BEFORE: OK, enough with Dracula - I'm going to transition over to remakes of that OTHER Gothic horror tale, the one from Mary Shelley. Christopher Lee carries over from "Count Dracula" making that both easy and logical. (Though in retrospect maybe I should have connected to the remake of "Nosferatu" via Klaus Kinski. Oh, well...)
Last October, TCM ran four of these Frankenstein films made by Hammer Films in the 1950's & 60's, starring Peter Cushing - but I didn't have room for them last year, and they got pushed forward into 2017. But I did watch "Victor Frankenstein" last year, along with three older Universal Frankenstein films - four seems to be my limit on the number of films about each monster that I can watch in a year. Soon all of the channels will be airing horror films, and I may be forced to prioritize. I've got a ton of movies coming in right now, and not enough slots unless I'm willing to allow the Watchlist to get bigger.
THE PLOT: Victor Frankenstein builds a creature and brings it to life, but it behaves not as he intended.
AFTER: I tend to complain a lot about the use of framing devices, like the current trend of starting a film with the single most exciting moment in the story's action, and then snapping back to explain how we all got there. I tend to think of this as a device similar to the opening "splash page" in comic books, and mostly I consider it a cheap way to grab people's attention, as well as covering up a host of other potential drawbacks, most notably it's an admission that telling the story in the proper sequence would be very boring, and therefore it's usually a giant red flag. But thinking about the novel "Frankenstein", which framed the story with a sequence of a ship exploring the North Pole region which comes across both the fleeing Creature and the pursuing Dr. Frankenstein - that makes me realize that this literary device has been around for a very long time.
Now, this 1957 film from Hammer Studios didn't use exactly that framing, instead they started with Victor in a prison, incarcerated for murder, and then telling his entire story to a visiting priest. Clearly you need a big budget to film on a ship stuck in an ice floe, and with a limited budget, some concessions must be made. But this also prompts me to go back to the original novel to see where the film deviates from Shelley's story. In the novel, Victor falls in love with his adopted sister, Elizabeth, and in this film, Elizabeth is his cousin. (In the 1950's as well as in Victorian times, I'm betting it was more proper to marry one's cousin than one's sister...) In the novel Victor's friend and confidante is named henry, here it's Paul Krempe.
Those seem to be minor details, but the bigger differences concern the creation of the Creature, and his portrayal. In the novel, the creation of the man, the re-animation of dead tissue, happens quite quickly. Perhaps it's movies that made this into a long, arduous process, with flashing lights and bolts of electricity in the lab, which are very photogenic. In the novel it's more like a school project, Victor just builds a creature while at university, with about as much difficulty as a teenager would have while writing a book report. The bulk of the story, the real heart of the philosophical debate comes after this, when the Creature spends a few months living behind the cottage of a poor family in the woods, during which time he also learns to read and write. (Umm, that doesn't end well, and soon the Creature returns to get revenge on Victor, for creating him in the first place.)
My point is, the Creature in the novel is able to speak, and to have philosophical debates with Victor, and then make demands and threaten him when the debating doesn't work. But in "The Curse of Frankenstein", just like with Renfield yesterday, we never hear the Creature say anything, which seems a bit odd not only because it's important to the story, but also because film is a medium of sound as well as picture, and this therefore seems like a bloody waste. On the other hand, a Creature that can't talk can't be reasoned with, and therefore there's something scarier about him, he's just a force of strength and violence.
The weird thing is that when Victor and Henry begin their experiments, we see them pouring various chemicals over a dead puppy, and once they land on the exact combination, they're able to bring that puppy back to life. The next logical experiment would be to pour those chemicals on a human corpse, to see if they can replicate their success - but no, Victor insists on putting together the perfect specimen first, which means assembling the body of a hanged thief, the hands of a sculptor, and the brain of a professor. NITPICK POINT: We see Victor cut off the thief corpse's head, and dissolve it in the acid bath, but whose head does he then put the professor's brain into?
It's a nice theory, that if you took the best parts of different people, you might be able to make the best possible person. But I think we can all safely predict that things don't always work out the way that the mad scientist wants them to. So little was known at the time about how quickly dead tissue deteriorates, or like I said, maybe they should have focused on reviving ONE person who was already in one whole piece, instead of dealing with all the complexities of assembling a patchwork person as a test subject. Because what they get here is akin to a mindless, suffering killing machine.
Now, in the novel the Creature is quite crafty, he even frames the nanny Justine for his murder of Victor's brother, just by planting a locket on her. So that's pre-meditated murder, planting evidence - not bad for a re-animated corpse. Things are quite different in this film, where Victor digs up the Creature after Paul buries him, to kill Justine, the maid Victor's been having an affair with. Hey, it's almost like a soap opera with monsters! But really, isn't Victor the REAL monster here, I mean, tampering with the forces of life and death, robbing graves, and killing anyone who doesn't agree with him? But then we find out whose murder Victor is charged with, and damn it if what comes around doesn't go around in the end. See ya later, Baron.
Also starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "Rogue One", sort of...), Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Melvyn Hayes, Valerie Gaunt, Paul Hardtmuth (last seen in "I Was a Male War Bride"), Anne Blake, Raymond Ray, Noel Hood, Claude Kingston, Alex Gallier, Michael Mulcaster, Andrew Leigh, Sally Walsh.
RATING: 5 out of 10 black-market eyeballs
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