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Frankenstein, 1931. Directed by James Whale. Boris
Karloff, Colin Clive, Dwight Frye, Edward Van Sloan, Mae Clarke.
My original review of Frankenstein went something like
this:
Sometimes described as the "Gone With the Wind
of horror movies," this still packs a punch seventy-odd years after
its release. James Whale's borrowings from the Germans are put to good
use here, as the gloomy expressionist sets cast a pall of menace over
almost every scene in the movie, an effect heightened by the film's
lack of a musical score -- the whole thing has a striking ambience of
airless, suffocating oppression. This menace is hammered home by the
cast. Although neurotic Colin Clive and manic Dwight Frye set the standard
for mad scientists and their assistants for years afterwards, the real
powerhouse here is Karloff's portrayal of the monster. His first appearance
on screen, with his dead eyes and slack face, is one of the great scenes
in movies. Lon Chaney, who would almost certainly have played the role
had he lived, might have buried himself under one of his thousand faces,
but Karloff's face is almost naked beneath Jack Pierce's make-up and
is so expressive that even after the shock of his first appearance,
he is able to command the audience's sympathy. His creature is timeless,
a myth figure, in a way Mary Shelly's own intellectual monster is not.
It is possible to read any number of meanings into Whale's
Frankenstein --I personally like to think of it as a warning
against the rising tide of fascism in the Europe of the day. The sympathy
Karloff's monster generates in the audience makes the mob violence at
the end of the movie rather uglier than Henry Frankenstein's usurpation
of life. All of which makes Frankenstein one of the first horror
movies to hold a mirror up to the audience as a way of showing them
monsters.
I've been working up to doing a shot by shot analysis
of certain films, and while this isn't quite that detailed, it's a dry
run for future projects. I picked Frankenstein because it's short (a little
over 70 minutes) and because I recently bought a nice laserdisc version
of the film. It had been a while since I last saw it, so sitting down
to see it anew was a great pleasure. I was particularly interested in
Frankenstein's debt to German Expressionism, and that colors what follows:
Frankenstein opens with a short warning
from the producers, spoken by Edward Van Sloan. He steps out from behind
a curtain, which immediately places the film at a degree of separation
from our own prosaic reality and, indeed, from the reality of more naturalistic
movies. The material adapted by Whale and his collaborators comes to the
screen from the theater (from a dreadful stage adaptation by Peggy Webling),
and the prologue retains the films origins on the boards. This is
followed by a credit sequence that seems lifted directly from the Germans.
A number of eyes swirl in the background as the cast and crew are listed.
This has no relation to the action of the film that follows, and, indeed,
it is the only part of the film with an underscore.
The film proper begins in a graveyard, as Frankenstein and his assistant,
Fritz, lurk near a funeral. This sequence and the one that follows it,
are a pure example of Caligarism. There is not a straight horizon in this
sequence. The horizon line rises and falls at steep angles. None of the
gravestones in this particular cemetary rise vertically from the ground.
They are all at angles, as if the unquiet occupants of the graves have
knocked them askew. The first look we have of Doctor Frankenstein is from
behind a wrought iron fence. The fence is at odd angles, too, and even
though Colin Clive and Dwight Frye as the doctor and his hunchbacked assistant
are filmed straight on, the effect is the same as it would be if the shot
were an actual dutch tilt. The sum of these shots, the way that they are
designed, indicates derangement and madness, much as Caligari portrayed
madness and derangement with its production designs. As Frankenstein and
Fritz exhume the body, Frankenstein is positioned beneath the first of
the films many memento mori, a statue of the grim reaper himself.
The trip to the gallows that follows immediately afterwards repeats these
motifs.
A comparison between these opening sequences and the one that follows,
where Fritz makes a trip to the medical school is instructive. The scenes
at the medical school have a substantially different design. The setting
of these scenes is strictly rectilinear, all straight lines and right
angles. This is a place of reason and learning, and the shot compositions
are all low-angled and upright. There is power and rightness in reason,
the camera seems to be saying. This is one of the very few sequences where
James Whale allows the humor his films are known for to enter into the
action, as a skeleton on a string elicits laughter from the assembled
students and Fritzs behavior as he grabs the wrong brain elicits
a chuckle from we members of the audience. But even in this bastion of
learning and reason, we find more mementos mori: the bouncing skeleton
and the cadaver, who is filmed from the same angle as Andrea Mantegnas
The Dead Christ. This last composition anticipates Whale's
use of crucifixion imagery in The Bride of Frankenstein, but that's
another matter entirely...
Frankensteins laboratory is another exercise in derangement. None
of the bricks of the walls follow a straight course. None of the walls
themselves rise vertically; they all rise at odd angles. The shadows create
unnatural forced perspectives. The electrical equipment is filmed at low
angles, slightly tilted. This is a place of madness, the design is telling
us. The principal memento mori in Frankensteins laboratory is the
unliving body of the creature himself, mostly hidden under a sheet during
the first sequence.
The film next shifts to Elizabeths perspective. The first shot of
this sequence features a picture of Henry Frankenstein flanked by a candle.
The arrangement of objects in this shot resembles a shrine to someone
who is dead. This is another memento mori, although Whale makes interesting
suggestions by framing this around an image of someone who is alive. The
content of the relationships in this sequence is interesting, too. Why
exactly does Elizabeth prefer the effeminate Henry Frankenstein to Victor
Moritz, who is altogether more masculine, more self-assured, and more
approachable. And what, exactly, is the relationship between Moritz and
Frankenstein himself? The film leaves these questions hanging in the air,
but I cant help but wonder if Whale is making a veiled reference
to the laissez fair free-love triangle of Byron, Shelly, and Mary Godwin
(ne Shelly). Its certainly a possibility, given that Whale
returns to this triangle at the beginning of The Bride of Frankenstein.
But I digress. Elizabeth is the weakest part of the film. Mae Clark is
just wrong for the part (I much prefer Valerie Hobson in Bride,
and I prefer Madeline Kahn to any other actress in the part), and John
Boles as Moritz seems a Clark Gable wanna-be. These scenes are set in
an oppulence that seems thirty years out of date. The sets in these scenes
and in the scenes between Elizabeth and the Old Baron Frankenstein, and
during the wedding sequence later in the movie, seem culled from a fin
de siecle art nouveau print by, say, Alphonse Mucha or Maxfield Parrish
(there is a composition later in the film, as Elizabeth sits at the knee
of a recovering Henry that seems to have been stolen whole from Parrish).
The manifestly retro nature of these scenes suggests an essential conservatism,
a life that Henry Frankenstein rejects while he is walled up in his laboratory.
The scene where Elizabeth and Moritz meet with Dr. Waldeman is filmed
in much the same manner as the other scenes in the medical school: a rectilinear
design, consisting mainly of bookshelves. A hint of derangement creeps
into this scene, though. Whale has placed a striking memento mori into
these shots: a line of human skulls along the entire length of one of
his shelves. This foreshadows Waldemans complicity in Frankensteins
experiment later in the film, and foreshadows his death at the hands of
the monster.
This is followed by the creation scenes. These scenes are directly influenced
by Metropolis and the creation of the false Maria. Mary Shellys
creature was created in a vat of chemicals through which a galvanic current
was passed. Whales creature is raised up to the cosmos during a
raging thunderstorm and exposed to the life-giving ray beyond the ultraviolet.
As I was watching this sequence, as Frankenstein expounded his theories,
I couldnt help but wonder if the screenwriters hadnt been
reading Lovecraft. The cosmic implications of what Frankenstein says here
seems drawn more from his cosmos than from Mary Shellys cosmos.
As I said, this scene derives from Metropolis, but the morbid nature
of the creature and the way it is filmed transform it into one of the
cinemas great scenes. The way the light from the electrical equipment
lights the faces of Frankenstein and his assistant throws them into stark
chiaroscuro, rendering them as one might see faces in the woodcuts of
expressionist artists like Max Beckmann or Emil Nolde. Its an effect
that Caligari suggested but was never able to realize on screen.
At the conclusion of this scene, we come across one of the films
casualties: During Frankensteins rant that Hes alive,
hes alive! he proclaims that Now I know what its
like to be God. This fell victim to the production code. Although
Colin Clive can be seen mouthing these words, the actual sound has been
fuzzed. Even in restored editions of Frankenstein, these words
are no longer spoken. The sound discs for Frankenstein still exist,
so this omission is doubly vexing.
The first appearance of the monster is another of the cinemas great
moments. Boris Karloff backs into the room and slowly turns around. The
camera zooms into his face with three abrupt cuts. His face is shocking.
His heavy-lidded, sunken eyes are lifeless, his sunken cheeks are cadaverous,
and his expression is the expression of the dead come back to life. In
this shot, the reality that this creature is an undead construct is hammered
home. That Karloff is subsequently able to win the audiences sympathy
for this creature is nothing short of miraculous. He begins to do this
almost immediately afterwards, when he attempts to grasp the light that
streams in from the high window that Frankenstein opens above him. There
is something pathetic about the movement of Karloffs hands, something
poignant about a creature that has existed in darkness for so long that
he instinctively trys to hold on to the light. When the creature is in
the light, it seems positively benign. But when it goes back into the
dark, it becomes a raging monster again. It can be argued that the creature
represents an externalized expression of Frankensteins own id. When
Frankenstein is holed up in the gothic confines of his laboratory, the
creature is in darkness, tormented by Fritz, desperate to escape. When
Frankenstein escapes to his wedding bower, the creature escapes too, and
is shown smiling for the only time while holding the flowers that the
little girl gives to him. He is in full sunlight during this scene, while
Frankenstein himself is basking in the love of his bride to be. When the
monster commits a crime that externalizes Frankensteins crimes in
the community at large, he retreats back to the half-shadows of the woods
and proceeds to distrupt Frankensteins wedding by visiting his sins
upon him.
Both Fritz and Dr. Waldeman are murdered by the monster. Fritz represents
Frankensteins derangement, Waldeman represents Frankensteins
reason. The monster destroys both of them. (as a side note, Ive
always thought that Waldemans death was wholly deserved; he knows
that the monster is dangerous, but does not take precautions against the
monster waking up, the fool). The murder of the little girl could be said
to represent Frankensteins impending happiness as a married man.
The creature murders that, too, even though it doesnt mean to. This
sequence is remarkable: There is genuine joy in the creatures face
as the girl makes friends with him. The whole thing is a sunlit idyll,
undercut by the nature of the creature. The audience watches this scene
with a mixture of sympathy and panic. We KNOW that the creature is going
to do something awful, and we feel horrified as he does it before our
very eyes. The look on the creatures face as he turns back to the
camera is a mirror of what the audience feels. He cant believe he
did it, he cant believe it cant be undone. This is another
sequence that was a victim of the production code, fortunately restored
on most current presentations of the film. It just goes to show that the
code didnt care how central a scene was to a films artistic
integrity, if it angered the blue-noses, out it came...
The scene that follows finds Elizabeth plagued by a psychic vision of
something coming between them. Watch what happens to the shots of Frankenstein
himself when it becomes clear that her fears are real and that the monster
is in the house: angular shadows begin to appear, and derangement invades
the conservative bastion of his fathers house. The scene between
the creature and Elizabeth is a marvelous metaphor for a clumsy suitor,
inarticulate and lumbering before his lady love, and forms one of the
reasons audiences have identified with the monster over the years. Immediately
after this sequence, with Elizabeth comatose from the shock of being tormented
by the creature, the REAL sins of his past are visited upon him as the
drowned girls father carries her body through the streets. What
follows is a hounding of the monster by angry villagers. Frankenstein
is himself among them (he leads the villagers who are searching the mountains),
which is ironic, given that they might as well be hounding Frankenstein
himself. On the other hand, in the original print of the movie (prior
to alterations made to prints still in circulation in 1935 to accomodate
a sequel) Frankenstein and his creature both meet their demise in the
windmill. The last portions of the film are interesting from another,
less psychological viewpoint, too. The film was made just before the rise
of fascism in Europe. Given that the audience is always sympathetic to
the monsters plight as a hounded outsider, does this sequence represent
a critique of fascism? I suspect that it might...
For myself, Ive always preferred this film to its sequel (I also
prefer Son of Frankenstein, but thats neither here nor there),
mainly because it is more overtly frightening than The Bride of Frankenstein.
The lack of a score amplifies many of Whales effects and gives the
film a breathless, neurotic quality that is absent from the other Universal
horror films that followed it. And Karloff gives one of the great performances
in this movie. I had forgotten just how good Karloff is here--over the
years, Ive let his work in movies like The Body Snatcher,
The Black Room, and even The Bride of Frankenstein blind
me to the accomplishment of his signature role. Its iconic, and
all the more remarkable for its complete lack of dialogue; one of Karloffs
greatest gifts is that menacing/half lisping voice of his, and even deprived
of that tool, he proves himself at least the equal of Lon Chaney.
Frankenstein remains one of the essential horror films. Hell, its
one of the essential films of any type, and echoes from Frankenstein
continue to reverberate through the cultural echo chamber even seventy
years after the fact.
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