“It’s alive!”
I love the bloke in the tux at the start with his wonderfully camp introduction. It sets the tone for the whole film, which is essentially a great big knowing wink. The credits are interesting, too: Mary Shelley is credited as “Mrs Percy B. Shelley” (it’s feminism gone mad!), and Boris Karloff is referred to as “?”, only being named in the closing credits.
The look of the film is just as stylised and atmospheric, paying no heed to realism and with no tree left ungnarled, as per the Hammers we’ve covered so far, but the whole thing seems to be shot so as to be a lot more claustrophobic. It’s also striking that everyone is in (for 1931) modern dress, and the setting seems to be firmly Bavarian (see the peasants’ costumes) rather than the mittel-European vagueness of Hammer.
For all that he starts off with grave robbing and stealing brains from dissection labs, Henry Frankenstein (why the name change?) is nothing like as nasty as the later Cushing version. Colin Clive does a great job of portraying his monomania, but as soon as his family performs an intervention halfway through the film he comes to his senses, and even leads a mob of baying peasants after the monster at the end. He seems to get away with rather a lot really. I was left mouth agape at the sight of Igor, whose name is Fritz, climbing up a not-very-solid gallows, in defiance of all health-and safety standards.
The early scene with the lecture is hilarious, with the lecturer telling his students with a straight face that he can physically tell the difference between a “criminal” brain and a “normal” brain! We’re also reminded that it’s 1931 by the fact that he goes on to say “Thank you, gentlemen- the class is dismissed,” in spite of the fact that at least a good third of the students seem to be women.
Elizabeth (token love interest and token woman) and Moritz are characters who exist only to advance the plot and be a bit wet, and are given dialogue so trite that it has to be deliberate; this is clearly James Whale having a laugh with the tropes. Even the performances of both actors seem to be deliberately wooden. And Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s grumpy, bibulous yet loveable old dad, is the funniest character in the film, who quite rightly gets the last word.
Funny though this film is, though, it’s full of iconic moments, and the moment where the monster is raised to the skylight to be infused with life as his creator raves that “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” is justly iconic. It’s is justly iconic. It’s easy to take for granted, too, how fantastic the monster’s make-up is, so familiar has it become. And our first glimpse of the monster’s face is simple but powerful. Even so, this doesn’t really feel like a horror film; there’s plenty of room for some archly ridiculous line about Frankenstein having found the “great ray”, beyond ultraviolet, which brought life into the world. Er, how scientifically rigorous.
The monster kills Igor, whose name is Fritz, but he was asking for it, frankly. It’s only when Dr. Waldman is killed that we realise the monster has become truly dangerous. The scene between the monster and the girl is the heart of the film, driving home the monster’s childlike innocence at the same time as we see it do the deed that puts it beyond redemption. Even here, though, the monster shows no malice. It is horrified and upset to see the little girl sink into the lake.
The scene of the girl’s father, numbed with grief, carrying his dead daughter towards the burgomeister is sad and effective, but I’m not sure how he realises she’s been murdered, or that there’s some unseen murderer hiding bin the woods. And I don’t think much of this society’s sense of justice, with the authorities happy to organise lynch mobs with not the slightest shred of evidence! Still, there’s no denying that the ending, with the mill quickly catching fire and Karloff brilliantly portraying the monster’s fear, is superb. There’s no way it can get out of that, right?
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