Rating:

They really knew how to make movies back in the early 1930s. A taut and effective story told without any superfluous filler and it’s all over in an hour and ten minutes. Yes, please! Plus, there’s the whole thing about how this movie is still considered essential watching more than 75 years after its release, which is generally indicative of pretty awesome quality. Frankenstein is the greatest of the classic monster movies from Universal, and none of the other tellings of the tale that have been made since has ever come close to this one. The movie takes Mary Shelley’s original novel and improves on it. Yes, folks, Frankenstein is one of that rare breed, the film that’s better than the novel on which it is based.

We all know the story. If anybody here doesn’t know the story, you can just go home right now because what in the hell is wrong with you? A scientist digs up corpses and builds himself a manmonster! Manmonster terrorizes people, mob has torches, the monster meets his demise (OR DOES HE?!) and that’s that. On the surface, that doesn’t seem too wildly impressive; that, in the words of one Lita Ford, ain’t no big thing. Why, then, has the movie lasted through the decades? What makes it rise above the pack and gets it on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movies? I submit that the movie’s staying power is attributable largely to its portrayal of the monster. In 1931, audiences were usually sheltered from anything too unpleasant and were certainly never encouraged to see the line between good and evil as blurry. Along comes Frankenstein, with a monster who is nonetheless human, who we feel compassion and sympathy for, and the whole concept of what kind of story you could tell on screen was turned on its ear. It was a bold move and a brilliant one.

Boris Karloff’s skills as a performer allowed real humanity and emotion and thought to emerge through all the mortician’s wax and spirit gum on his face. Without ever uttering a single word, Karloff’s monster speaks volumes. He’s got an abnormal brain rattling around in his skull, a brain taken from a known criminal, so some might say his monstrous actions are inevitable, but I disagree. There is great potential for love and compassion in this so-called monster, and there’s a desire to have those same things given to him. In the scene where the monster is exposed to sunlight for the first time, we get our first inkling that maybe he isn’t a monster at all. As the window opens and the sunlight comes streaming in, the monster reaches up, trying to take hold of the light, not comprehending that it can be all around him yet he can still be unable to touch it. When the window is covered again and the light is banished, the monster holds out his hands in a pleading, questioning gesture: Where did it go? This guy isn’t a monster, he’s a child, a child who lacks the knowledge to understand the world around him and finds himself with no one willing to teach him. He’s alone, his yearning for understanding ignored by the people who can’t abide him simply for the way he was born. Is it any wonder he became a “monster?”

As pitiable as Karloff’s monster is in the scene with the light, nothing can top the scene at the lakeshore with the young girl, Maria. This quick sequence may well be the saddest thing ever put to film. The monster kills the girl, yes, but it’s not because he’s malicious; again, it’s because he doesn’t understand. It’s not like his murder of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, where he’s clearly acting out of rage. This little girl had been kind to him—had played with him—and he responded to these friendly gestures with obvious delight. He and the girl throw pretty flowers into a lake and watch them float on the water’s surface. When the flowers run out, the monster is unsure of how to act or what to do next. Trying to keep the game going, he picks up the pretty girl and throws her in the lake, assuming she too will float gracefully and it will all be part of the fun. When he realizes that something has gone horribly wrong, he’s not pleased with the havoc he’s created; he’s terrified. He has no idea why the flowers were fine when the girl wasn’t, he only knows that he’s made a grievous mistake and he runs away, frightened and sad. It’s an absolutely heartbreaking scene, one of the finest in all of cinema history.

Having been several decades away from being born when the movie was initially released, I can’t say whether audiences of the time would have found Frankenstein to be scary. Certainly modern audiences are not going to be jumping in their seats the way they do at Hollywood’s current crop of horror films. Before the film proper begins, actor Edward Van Sloan comes on screen and announces that if you don’t wish to subject your nerves to undue strain you’d better leave the theater now because this picture’s gonna scare you shitless. This was doubtless done for sensational reasons rather than genuine concern that audiences may keel over and die from fright, but there may have been an element of truth to it. Audiences may truly have been scared by the murderous events of the story and the eerie cinematography (heavily influenced by German films of the time), I cannot say for sure. But I don’t think director James Whale really meant to be scary. It’s clear he identified with the monster’s outsider status—Whale was an open homosexual—and that this is what was most interesting to him about the story, a character ostracized from mainstream society simply for the way he was born, despite his capcity to be as human as the rest of us. I think the real scares in this movie come when we as audience members think: “Would I be just as quick to join that torch-wielding rabble? Or would I have the courage to learn the more complicated truths instead of taking the easy solution?” We’re scared of what the answer might be when we ask ourselves questions like that, and Frankenstein won’t let us get away with avoiding them.

Interesting trivia: Dr. Frankenstein’s (Colin Clive) first name here is given as Henry rather than the more familiar Victor. Further, the hunchbacked laboratory assistant (Dwight Frye, a brilliant character actor who also played Renfield in Universal’s Dracula)is not named Igor, but rather Fritz. Wrap your mind around that one!

And let’s not forget the most important thing about Frankenstein. Without it, there could never have been Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and we would live in a much less joyous world.

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