Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) has gotten so involved with his scientific experiments that he’s about to miss his wedding. Fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) is concerned, so she enlists the help of their friend Victor (John Boles) and Henry’s mentor Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan). What they find at Henry’s lighthouse laboratory is that Henry and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) have been experimenting at making life. “It’s alive!” Henry shrieks upon observing his creation, but he has no idea that The Monster (Boris Karloff) has an abnormal brain inside that flat skull of his. Soon, however, the whole Bavarian village will know...
I’ll try not to spend too much time comparing Frankenstein to Dracula, though watching them both practically back-to-back doesn’t make that easy. It’s worth exploring, however, the ways that these two movies operate in dialogue with each other, essentially forming the backbone of the very first cinematic universe. (It’s also interesting to note that Bela Lugosi was originally cast as The Monster, leaving the project after make-up tests proved disastrous. Lugosi had, however, initially wanted to play the doctor.) Critics at the time noted the similarities between the two films, and I do have to agree with them that – no slight to Dracula – Frankenstein is the more successful feature.
Though the image of Karloff looms large over the film (and subsequently the very idea of Frankenstein’s monster), Frankenstein’s success owes in large part to director James Whale. Where Dracula’s director Tod Browning kept things mostly stagey aside from the impressive sequences with Lugosi, Whale’s direction is dynamic and, to encapsulate the burgeoning medium in a word, cinematic. The camera moves nimbly, the edits are impressive, and the pacing of the film is enviable; despite the rigor mortis of the subject matter, there are no dead spots in Frankenstein. Whale is especially adept at using shadows and light, particularly firelight, to which The Monster has a notable aversion.
Frankenstein was, like Dracula, adapted in equal parts from the Mary Shelley novel and from a stage play by Peggy Webling. As with any adaptation, there are many interesting changes, a good number of which have become practically canonical. Where the novel takes pains to show that The Monster learns inhumanity from its creator and others, the film sets the creature up to fail by giving him an abnormal brain; in a bit of a reversal, the creature learns compassion from playing with little Maria, but we know how famously that playtime goes south. Similarly, Henry Frankenstein (not Victor, as in the novel) is always already a little deranged by the time we meet him, played to arch perfection by a manic Colin Clive. Perhaps this is a consequence of the novel being told in epistolary fashion through Victor’s eyes; when we view Henry from the outside, we can’t help but notice he seems a little mad in his pride at his aberrant experiments.
Among the additions Whale and company bring to the story are the use of electricity and the hunchbacked assistant (Fritz, not Igor). Anyone turning to the novel might be surprised to find these aspects missing, so inextricable have they become to the Frankenstein legend. In the case of the latter, Fritz is played by Dwight Frye, late of Dracula, where he played a similar role as the vampire’s assistant Renfield. It’s the sort of thankless role that Peter Lorre might have played a few years later; surprisingly, Lorre never played any version of Igor, and I’ve never been able to discern how his voice became identified with the part. Also back from Dracula is Edward Van Sloan, playing another skeptical man of science. Here, Van Sloan is less compelling than he was as Van Helsing, largely because his role here is less than central, but his presence forms an odd kind of stabilizing backbone in the emerging monster franchise, where the forces of the supernatural are pitted against the keen and cool intellect of science. There’s even an interesting prelude to the film where Van Sloan comes out of a curtain, breaks the fourth wall, and warns the audience about the film they’ll be seeing. (A similar sequence with Van Sloan was crafted for Dracula, though it is evidently lost to history).
Of course, no review of Frankenstein would be complete without a heap of praise for Boris Karloff, whose extensive turns in disfiguring makeup made him a legend. He’s practically synonymous with the Universal Monsters, and we’ll be seeing much more of him throughout Monster March; where Lugosi reprised his role as Count Dracula only once, Karloff gladly donned the makeup again and again, even getting a turn (sort of) as the not-so-good doctor. Karloff manages to emote from behind the thick layers of prosthetics, vacillating between childlike wonder and murderous rage as his fancy suits him. That flat dome and the bolts on his neck continually remind us of the creature’s monstrosity, but so too does Karloff’s shambolic limp and subvocal groans. (His distinctive walk, however, with arms thrown out before himself, would be a Lugosi creation for 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.)
For monster movies, it’s hard to imagine a better double feature than Dracula and Frankenstein. They’re two sides of the same coin, two creature features whose very unnaturality can be summed up in the mere names of their stars – Lugosi and Karloff. (Can you imagine if they’d been played by a Smith or a Jones?) By the end of Frankenstein, the natural order appears to be restored, but we all know that the truest undead in Hollywood is the spectre of the sequel, and Frankenstein would certainly have his – as well, we know, as a bride.
Next week for Franken-Friday, behind every successful Monster is a Bride of Frankenstein (1935), starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, and Elsa Lanchester.
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