Happy Birthday, Ingrid Pitt! Hammer Time and an Amicus Brief

Countess Dracula (1971) was the film that introduced me to Elizabet Bathory. I remember being disappointed as young teen that there was no Dracula to be found, but that disappointment changed when I laid eyes on Ingrid Pitt (and Nike Arrighi and Lesley-Anne Down). I also remember the “Hammer atmosphere” and its subtle web of a kind of dreaminess that both undermined and underscored the horrors in the film.

The first Hammer film I saw was a rerelease of The Horror of Dracula somewhere around 1966 or 1967. There were heaving bosoms, a riveting Count Dracula who said nothing because he didn’t need to, and his demise at the end that left me speechless. It would be a few years and then I’d catch Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Count Dracula, and The Brides of Dracula. 

Hammer films were fascinating in a different way from Universal’s horror films. They were sexier, sure, but it was the pacing, the acting, and that general state of some kind of dream logic at work, even when the story was fairly linear.

Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were the stars, the anchors, actually, in most of the films. But every so often, someone different would show up on screen who was magnetic in their own way, and in Countess Dracula, that person was Pitt.

Before Countess Dracula, though, was 1970’s The Vampire Lovers which I didn’t see until I was in my thirties and at the time, wasn’t grabbed by it. Then, years later, after reading LeFanu’s Carmilla, I saw it again and was completely entranced. Pitt’s performances in each film are quite different from one another. 

In Countess Dracula, she’s tasked with playing a middle-aged woman (who ages even more, and has to then adapt to playing even older) as well as her daughter. In The Vampire Lovers, she plays a vampire who is drawn to the young daughters of local aristocrats and fills her time in with terrorizing the village nearby. 

It’s arguable that playing Elizabet Bathory gave her more to chew on, but there’s a peculiar sang-froid as Marcilla/Carmilla Karnstein that lends her performance a sense that she could very well be undead. What plays against that is, of course, how robust Pitt genuinely appears. 

It’s fascinating to me how the vampire in cinema developed over the decades from Murnau’s Nosferatu to Browing’s Dracula and then to the current period under discussion. Max Shreck was no one’s idea of a seductive smoothie. Lugosi certainly was, and set the tone for Dracula as a man of the world and a link to Old Europe with all that might signal in the 1930s. 

But if we leapfrog to the ‘50s and ‘60s, we encounter Christopher Lee as a similar figure, but more layered and more dynamic. 

The distaff versions of vampires advanced along similar lines and while there might be similarities between Gloria Holden’s Marya Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter and Pitt as Carmilla, there is a similar progression to a more vibrant approach to the character. Pitt isn’t waiting around for food to come to her; she’s out to seduce and destroy and does so by playing everyone around her like so many fiddles.

Also, Pitt is a commanding presence. Holden was posh, and her turn in the 1936 film is an early exercise of minimalism, but Pitt is a force of nature. She might be undead, but she’s hungry and horny and sets in on her prey with a veritable lust for life. Funny, that.

As Bathory, she has far more to do. As the elder countess who discovers she can reverse aging by bathing in the blood of young women (and we find out soon enough that they have to be virgins, to boot, for the regression to work), she finds herself romancing two men. 

Nigel Green plays her lover and contemporary Captain Dobi with incipient frustration. He finds her quest for prolonged youth offensive, riidiculous, and unbecoming of a woman who in her fifties (I’m guessing, it’s never really stated), is quite beautiful as it is, as well as smart and who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. She’s also, obviously, vain.

Dobi is on to her secret when he finds that she’s enlisted her maid in waiting to bring a Romani girl to her. Nike Arrighi has an uncredited role as the first sacrifice and it’s a doozy. Absent the older woman make-up, Pitt is, of course, younger and more robust, but she plays the role with the kind of commitment that makes perfect sense that her maid and Dobi would do her bidding and maybe be even a little afraid of her.

Her husband had died recently, and the will left Dobi with little, but the son of her departed husband’s best friend inherited the stables and horses. Not too bad. Elizabet’s daughter (Lesley-Anne Down) was en route to see her mother but was waylaid and kidnapped by a rural mute in the countess’s employ. 

The countess falls for the young man, Toth (Sandor Eles), and woos him and turns him out depending on how the reversion back to her contemporary self comes on. When Dobi brings the prostitute Ziza to sleep with Toth, he brings Elizabet to see Ziza on top of a passed out Toth. The countess knows this is a set-up, but murders Ziza and bathes in her blood. 

When she encounters Toth next as her daughter, she ages rapidly and it becomes clear that she had missed the part of the  grimoire that said “bathing in the blood of a virgin.” As it becomes clear to Toth what’s going on - as unbelievable as it is - she begins to corner him into marrying her, much to Dobi’s chagrin. 

In the meantime, Ilona, her daughter, has escaped and made her way to the castle, only to be whisked to safety momentarily. Toth tells Ilsa the whole supernatural truth, and practically begs Ilona to leave for her own safety. Instead, she attends the wedding and everything goes to hell as Elizabet begins to age before everyone’s eyes. She attempts to kill her daughter but slays Toth instead and she, Dobi, and her maid Julie are captured. 

As these types of film go, the perposterous nature of the various plot devices are second to the overarching twin influences of committed performance and an atmosphere of genuine dread.

Pitt is the center, sure, but Nigel Green brings a bruised heart, ego, and dignity to the film. The other old pros, Maurice Denham as Fabio, the family’s historian and Patience Collier as Julie, the countess’s maid, are solid supports, but neither Eles nor Down register much more than as types; the innocents being led to the slaughter.

More to the point is how rich the themes are of power, vanity, and maintaining youth which is going to fade because, let’s face it, how long can you keep a stable of virgins before people catch on? Without Pitt holding the space at the center of the film, it would fall apart. This is a woman determined to cheat old age, but it’s driven her to homicidal madness. Dobi, as fed up as he is, has been loyal for years, waiting for her until her husband died and is repaid as a cuckold.

Pitt can turn on the charm as both older and younger Elizabet, but she excels at exerting her power over any and all. She is capable of chewing the scenery as required, but reins it in sufficiently to render the performance more human and grounded than you might expect.

As mentioned earlier, Bathory is the juicier role for her over Carmilla/Marcilla. As the latter, she’s solicitous of her victims, two young girls in different decades, whom she seduces and slowly drains of blood and life. Even so, Pitt brings a subtlety to the role that you wouldn’t expect to see. 

When she turns from being the houseguest caring for the Lord of the Manor’s daughter in each case, she turns just enough to reveal the predator. Again, she’s surrounded by a solid cast, including Peter Cushing as the uncle of the first girl to fall victim to Marcilla’s charms; Pippa Steel plays his daughter and later, it’s George Cole as Robert Morton whose daughter Emma (Madeleine Smith) is at risk. 

The set-up is the same, a mysterious woman appears, first at a ball and later, her carriage breaks down in front of the Morton estate, each time the ploy is that the counetess’s daughter or niece is indisposed and could she stay with each of the marks while she goes on her journey to visit a sick relative. Once in, Carmilla isn’t going to leave. 

As an adaptation of LeFanu’s novella, The Vampire Lovers ranks pretty high. It has that queasy sense of imbalance that permeates the story but again, Pitt brings me a commanding, though not domineering presence to the screen. This works well enough, and as seductive as she is naturally, her take on the character isn’t quite as romantic as what LeFanu has on the page. No matter, the film still works.

The film had opened with Baron von Hartog beheading a vampire and it turns out that we had met him as was slaying the entire Karnstein family. But of course, one got away. In the Peter Cushing part of the movie, she’s Marcilla, in the Morton part she takes the name Mircalla, but we know that she is Carmilla Karnstein. 

That she meets her end is a given and there’s no point in going to deeply into it. Emma has fallen for Carl (who had met Carmilla earlier,  as had Cushing’s general), but the fun is in watching Carmilla’s seduction and disposal of Morton’s footman/butler Renton and Emma’s governess. It’s here that Pitt seems to be having the most fun. 

Madamoiselle Perrodot is played with aplomb by Kate O’Mara in a turn that might be the most emotionally charged in the film. She’s fallen hard for Carmilla and is tossed aside unceremoniously. Harvey Hall’s Renton figures out Carmilla’s game after hearing stories about the vampire that came to the Spielsdorfs and had returned to the village and was again murdering citizens. 

Undaunted, Carmilla has Renton under her control and has him remove the garlic and crucifix that fill Emma’s room and adorns her bosom. She kills Renton and as she begins to take Emma with her - she is in love with her, after all is said and done - Mlle. Perrodot begs to go with her. Carmilla drains her and she dies in a particularly riveting sequence on the stairs. Pitt is ferocious in this, the denouement of the film, but she is confronted by Carl who she is about to finish until he uses a dirk as a cross and she dematerializes to return to her as-yet-undiscovered grave at Karnstein manor.

Morton, Spielsdorf, and Hartog find the coffin, and Spielsdorf plunges a stake into her heart and beheads her. Emma is freed from the curse and the illness it brought and the final shot is of a mysterious man in black we’d seen earlier in the film. He laughs and the film ends.

There is sexual tension a-plenty in both films, but it’s ramped up eleven in The Vampire Lovers and indeed, there is a palpable heat between Carmilla and her charges but more between her and Emma. Both Smith and Pitt excel in fleshing out their characters and lending weight to their increasingly hermetic relationship. Both actresses were called on to show plenty of flesh but this is one of the few instances where it doesn’t seem gratuitous. It feels actually necessary in showing just how deeply Carmilla has burrowed into the Morton household and into Emma.

Interestingly, Pitt had no problems with nudity. She makes it plain in her autobiography that she was an exhibitionist but that Madeleine had a slightly harder time with it until they were assured of a closed set. Pitt stated that disappointed the producers who were hanging around outside while shooting was underway and that she flashed them when she came out after finishing the shoot. Yep, Pitt was a handful.

I do recommend reading her biography. Her formative years were spent in a concentration camp, she and her mother survived with Polish partisans in a forest. Pitt overcame, at various times in her life, tuberculosis, anorexia, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer. She wrote novels, plays, had her own theater group, and a black belt in karate. Her memoir is a matter-of-fact read, so much so that what you read about her at different points just lands harder because it’s so straightforward.

She didn’t really care for the horror genre; she’d seen enough in her life, but it certainly aided her in calling up the emotional heart of her characters. And there are emotional hearts to both Bathory and Carmilla. Sure, they’re predators and users, but in both, there is a crushing need. In that regard, Carmilla’s is her desire to be with Emma and we assume for all eternity since her plan is to take her to the Karnstein crypt and initiate her into vampirism. Bathory is driven by her desire for youth, which sounds shallow, but on the balance of things, it renders a critique of Countess Dracula as a critique of what the emphasis on youth and beauty costs us. 

To be sure, Dobi’s dismissal of Elizabet’s desire to regain youth is a pretty enlightened statement in what is, after all, just a horror movie. But then, no movie is just a movie.

Another critical element that comes through in Pitt’s autobiography is her sense of humor and this shows up in her turn in the fourth story in the anthology film The House that Dripped Blood (1971) from Amicus Films with Jon Pertwee as an actor who insists on playing a vampire in a movie not so different from these under discussion with some degree of authenticity. 

To that end, he finds a cloak that seems grants him invisibility and later compels him to chomp on his co-star and lover, our heroine herself. 

Convinced the cloak turns him into a vampire, Pitt asks him to show her. He’s reluctant, dons a cloak and nothing happens. It’s a prop from the shoot, not the cloak he was using. But Pitt, oh, Pitt puts it on and tells Pertwee that she is a vampire sent by others to turn him into one because his depictions are so good! It’s a hoot, it really is, in a typically uneven antholoy of semi-Twilight Zone tales. The pedigree is legit, though; the film was written by Rober Bloch, so if it’s not Psycho, it’s still better than expected.

The film overall is pretty fun and none of the segments overstay their welcome, even if the framing narrative doesn’t make sense at the end, but Ingrid had a good time working with Pertwee, apparently (they’d worked together in a Dr. Who episode years before and got on well).

I have to note that watching the flick was fun knowing that there were two Doctors in the House, so to speak. Peter Cushing is in the second segment and part of me wondered if anyone thought about casting them both in the same segment. 

In her autobiography, Pitt doesn’t really gossip much and from the sounds of it, really enjoyed her time at Hammer. She had no illusions about where she was in the grand scheme of show biz thing. She could act, but she wasn’t going to blow the doors off of Hollywood and though she was well-received on-screen, her companion of many years turned on her and rendered her persona non grata because she wouldn’t submit to his attempted forced attentions. In turn, as a distributor and with extensive clout, he essentially blacklisted her from the industry in the UK. 

She wound up going to Argentina, got to know Isabelle Peron and wrote a book about the family, but the successsive years were marked with no small amount of struggle. She returned to England, set up in a traveling theater troupe and had quite the following. All of this is to say, that stories like these are what sometimes intrude when I’m watching a film. As much as I prefer not to know too much about a person’s biography, a) these days, it’s difficult to not get something of an idea of the person behind the make-up and b) it is mostly irrelevant to the performance, but as in a case like this, the woman is more interesting than her roles. 

So here’s to Ingrid Pitt, whose birthday is coming up on November 21. Raise a glass to her or better yet, watch one (or all) of the films here (or any of her other work as you see fit!)

The birthday girl! Happy birthday, Ingrid!