Make The Case: 5 Essential Christopher Lee Films

As I worked to put together my personal choices for 5 essential Christopher Lee movies, two things occurred to me:

– I have not seen nearly as many Christopher Lee movies as I thought I had. True, I’ve caught around a hundred or so film and television appearances over the course of my own life, but that doesn’t even begin to cover his. Christopher Lee is in the Guinness Book of World Records for a reason.

His 206 film appearances fail to include his work on television, his work in music, and all of the voice acting jobs he picked during a career that ran from 1948 to 2015. I feel confident that I have seen enough of his career to pick five films with some accuracy. Even so, the sheer scale of Christopher Lee’s career is remarkable. There is an incredible range of roles within that career, and not just villainous parts either. The aim of looking at a filmography as singular as Lee’s, and cutting down everything you know (and 100 films or so is still quite a bit) to five is a challenge. Doing so will hopefully swerve to emphasize the fact that Lee was much more than deep voice and sinister, piercing eyes.

– Comparing Christopher Lee the man to Christopher Lee the actor is a little difficult. At the very least, it’s mildly fantastical that a man who killed people in World War II, who also once had to get permission from the King of goddamn Sweden to get married, appeared in the second Howling movie. Or The Stupids. Or Honeymoon Academy. It goes on like that. When it comes to the notion of a life fully lived, it’s hard to argue with anyone who tells you that Christopher Lee is a fantastic example of that.

Yet throughout an extraordinary personal life, Lee made some very odd choices. Taken as a whole, his career suggests he simply liked to keep working as much as possible. Even the worst examples of films and TV appearances from Christopher Lee’s career suggest that he took even the most hopeless scripts seriously. He endeavored in everything I have ever seen him in to give a performance that was at least entertaining. I really can’t say I ever saw him coasting.

We skipped voice over work entirely, but it’s worth mentioning that if you haven’t seen The Last Unicorn, you should.

A complete overview of Christopher Lee’s career is probably not necessary. It’s going to mean sitting through some of the worst films of the past few decades. However, if you insist on watching everything that’s available in one form or another, you may as well begin with some good ones. Christopher Lee understood how to use his mere presence to sell the menace of a character. Yet he could utilize his incredible assortment of gifts as an actor to find things that made his best roles highly distinctive from one another.

Start with these movies, if you quite simply do not know how else to proceed:

1. Dracula (1958)

Also known as The Horror of Dracula, this wasn’t even the beginning of Lee’s association with Hammer Studios. He had already done a fine job as The Creature in 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein. By 1958, he had already appeared in over forty films. Dracula marked a decided change in the types of roles Lee was offered and accepted. Within a couple of years of Dracula, he would be a star. It’s easy to watch him in this version of the Bram Stoker story, and understand that that would very quickly become the case.

Beyond the fact that the 1958 version is an excellent horror movie with rich atmosphere, a strong telling of the original source material, and excellent performances from the likes of Peter Cushing (who would go on to become great friends with Lee for the rest of his life) and Michael Gough, Dracula has one of the absolute best Dracula performances in film history. That’s because of Lee, who manages to create his own version of the character, one which proved to be singular enough that for many people, he is still Dracula.

 

2. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Strictly in terms of Lee’s work with Hammer Studios, The Hound of the Baskervilles is fun for the simple fact that it lets Lee play something besides a monster. As good as those monsters are, it’s just as enjoyable to see him play an extremely unlikable aristocrat. The Hound of the Baskervilles is quite simply an excellent Sherlock Holmes story, with this specific cinematic version holding up fairly well for the most part. Few have excelled in the role of Holmes like Peter Cushing, and the scenes between himself and his friend Christopher Lee are a joy. They rarely got to play humans in the same film.

Lee himself would play Holmes repeatedly throughout his career, and even at one point took on the role of brother Mycroft. The Hound of the Baskervilles is another prime example of the magic Hammer was capable of, and how the best examples of that magic often involved Lee.