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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
Although Morrissey is best known for his contemporary comedies – the Flesh trilogy and his later epics of New York street life (Forty-Deuce, Mixed Blood, Spike of Bensonhurst) – he also made three costume films, curious for their historical remoteness. (“Costume” seems the distinguishing term, for the Flesh trilogy and the “political” films are in their own way period pieces.) Two are schlock entertainments: Blood for Dracula (1973; released as Andy Warhol's Dracula) and Flesh for Frankenstein (1973; released as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein). As Morrissey told Melton Dawes, “We're injecting our style into a formula film.” The “style” was jocular: “I don't think it really matters whether a film is photographed to look fantastic or whether it looks really awful. If you come away from the film and you have had a somewhat amusing time, you've seen something that approaches a good film.” The third costume film is a full-blown “European” art movie, Beethoven's Nephew (1985), with sumptuous Vienna location shooting, a rich score, and operatic performances. It may seem perverse to group the classy Beethoven with the broadly comic Dracula and Frankenstein. But like other forms of adversity, film criticism makes strange bedfellows. Despite their difference in genre and “brow” (the low and middle-high respectively), the three works are consistent.
Their period accoutrements notwithstanding, the three films are comedies. As Morrissey told Newsweek in 1974, “I've always made anti-erotic comedies. Sex is the best subject for comedy because it's so silly. I ridicule it because people try to use it as some sort of cure-all.
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