Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Frankenstein" (1931) – That's Life!

Initiating a weekly roam though Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

"10,000 Thrills Frozen into an Epic of Terror"? What? Who wrote this, me?

 To begin with – and this all comes with a huge dose of "What do I know!" but the only way I can write about this movie is to rave about it, so buckle in – James Whale's 1931 "Frankenstein" is Frankenstein; it simply is, just as Boris Karloff in Jack Pierce's make-up is Frankenstein. It's no more the name of the scientist than "Big Ben" is the name of the bell. No, when you write the word "Frankenstein", you're writing the word for this film, and for this face:

  The Monster enters backwards, he turns, and immediately the camera drags us up into a closeup like a drunken Michael Elphick introducing a sex worker to the Elephant Man. Then it pulls back, and he towers over everyone, and we're terrified for a second or two until we realise that he is completely lost, then we're his. This introduction happens thirty minutes into the film, and epitomises what makes it such an achievement of adaptation: not any fidelity to Mary Shelley's novel written over a century earlier, but the fact its seventy minutes have proven to have had as huge an influence upon Cinema as those hundred odd pages had upon Literature. Wegener's "Golem" had already given us a giant monster brought to life in lift shoes, Wiene's "Caligari" had a gaunt, sleep-walking mute and wonky stairs, Julian's "Phantom" a torch-wielding mob, Lang's "Metropolis" a frenzied scientist bringing a humanoid to life with fancy Art Deco electricity, and Browning's "Dracula" gave us us ruined castles and Dwight Frye, but while all of those films are unquestionable treasures, Whale's "Frankenstein" animated their imagery into something both more primal and more contemporary, by somehow giving it a soul. As I said last week, this film lets us in. This is where the genre "Horror" would finally make its home. This is what it would look like from now on.

 And how do you do, Edward Van "Helsing" Sloan? Apparently, Browning's "Dracula" also had Van Sloan come out in front of a curtain, this time at the end of the film to speak an epilogue, but one can't see that these days because the 1934 Hays Code deemed "THERE ARE SUCH THINGS AS VAMPIRES!" too irresponsible a sign-off, and demanded it be cut from any further reissue, which it was, and then lost. He's on his best behaviour here though. However, any assurances we're about to watch a morally edifying story are of course baloney. We're actually about to watch two stories... Okay, I'll have to talk about the scientist now, so let's say for the sake of protocol that his name is "Frankenstein" and that the name of Karloff's monster is, I don't know... Big Ben. So, one story will tell of Dr. Henry Frankenstein's reponsibility as the son of a tedious be-goitered Baron to provide an heir to the House of Frankenstein. It will be a tale told almost by accident, as I'll discuss later, but that doesn't matter in the end, because the other story will tell of the entirely wretched birth, life and extermination of Frankenstein's actual, unnamed scion, and it is the simplicity of this story that is the film's first strength. It is also why this monster doesn't have to be taught to talk.

 If Whale's vision of the Monster has any literary predecessor, it's not Milton's Lucifer (as suggested by Mary Shelley, and explained at great length in Danny Boyle's incredibly long stage version), it's Pinocchio, but in some hideous upside-downing where Gepetto immediately hates his creation and keeps him chained and tortured in a cellar, only for Pinocchio to escape and then accidentally drown the first friend he meets, before being hounded to death in a burning windmill, having learnt nothing except that life is horrible. Big Ben's pathos is legendary by now, but it should also be noted how brilliantly pitiful Colin Clive is as Henry Frankenstein. Driven like an addict to reject society in pursuit of something he in turn almost immediately rejects, at no point in the film is he actually master of of anything. He can't control his assistant. He can't find his wife. He has nothing to say on the balcony by the burgomaster. In the end he just picks up a torch and joins the mob.

 And he falls on the torch! 

 One would wonder what Elizabeth saw in him, if it weren't so obvious she'll do whatever a Baron proposes. Henry's "best friend" Victor's no better. Rudy Behlmer's Blu-Ray commentary tells us the writers intended for the audience to root for these two, but we don't for a moment since neither of them acts on their love. We're just bored, by them and by the Baron and by their right angles and chintz, waiting to get back to Henry's twisted watchtower and his sadistic assistant. Tastes change, I suppose, and our interest in Elizabeth and Victor might have been helped if Henry had died in the fire along with his creation, as originally scripted. Brilliantly though, Universal's top brass changed this at the last moment, wanting a happier ending but in fact creating a far more depressing ending, by locking Elizabeth into a breeding couple with this drained maniac while the Baron toasts "An heir to the House of Frankenstein!" and Big Ben lies beneath the rubble. (It's not even Colin Clive in the bed in the background, so late was the change.)

 I think it's fine to hate the Baron. Maybe I'm reading too much into these scenes, and Whale simply intended them as comic relief, rather than a powerful argument for abandoning your family and squatting in a ruin while trying to turn yourself into God. But boy do they creak. And Whale can do laugh-out-loud. For proper, lasting comic relief, look to the outstanding Dwight "Renfield" Frye as the doctor's "hunchbacked" assistant Fritz. Not Igor, mind. Fritz. We'll have to wait another couple of films for Igor (and it's worth the wait). Rudy Behlmer says Fritz was first introduced into stage adaptations in 1823, fact fans! But Frye is a total original, and his terrifying maniac has some extroardinarily funny details, like stopping to pull up a sock as he mounts the stairs to the lab, or the cane that's far too short for him, which Marty Feldman would later adopt in "Young Frankenstein". His brain theft was also restaged by Mel Brooks pretty much beat for beat, although I find Frye's negligence even funnier...

 The "abnormal brain" was an innovation of this adaption's, by the way, and complete baloney, at least in terms of framing Big Ben as a natural criminal. Both Whale and Karloff understood how much audiences would sympathise with the monster, and the scene with "Little Maria" clinches it: a living nightmare for everyone involved, as Karloff's goofy grin turns to helpless, screaming confusion.

 What Big Ben's motives actually are after this scene, for seeking out specifically Elizabeth, seem incredibly muddy. Is he looking for Henry? Is he out for revenge for simply being forced to exist? Or is he just terrorising the Frankenstein Home, because the story now demands he do something more monster-y? I suppose we're to understand that Frankenstein (Henry, remember) has created something unsafe, and that the unsafe must be banished. But we can't root for that either. We can't root for anything by this point, because the astonishing Michael Mark – as Maria's father – is now staggering through the festivities of wherever this story is meant to take place, carrying something genuinely too horrible to screengrab: perhaps the most convincing looking casualty I've seen on screen, and a reminder that Tod Browning may have spent his youth buried alive in a coffin as part of a carnival act, but Whale spent his in the trenches.

 On a lighter note, isn't Karloff handsome! He had quite a hand in the look of Big Ben too, asking for fake eyelids, and removing his own dental bridge in order to Bowie himself. It's a hell of a look, and it's extaordinary that Universal, wanting to do for its fortunes what Marvel did with its own "universe", has ignored the very first thing Marvel got right: Make it look like what we know it looks like!  

 And everyone knows what Frankenstein looks like. He looks like Frankenstein.

 Your homework for next week is "The Bride", starring David Rappaport and Sting. Not really. It's 1935's "Bride of Frankenstein" obvs.