NFR Project: 'Frankenstein' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Frankenstein’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: Garrett Fort, Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert Florey, John Russell

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Clarence Kolster, Maurice Pivar

Premiere: November 21, 1931

70 min.

Still scary.

Horror is critic-proof. It has a set of values, and an aesthetic, of its own – but if it does not frighten, it has not done its job. Frankenstein still delivers.

Universal Studios was encouraged by the success of Dracula, and sought to create more horror movies as quickly as it could. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel about a science-made man composed of parts of the dead and reanimated with electricity was a natural source for a horror adaptation.

Fortunately, the task of helming the film fell to James Whale. The director had one great talkie success, the war drama Journey’s End (1930), and was just signed to a five-year contract with the studio. He had his choice of projects.

Whale was a master of style, and he turned in part to the tenets of German Expressionism, and in part to the lugubrious Victorian obsession with death and gloom, to inform the way the picture looked. Set darkly in an imaginary middle-European kingdom, it mixes elements of the Gothic and of modernity, with little regard for stylistic consistency. The result is the creation of an unsettling world that seems to cycle in and out of various time periods.

The central role is that of Henry Frankenstein, the proverbial mad scientist who seeks to tamper with that which man was not meant to know. His defiance of moral strictures concerning the creation of life make him a tortured rebel. With the help of his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (an iconic performance by Dwight Frye -- Igor would not come along until Son of Frankenstein), he stiches together a body, unknowingly places an abnormal brain in it, and voila! The monster is born.

The monster’s cradle is the electric creche designed and created by Kenneth Strickfaden, an amazing collection of sparking and sputtering laboratory equipment that became standard in every mad scientist’s laboratory afterwards. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Henry cries.

But the monster is problematic. Hulking, childlike, immensely strong, and prone to violence, he could have been played as a merely destructive force. Fortunately, he was played by the genius of Boris Karloff. Karloff knew he had to make the monster sympathetic, and the reaching of the monster toward a shaft of light humanizes him beyond the extent that we feel sympathy for the human characters of the film.

The monster is doomed. He breaks free, and unintentionally terrorizes the countryside. Soon, angry peasants armed with pitchforks and torches are ready to destroy him. After a final angry confrontation between Frankenstein and his creation, the doctor finds himself thrown from the top of a windmill, presumably to his death. The crowd sets fire to the windmill, and the creature is burned alive.

The picture was a massive success ,and triggered a slew of sequels. Karloff would play the monster twice more, before the role was passed on to other actors. Whale would direct the first sequel – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – which is arguably superior to this first film.

However, the original still works. The stark gloom, the overheated emotions, the sheer strangeness of Jack Pierce’s incredible makeup for the monster, it all works to create a claustrophobic, terrifying tale.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Front Page.