am really not sure how I will ever get you caught up on it all. But let's have a go at writing about just one Thing - going to see Spartacus on a frankly ENORMOUS screen at the National Media Museum's Widescreen Weekend with HickeyWriter.

It looked SO GOOD. It was the 2015 restoration, which not only included all the deleted footage put back in 1991 (oysters, snails and all), but had clearly been carefully visually cleaned up as well. It was incredibly crisp, bursting with colour and detail, and sometimes almost looked like it was in 3D when there was something prominent in the foreground and the camera was moving round to track something in the middle distance. It really showed off the epic scale of the closing battle scenes as well. I had a go at counting the numbers of Roman soldiers by row and by column as they performed their opening manoeuvres before Spartacus' forces, and realised to my astonishment that I was looking at easily 20,000 people on that side alone. The spectacle of them all filing into lines and presenting shields in perfect synchronicity was genuinely awe-inspiring, and really helped me to understand the psychological impact such displays must have had on opposing forces in antiquity. On the other hand, the big-screen experience perhaps revealed more than a small one might that the editing and continuity left some room for improvement. People having conversations with each other were often visibly in completely different positions when the camera cut between shots seen from the front and behind, while the final few scenes revealed the remarkable colour-changing properties of Varinia's baby's hair.

I am not going to say much about the plot or its political resonances, all of which is well-documented, but it did really strike me how we are carefully shown enslaved women and children in the gladiatorial school, not to mention a very diverse range in Spartacus' roaming troupe, including elderly people and a dwarf. We're left in no doubt of the wide-ranging impact of slavery, or the inclusiveness of Spartacus' revolution, and this shows up in its logistics as well as its demographics. It's made very clear that weaving is as important to the revolutionary cause as fighting, with a role even for Antoninus the musicus. He seems to personify the (slightly apocryphal) quotation from Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

The art (wall-painting, statues, etc) and architecture are often a little anachronistic, but that's par for the course in screen depictions of antiquity. In fact, I found the inclusion of statuary from right up to the late antique period in the opening credits actually worked in a positive sense, in that it could be taken as signalling that the moral issues at the heart of the story remained in place throughout the Roman period - though that reading was then undermined by an opening narration suggesting that the coming of Christianity had helped to overthrow the tyranny of slavery, which it very much did not! In any case, the sets all looked broadly Roman at least, and some aspects of them were carefully researched and thoughtfully conceived. I had to suppress a squee at the sight of an hourglass-shaped millstone in the kitchen at Batiatus' gladiatorial school. Oh, and talking of Batiatus, Peter Ustinov really is just truly amazing in a film chock-full of great actors playing great characters. I understand he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in it, and it could not have been more deserved.

Although I've seen the film before, I've learnt a lot more about both late Republican politics and modern politics since then, so that political exchanges which had rather passed me by on previous watches struck closer to home this time. In some ways, this was irritating, because it opened up new dimensions of anachronism for me. For example, in the period when the action supposedly takes place, there was no such thing as a First General of the Republic (which is what Crassus is introduced as), a garrison of Rome (six cohorts of which Glabrus takes against Spartacus) or a governor of Aquitania (to whom Gracchus sends Batiatus and Varinia at the end of the film), which had not been conquered yet. Nor was there any prominent politician called Sempronius Gracchus. Rather, Laughton's character seems to be a sort of splice between Crassus' main opponent Pompey (whom he can't literally be because Pompey was away in Spain for most of the crisis) and Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the late-second-century BC populists. On the other hand, I was able to be forgiving about all this because I could also see how the politics of the Roman Republic was being used as an analogy for American politics, with Crassus as a Republican leader and Gracchus as his main opponent - perhaps an idealised Kennedy?

Although we didn't know this before we arrived, it happened that this film was the first screening of the Widescreem Weekend's 25th anniversary edition, so we got free drinks beforehand, free ice-creams in the intermission, and free cup-cakes to take home afterwards. Given how good the film itself was, I didn't need those perks to make for an excellent evening, but they certainly didn't hurt.