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• Frankenstein
• Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff and Edward Van Sloan
• Directed by James Whale
• Screenplay by John L. Balderston, Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort
• Based on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Universal Pictures
• 72 Minutes
• Originally Released 1931

 

The Story

For most people, death is something to be feared, pondered or forgotten. For Henry Frankenstein (Clive), however, death is something to be conquered.

A brilliant young medical student, Frankenstein is certain he's found the means to animate a dead human form.

When his neglected financee, Elizabeth (Clarke), their friend Victor (John Boles) and Frankenstein's one-time professor, Dr. Waldman (Van Sloan), descend on his isolated lair in the teeth of a furious storm and urge him to abandon his mad obsession, Frankenstein is driven to prove them wrong. Using the power unleashed by the storm--"all the electrical secrets of heaven"--Frankenstein succeeds in bringing to life a hulking, dead, human form (Karloff).

Waldman fears the worst, especially on learning that the creature houses a criminal's brain stolen from his own laboratory. Intoxicated with success, however, Frankenstein pursues the experiment. At first the creature is timid; but Frankenstein's crude servant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), tortures the creature, twisting him into a ferocious killer. Finally the enraged monster snaps, brutally murdering his tormenter. His servant's shocking death snaps Frankenstein back into reality.

He and Waldman subdue the creature, and Frankenstein--as if awakening from a nightmare--returns home to prepare his wedding, leaving Waldman to perform an autopsy.

 

But the nightmare is far from over. The creature tricks Waldman, throttling him, and escapes into the idyllic countryside. There he encounters a trapper's trusting daughter, Maria. Though her murder is almost accidental, Maria's death transforms the town into a mob of torch-wielding vigilantes just as the monster reaches Frankenstein's manor and terrorizes Elizabeth. Soon the pursuing townspeople have the monster hemmed in, trapped up in the desolate mountains--but then Frankenstein becomes separated from the others, bringing him face to face with the inhuman abomination he created with his own hands.

 

Filled with pathos and humor

Frankenstein is both art and artifact. Its unexpected tone--combining horror, suspense and humor--immediately set it apart from anything that came before and much that came after. It was relentlessly copied, with singular films (including The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein by the same director) giving way to a sink of lurching monsters and screaming victims. Later, Frankenstein became a pop culture touchstone, earning paeans masked as parodies (Young Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and culminating in a film about its curious creator, director James Whale (Gods and Monsters). And make no mistake: This Frankenstein is much more Whale than Shelley.

Whale invested the monster film with pathos. Karloff's ominous creature is tragic, both physically tortured and emotionally unequipped to deal with the world into which he is thrust. Henry Frankenstein, the model for countless mad scientists to come, is not so much mad as blinded by obsession--and, amazingly, he recovers. Clive deftly conveys his complex emotions. And in a role that usually amounts to monster bait, Clarke's Elizabeth has both depth and symbolism. She represents the lure of normalcy, which Frankenstein rebuffs until it's too late.

 

Layers of humor and horror

As Gods and Monsters stressed, Frankenstein was partly meant as a comedy--and there is a lot of humor, both coarse and sophisticated. There are delightful characters like Frederick Kerr's Baron Frankenstein ("Stuff and nonsense!") and even slapstick (the classic scene where Fritz drops the "normal" brain). Some of the humor is more subtle: The monster throws Maria into the river because they're tossing in flowers and he's run out, which Whale surely intended as a joke. What's often unnoticed is that the famously furious townspeople never catch on to Frankenstein. Frankenstein is often framed as illustrating God's retribution for man meddling in his domain--but only the monster acts against Frankenstein, and the monster loses. That may be the biggest joke of all.

I amazed many people when I admitted I'd never seen this film before first looking at it for Science Fiction Weekly; I wonder what it would have been like had I seen it before all the films it informed in the last 70 years. Still, I'm grateful I'd seen it late, after certain revealing scenes (including Maria's drowning and Frankenstein's line, "Now I know what it feels like to be a god!") that Whale was forced to cut have been restored.