Frankenstein

#2 in my ranking of the Classic Universal Monster movies.

Dracula was a big success for Universal and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. set out to follow up the gothic romance with something similar in terms of tone and reputation. What he ended up picking was an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel about man conquering nature to create life and the fallout that follows. Eventually the directing duties fell on James Whale based on a script credited to Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh (that Whale apparently rewrote a good deal). What Whale ended up crafting is a surprisingly touching story of a monster brought into the world without guidance or love, and the fear on all sides that comes from it.

Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) has gone mad, shut himself and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) in a remote, abandoned, and dilapidated watchtower to work on his theories of reanimation, stealing bodies from fresh graves and gibbets in the middle of the night. He’s on the verge of proving his theories correct when Fritz grabs an abnormal brain from the local university where Frankenstein had been studying under Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan). As an aside, it’s been so long since I’ve seen this movie, and I’ve seen Young Frankenstein so many times, that I was convinced the abnormal brain thing was a creation of Mel Brooks. It’s one of the small things that bugs me in this movie as well. The brain is dead, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. It really shouldn’t work at all in these kinds of experiments, but whatever.

Frankenstein has friends and family, though, and they worry about him. His fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) and his friend Victor (John Boles) go up to the watchtower with Dr. Waldman to check in on Frankenstein, coincidentally right when the experiment is reached it apogee with the lightning storm.

Now, there’s something about how Whale handles this lightning storm that makes me think that Frankenstein is something other than just a “science gone mad” horror story. The way the thunder is just ever present while Frankenstein talks about how he’s going to be a god edges the film into cosmic horror. It feels like the young student gone mad is tapping into cosmic forces beyond his comprehension, that the storm represents something larger and powerful than he can imagine, and that the monster (Boris Karloff) he creates is a conduit to that power.

Anyway, the story plays out as we’ve all come to expect with the careful education of the mute monster, his rage brought on by fire, and the confused rampage he makes through the quaint German countryside, culminating with him throwing a small girl into a pond to drown, thinking she’ll float like a flower on the water. The core of the whole thing is Karloff as the monster. His introduction with Frankenstein showing him the light of day for the first time, is surprisingly touching. His ill-treatment by Fritz is painful. His rage at his state is understandable. It’s meeting that little girl where he’s finally happy, and his father has abandoned him to the point where he has no idea what to do in this wide world.

The heart of the film is Karloff, but the brain is the idea of man trying to play god. Frankenstein reaches into the abyss to create life, and he cannot control it. This is one reason I feel like the attainment of the abnormal brain is actually a mistake. It lays the blame on Fritz for the failure of the experiment instead of on Frankenstein himself for trying it. If there’s room for the experiment to have worked with a normal brain (or even a Hans Delbruk brain), then it’s not about man’s hubris but about a science experiment gone wrong because the process wasn’t followed precisely. The use of the abnormal brain doesn’t feel like an effort to undermine the whole hubristic take on Frankenstein’s efforts considering the rest of the film, but it’s still there.

I also have a problem with one event in the monster’s rampage. Frankenstein has gone to his father’s house, leaving behind his experiments forever and to marry Elizabeth. The monster approaches that house specifically and attacks Elizabeth. I think it’s a base narrative need to up the sense of danger, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The monster doesn’t know where Frankenstein lives, so it can’t be a specific approach on him. That would make it random, which is silly on its face. Out of all the houses the monster comes across, it comes across Frankenstein’s? It’s also not necessary to get the townspeople and Frankenstein into action for the finale with the father of the girl carrying his dead daughter, soaked with the water of the lake, into town and naming the monster as her killer. That’s enough.

The chase through the mountain passes is great as well, highlighting the German Expressionist influences on the early parts of the horror genre most particularly. It’s pretty, and the way Whale frames the whole thing, it’s from both perspectives of Frankenstein and the monster. That gives it a wonderful sense of dread as the mob comes for the lost child that is the monster and his own father leads it on. The burning of the windmill is also terrifying, again, because it’s filmed from the monster’s perspective. I think there are obvious parallels to Kong in the original King Kong where the monster is actually childlike, taken into an environment it doesn’t understand, and ultimately killed. It creates a surprising amount of pathos around the monster that elevates it above being just another monster.

And then there’s a tacked-on happy ending that feels all wrong and doesn’t even involve Colin Clive because he wasn’t available for filming.

I think the film has a handful of small stumbling blocks (the brain, the monster attacking Elizabeth, and the tacked-on ending), but the rest is really smart horror filmmaking. It effectively blends a couple of types of horror while keeping its central idea clear and present throughout. Clive is great as Frankenstein, intense and manic, while the rest of the supporting cast is capable. The movie really belongs to Karloff, though. He’d go on to show he was more than just a mute monster in films by Ford (The Lost Patrol) and Hawks (The Criminal Code), but he imbues the monster here with real humanity that turns the story tragic in ways that Dracula simply didn’t try.

Rating: 3.5/4

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