Frankenstein (1931) Review: Who's the REAL monster?

 Welcome to day four sugar junkies! My patience has begun to wear thin, but I have a good feeling about today's film...

I find it an odd thing that the 1931 Universal film Dracula ever achieved any amount of fame, success or notoriety. At this point, I can hear the horror movie buffs out their clicking the red Xs at the upper right of their browsers, but for the rest of you that have decided to stick around and see how crazy the 30 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge is making me, allow me to explain. Try to imagine two movies, produced and released in the same year, by the same studio, on the turning point of a pivotal time in history (say, the beginning of the sound-era). Both movies are also film adaptations of a stage adaptation of a novel, use some of the same supporting cast, and feature relative unknowns in the role of the title character (ok, technically one of them is the name of the creator of the character, but that’s really neither here nor there) who went on to become fairly big stars. The most apt comparison in today’s world would probably be the world of Marvel comics’ film adaptations.

Wouldn’t you guess that one of those movies would be clearly seen as being the better of the two and the other would fade from memory, especially when you consider that one is (arguably) THE focal point of a ‘brand’ and spawned the most sequels? Quick example: raise your hand if you are HOTLY anticipating Iron Man 2….how about The Incredible Hulk 2? Exactly. Of the two Universal monster movies released in 1931, James Whale’s Frankenstein is clearly superior to Tod Browning’s Dracula. Thus, I reassert that I find it odd that Dracula ever achieved any real fame.

Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Mad Love’s Colin Clive, who would reprise this role) and his humpbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye from The Vampire Bat and The Invisible Man) are roaming about the countryside doing their best impressions of ghouls (for Fritz, that’s not much of a stretch). They rob graves, take the hanged bodies of convicts down from the gallows and Fritz even sneaks into a lecture hall to steal a brain (unfortunately, he accidentally destroys the normal brain and ends up stealing a malformed specimen).

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 200 years and have no familiarity with Shelley’s novel, you know as well as I do what it is that the good doctor wants all these corpses and spare parts for. It seems Frankenstein believes he has unlocked the secret of life and he wants to put his theory to the ultimate test and attempt to reanimate a cobbled together body from the best used items he can pilfer. He’s even locked himself away in a castle which is both foreboding enough to keep away random stragglers who would intrude on his work and tall enough to attract lightning – a key element to his experiment.

Henry’s biggest problem, though (other than that abby-something [Abby Normal – get it?! Didn't one of my past reviews already establish that I willfully steal Mel Brooks' jokes?] brain he’s putting into his test subject) is that back home, he’s engaged to a lovely woman named Elizabeth and he’s been so lost in his work that he hasn’t kept in touch with her very well. She is convinced that she trusts Henry well enough, but his father, the baron asserts that the young man has taken a mistress and no longer intends on marrying the young Elizabeth. Thus it is that Henry’s best friend Victor (and before you ask, I did not mix up the names of the doctor and his best friend, Universal did; why they switched them around, I’ll never know unless someone out there knows and tells me…) agrees to take Elizabeth to go see her beloved.

Along the way, they stop in at Henry’s old university to visit his mentor, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan of The Mummy and Dracula’s Daughter) and their last known contact for Henry. Dr. Waldman advises the pair that Henry’s theories were considered to be dangerous and when he was confronted with the fact, he dropped out to pursue his research on his own. Waldman agrees to take them to see Henry, in part because he’s at least outwardly a nice guy, but also because he would like to see Henry give up his research.

They stumble upon Henry as he prepares his experiment, the young doctor so agitated by the interruption that he refuses to let the guests in until he learns Elizabeth is among them. Now, one might find it a bit odd that he merely lets them sit and watch as he attempts to bring a dead body that he sewed together himself back to life, but Victor’s questioning of Henry’s sanity has pissed him off enough that he is wildly determined to prove himself right (and he doesn’t look AT ALL crazy while doing it…). As his friends look on, Frankenstein connects his man (if I need to tell you that the man under the sheet is Boris Karloff, and I need to give you a list of Karloff’s feature films at all, then what you REALLY need is a slap in the face) to his machine, and explains to them that he has discovered a wave of light beyond the ultra-violet spectrum and it is this wavelength of light that holds the secret to life. He requires the power of the lightning of the storm to create a ray of this light and reanimate his creation. The machine works like a charm, Frankenstein shouts the ultra-famous line, “IT’S ALIVE!” and Elizabeth and Victor return home, satisfied that Henry is both sane and dedicated to his betrothed.

“Yes, but what about that Waldo guy?” you say. Well first, his name is Waldman, and second, he has decided to stick around to lambast Henry for his mad science, and assert the danger in what he has done. Considering the creature is well over six feet tall and could probably rip any NFL player limb from limb without breaking a sweat, there’s probably something to his concerns. Add to the fact that he informed Henry that the stolen brain was defective (after Henry owns up to thieving the brain from the university) and even Frankenstein himself is forced to be a little bit worried. He assures Waldman that he can handle the situation and he might have if Fritz hadn’t decided that it would be fun to tease the monster with the murderer’s brain. His constant tormenting of the creature leads it to strike out and savagely kill him at which point Henry is forced to take notice. He ultimately decides that he will destroy the creature and Waldman assures him that he can take care of it while the young doctor goes home to attend to his forthcoming wedding.

Good thing for us Waldman is a man of science. He figures since the creature is going to die anyway, he might as well put it up on an operating table, open it up and see how it works before killing it. Unfortunately for him, the monster has grown an immunity to the effects of the sedative he has been pumping into it and just as he’s about to cut it open, it wakes up and kills him (what would you do if you woke up and somebody was about to slice you open so they could study you?). The monster begins its rampage while Henry attempts to plan his wedding…

Ok, so it’s not perfect. In fact, there are a lot of problems. First of all, the presence of anyone other than MAYBE Dr. Waldman at the moment the creature is given life is just plain silly. Well, not so much their presence as their reactions. Nobody who’s there seems at all concerned about the fact that Henry has just brought a sewn-together dead body back to life. Instead, they all more or less say, “Ho-hum, Henry you should get some rest, I’ll see ya later!” That one goes on the actors. There’s not even a modicum of surprise among them at what has just taken place and rather than forget the reason for their visit because Henry has just gone and pulled a God, they seem to use this moment as one that assuages their fears. I don’t know about you, but that’s kind of like worrying that your spouse has been acting a bit odd because they might be cheating on you, finding out that instead, they’ve been committing murder on a regular basis and thinking, “Oh well, thank God he’s not cheating on me!”

Second, the fact that anybody LEAVES after witnessing this feat is equally absurd. I may not know a whole lot about the early 20^th century, but wouldn’t it have been a rather long trip for these people to come see Henry, almost akin to a drive across the state of New York? I don’t know about most of you, but I don’t just drive to New York City to see a friend one afternoon and head back early the next morning (Buffalo to New York is like a six hour drive); it’s not like driving across town to a friend’s place for a couple hours. This one is on the screenwriter. Why put these people there in the first place if you can’t think of a GOOD reason for them to leave after the fact? That includes Henry who leaves moments after deciding the monster is too dangerous to live.

We do have some very good things happening here though. For one thing, Karloff’s portrayal of the monster is fantastic. He toes the line perfectly between inhuman monster and sympathetic character. He mostly milks the sympathetic side but given the creature’s origins as a sympathetic character, this is fine by me. The makeup work by Jack Pierce is nothing short of groundbreaking. Do NOT believe what popular belief would tell you – that the original creature makeup and appearance is goofy and cartoony – the monster is a gruesome creation, complete with terrible scars and (this is more thanks to Karloff than Pierce) an overall clumsiness and discomfort, as though it were not MEANT to be walking around. By far the biggest triumph of Frankenstein however, is James Whale’s directorial eye. The man wields a camera so much unlike the typical 1920s/1930s static style. He knows what a camera can do when put to good use and he brings us breathtaking visuals and excellent choices of shots and angles. I wasn’t raised on Whale, but the man has easily taken his place in my list of all-time favorites when it comes to laying on atmosphere along with the likes of Carpenter and Romero.

As always, there are some lessons to be learned here. Chief among them is that things really WERE more terrifying to people in the 30s than they are today. I personally find this movie to be much more tragic than scary, but in 1931, you would have shat in your pants, fainted and woken up to the smell of the rest of the theater scatting in their own trousers. Frankenstein teaches us that icon status can be attained by flaunting the censors (you do also have to have a story around it, but pushing the envelope is almost never a bad thing). Imagine a 1930s censor or audience reaction to the little girl being tossed into the lake and then having her dead body carried around in broad daylight; MUCH more gruesome, iconic, and horrifying than Dracula. Finally, we’ve learned that people had a short attention span in the 30s. Everyone talked fast and a seventy-one minute film was considered feature-length and not, Disney Channel Shoddily-Produced-Movie-of-the-Week length.

Like I said, we’ve got some problems here, but the iconic portrayal of a classic film character, pushing the envelope of what is “acceptable,” and the extraordinary directorial prowess make this a must-see and a highly enjoyable experience as well.

Final Rating is below. As always, you can read about exactly what it means and have access to a full list of my movie reviews, just CLICK HERE.

This hub is number four in my “30 Hubs in 30 Days (PLUS THREE!) Challenge” where I will be reviewing essentially all the old Universal monster movies (the 30) as well as the very first, the very best and the very worst films to feature ensemble casts of ALL the monsters (PLUS THREE) over the period of just thirty (plus three) days. Who “challenged” me? Nobody…well, unless one can challenge themselves. In that case, I challenged me.