Terror of the Healer
May. 12th, 2024 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledOne of the great unsung performances in film history has to be Christopher Lee in 1966's Rasputin the Mad Monk, which I watched again last night. For all his association with cheap, lurid horror movies, Christopher Lee was by no means a chewer of scenery. He had a strong belief in restraint. That's what made him so great as silent, stoic monsters. But casting him as a boisterous madman results in a magnificent chemical reaction.
Lee's Rasputin is every bit as hypnotic, enigmatic, capricious, and physically intimidating as you would want from Rasputin in a movie.
A huge man with big black hair and beard, gazing with wide eyes and sadistic smile is lurking in the doorway. Then this frightful monument laughs and grabs someone and dances madly.
His miraculous healing powers are never explained. His supreme confidence suggests it's a fruit of conquest rather than any bargain, anything that might have required him to relinquish something. If he had a soul, he certainly doesn't seem to miss it. He exists totally outside the rules of civilised Russia but he knows the rules to flaunt them, to use them to his advantage, to plunder the privileges of the Tsarina.
But we first meet him at a little countryside inn where he saves a woman from fatal illness. Her husband, the innkeeper, is understandably grateful and willing to accede to any request. Rasputin seems to make a game of just how far he can push the man's appreciation, right up to taking the man's daughter into the barn.
In a long career of playing villains, Rasputin may be Lee's most admirably terrible.
