Director/Screenplay – Jon Spira, Producers – Adam F. Goldberg & Hank Starrs, Photography – Simon Vickery, Music – Jamie Hyatt, Animation – Andrew Gill, Astrid Goldsmith, David McKean & Cornelia Skrok, Puppeteers – Lynn Robertson Bruce & Olly Taylor. Production Company – Canal Cat Films/The BFI/HH5/Trigger Films.
With
Peter Serafinowicz (Narration). With:- Juan Aneiros, Corrado Canonici, Joe Dante, Peter Jackson, John Landis, Paul Maslansky, Caroline Munro, Juan Ramirez, Jonathan Rigby, Harriet Walter
Christopher Lee (1922-2015) will always be the actor associated primarily with the Anglo-Horror Cycle and for his essayal of classic roles such as Hammer Films’ Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster, along with a host of other horror parts for Hammer and other studios. The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee is a Documentary about Lee’s life. There had also been an earlier documentary about Lee with Christopher Lee: A Legacy of Horror and Terror (2013).
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the documentary is the fact that it is supposedly narrated by Christopher Lee himself in first person, despite his death nine years earlier. In the opening scenes, we meet the voice actor responsible Peter Serafinowicz, who appeared in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and assorted voice work including that of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), and see him testing our various voices to get Lee’s down. Lee’s appearances in the non-stock footage scenes are represented by puppets and different styles of animation from various animators, which include Dave McKean, better known as a comic-book and graphic novel artist and as co-director of Mirrormask (2005).
The documentary takes us through Lee’s life from his upper-class upbringing and being sent to boarding school, his learning multiple languages for an intended career in diplomacy, before turning to acting. One interesting titbit that comes out is that he was witness to the last guillotining in France in 1939 and, as a result, became fascinated with executions and would even collect execution memorabilia.
A young Christopher Lee from his early days as an actor
The film takes us through Lee’s Wartime years. We get animatic recreations of scenes where he was wounded during the War. The documentary does gingerly steps around some of the controversies of this period ie. that Lee almost certainly made up some of the claims about what he did during the War. As John Landis and others recount, they pressed Lee for what happened where he remained tight-lipped and always claimed that what happened was bound under the Official Secrets Act and he was not permitted to say.
We then get to Lee’s acting career. The dicumentary covers how he spent ten years in bit parts, becoming frustrated at never gaining a leading role, before being handed the double-slam of the monster in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and then the title role in their Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958). It was the latter in particular that made Lee into an international star.
I felt frustrated with the film here as it skips over much of Lee’s career in horror, which is no doubt why most people would be watching The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. It does dwell on his friendship with Peter Cushing and mention of how Lee hated doing the Dracula sequels, but all of his other Hammer appearances (fourteen films) and any mention of the substantial body of horror and other films for Amicus and other British studios is skipped over entirely. Lee’s name is intertwined with horror and yet the film does what Lee himself wanted and gives more time over to other roles. I mean, how many people are there likely to be going to be coming to watch the documentary because of Lee’s non-horror parts?
A senior Christopher Lee during his career resurgence in the 2000s
Two areas that are focused on are Lee’s appearance in the international films he made primarily in Italy while staying as a tax exile in Switzerland in the 1960s and the Fu Manchu films. (One issue that marred The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee for me was during the coverage of the Fu Manchu films beginning with The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) where the Lee impersonator takes time out to decry the films for their bad racial stereotypes. This is something that Lee would never have done and is entirely a modern apologetic insert. In fact, when you look at the interviews conducted with Lee when he was still alive that appear on the dvd releases of the Fu Manchu films, he contrarily praises the original Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novels). Towards the end of his horror career, we also get mention of the cult classic The Wicker Man (1973) and how he personally pushed to get the adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter (1976) made, although there is no mention of his earlier appearance in Hammer’s adaptation of Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1968), which is regarded as one of his classic films.
The documentary does deal with Lee’s ambivalence towards horror roles and dismissal of them as inferior works, along with his desire to be able to expand his range and do more than horror. This came about with his move the Hollywood in the 1970s. The most amusing scene in the film is an interview clip just after Lee had accepted his knighthood in 2009 where he is asked what role he is most proud of and answers the title role in Jinnah (1998), a biopic about the founder of Pakistan, but then gets all indignant when the interviewer calls him the King of Horror.
The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee deals with some of the key works made during Lee’s Hollywood period such as his appearance as the villain Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and in the disaster movie Airport ’77 (1977), although it is also pointed how Lee followed the big hit of the latter with an appearance in Starship Invasions (1977) – which I regard as a more entertaining film than the documentary-makers seem willing to give it. The latter sections of the film deal with Lee’s latter-day career as a heavy metal star, something he loved. And then of his re-emergence as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars prequels. And finally of course on to his death.
