Films: 1930s
(1931) Frankenstein
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Frankenstein
Director: James Whale
Release: 1931
Lean, gruesome, foreboding disaster and efficient, "Frankenstein" demonstrates that less is more.
Director James Whale crafted his 1931 adaptation (and it is an adaptation in the broad sense of the word) of Mary Shelley's novel out of an apparently driving need to portray obsession and taboo with ruthless momentum.
Within the first 15 minutes of "Frankenstein," bodies are exhumed, corpses cut from gallows and brains dropped on the floor. There is little warning and little doubt that all of this will lead to a terrible end.
And it does. Whale supplies us with Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein, relative newcomer to the screen in 1931 and briefly burning star in Hollywood. Paired with "Dracula" veteran Dwight Frye, the screen is filled with madmen, one base and mean, the other urbane but driven to acts of such transgression against nature that cosmic vengeance is swift and brutal.
Frankenstein builds a human from scavenged parts and brings it to life. His compulsion to make a man separates him from his attractive lover, his would-be prosperous career as a physician and his wealth and station as son of a baron.
The Monster is all-consuming. Boris Karloff portrays the hulking, bolt-necked aberration with dead eyes and slow-burning rage. As Frye's Fritz tortures the creature to madness with whips and torches, the Monster exacts a revenge not unlike that doled out by society: He hangs his tormenter.
From that point on, Frankenstein and companion Dr. Waldman (Eric Van Sloan, who played Professor Van Helsing in "Dracula") are set on anesthetizing and dissecting the thing Frankenstein has made. The plan fails. Frankenstein's father disturbs the morbid seclusion of Frankenstein's abandoned tower hideaway and marriage is mostly forced upon the doctor. While domestic life preoccupies, Waldman is strangled in the lab. The Monster stumbles into the countryside and slays the innocent until the town can hunt him down and entomb him in a burning windmill.
All of this swift and terrible action hurts "Frankenstein" in a way. Whale leaves no room for Frankenstein and his wife-to-be Elizabeth (Mae Clark) to grow together on screen. Later, threatening her with the Monster is only abstractly awful, as a connections of the heart have been merely sketched. In Shelley's book, the abduction of Frankenstein's fiancee is a cruel and calculated revenge, in the film it amounts to a damsel in distress.
But Whale's "Frankenstein" is a mood piece in ways that count, and a test of will. It mounts the biological and atmospheric horror to a breaking point, and culminates with the Monster's face contorted and spasmic as the flames envelop.
"Frankenstein" is a artistic statement, rich with German Expressionist sets and forced perspective shadow play similar to the large-and-small games Ruper Julian played with his characters and lighting effects in "The Phantom of the Opera" (see especially the shadows on the wall of the classroom from which Fritz steals the brain).
What remains unclear, after over seven decades, is whether the Monster is a sympathetic character or not. Shelley infused her monster (named Adam in the book) with a soul and a tragic jealousy of life. Karloff and Whale's monster is not nearly so wrapped in pathos.
The monster of the film is ghoulish, inarticulate, childlike. While there is a sense of rationalization to its intentional and accidental murders, there is also an unforgivable destructiveness to the monster and a sense of societal implication created by the fact that Frankenstein (via Fritz) gives it the mind of a killer.
What the Monster represents, perhaps, is the awfulness of science (an arguable foreshadowing of the monster atomicists would create less than a decade later), the sudden explosion in the face that the laboratory threatens. There is very little God in Whale's "Frankenstein." The divine does not punish man, here. Man punishes himself, devising the hideous end to which he will subject those around him, then running from the creation and futilely attempting to recreate a normal life.
"Frankenstein" suffers one unforgivable flaw: Its ending.
With the Monster immolated, Frankenstein bounced off a turning windmill wheel and the psychological fate of Elizabeth unclear, it is clear Whale set up a conclusion consistent with the themes of his film.
Instead of a sobering finish, however, Baron Frankenstein totters into the story and toasts his son with a half dozen maids. The concession to normalcy is unnecessary, unnatural and partially undoes the blanket of meaning the awful events preceding have draped across the tale.
Nonetheless, Karloff has etched the square-skulled Monster into the critical cinematic consciousness. What the symbol he has created means continues to demand examination. "Frankenstein" is still a cipher, still a lumbering metaphor and still a grueling tour de force.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
