FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
"Frankenstein was interested only in human life: first to destroy it, then recreate it."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Edward Van Sloan; Directed by James Whale; Written by John L. Balderston, Francis Edward Faragoh, and Garett Fort, from a play by Peggy Webling; Cinematography by Arthur Edeson
If parody is a form of tribute, then James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN is surely one of the most honoured films of all time. Few movies, if any, have been aped and imitated so often and so pervasively. Boris Karloff's braying, lurching monster. The hunched, atavistic lab assistant. Dr. Frankenstein in his white labcoat, scuttling around his lab, dwarfed by the vast walls and the mad scientist decor. They have become icons of our culture, and it is a measure of how good FRANKENSTEIN is that it emerges, indefatigable, from this smothering pile of cultural baggage, retaining still some measure of the power it must once have had.
All popular works suffer from inevitable datedness, because the conventions they manipulate to provoke sensation are as ephemeral as the box-office success they strive for; but FRANKENSTEIN, if not exactly contemporary in feel, is at least well-preserved: watching it is not simply an exercise in camp nostalgia. It has more to offer.
For one thing, at only seventy minutes, it seems a model of clarity and purpose compared to the flaccid torpor of today's blockbusters. Whale finds a fine balance, embellishing outlandish scenes with extravagant stylistic flourishes, but proceeding through the straight scenes with ruthless economy. Compared to the melodramatic excesses customary of popular films, the key moments are charged--rather impressively--with a stark simplicity of emotion and imagery. The monster choking a man to death, a little girl innocently offering him a flower, a windmill burned by a frenzied mob: the images are concise, bare, direct, and remain vivid in the mind's eye.
There is also, at times, a surprising degree of dramatic understatement. The ultimate meeting of maker and monster, at the edge of a cliff after an urgent mob/chase scene, is expressed in a couple of quick close-ups. We see the monster's face and Frankenstein's face, and there are no words. We know all we need to know. (In the novel, the equivalent of this scene is the starting point for much speechifying.) Earlier, when the monster is birthed, we don't see (as I anticipated) a head-on shot of Boris Karloff sitting bolt upright, eyes wide and wild. Instead, we see him in flashes: a hand twitching, a glimpse of the head behind the gloating figure of Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive). He comes to life in pieces--which is somehow rather appropriate.
Boris Karloff's performance has long since become legend, so much so that it is easy to forget that it is just that: a performance, and a savvy one. The role, of course, did not require much dramatic range, but it required something beyond the haunted gaunt pallor of the make-up. The shambling wooden gait is obviously intended to suggest the unnatural quality of his existence. But Karloff adds something more: even though he himself is not freakishly large, it seems as if he is, for he dominates the screen. He achieves this by seeming to place his entire weight on each foot as he walks, giving the sense of ponderous body mass, of largeness. It's remarkable how dramatically effective this simple trick is. And in the fight scenes, the brute unchoreographed simplicity of the monster's violence powerfully suggests his animal innocence.
Although the script--itself taken from a theatrical adaptation--plays fast and loose with the original novel, it retains crucial thematic elements, one of which is the concept of the monster's innocence. He is abused, persecuted, vilified, yet he wilfully initiates no wrongdoing; he simply responds, in his bewilderment, to the provocation around him. The movie cheats somewhat by having the monster's brain come from a criminal (stored in a jar helpfully labelled "ABNORMAL BRAIN"), but the way it develops, this becomes irrelevant. When he tosses a girl into a lake, it is not the malicious act of a criminal--no criminal's gaping grin could seem so silly--but rather the amoral act of an infant who has not yet learned how to interpret the world and respond in socially appropriate ways. The creator is, in a way, as sociopathic as his creation, and Dr. Frankenstein's sin lies not so much in having made this unnatural being, but rather in abandoning it to its fate. His crime is not hubris, but lack of moral responsibility.
The story plays out in a series of improbably spacious rooms, a panoply of ornate TARDIS chambers, bigger inside than out. The narrow dark spire of Frankenstein's retreat opens up to reveal vast shadowy spaces; the rooms of the Frankenstein household, even the hallway, are palatial in their dimensions. But there are no ceilings. Long-shots show us extensive horizontal space but never tilt up to show us what is overhead, creating the sense of an oppressively low ceiling always just out of sight. It's a strange sensation, this almost subliminal distortion of spatial perception, and--while it is doubtless a mere accident of the mechanics of production--it is odd, unsettling, and the perfect ambience for a tale of terror.
There is one ceiling in the film, and that is in the laboratory--which is a marvel of set design, a comic-book array of Gothic exaggeration and primitive sci-fi apparatus--where the sheer walls frown forebodingly down on the banks and coils of machinery: this is a space that seems more vertical than horizontal. When the instant of creation arrives, the monster's incumbent form--in an inspired moment--is hoisted off the floor on a gurney and winched up to an aperture in the ceiling, where it bathes in the lightning-glare of the storm, in the sturm and drang of the sky. Watching from below as flares of illumination flicker about the immobilized body, it truly seems as if we behold something greater than us, beyond our ken, unknowable: the act of creation is irradiated by mystery, as it should be. The film entire may not be perfect, but in splendid set-pieces such as this, it is lit from within by the eternal fire of myth, and makes its flame burn brighter.
A Review by David Dalgleish (February 9th, 1999)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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