FRANKENSTEIN (1910)
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is a film long thought lost
to the world and then held for ransom. Finally
it is being seen by a limited set of people. It
is a crude film, as one might expect. But in
some ways it seems to have inspired later films.
It is a very different interpretation of the
nature of the monster than has been seen since.
(It is hardly reasonable to rate a 1910 film.)
Spoiler warning: this review includes a complete
synopsis of the plot.
Back in 1894 Thomas Edison was a pioneer of the American film industry and was claiming (not entirely truthfully) to have invented the motion picture. He did however sell a Kinetoscope and the he had to make films to show on his Kinetoscope, much the same a Vu- Master has to make slides for their viewer. His was not big scale film production, today it looks amateurish. But he built a small studio barely the size of a truck, and started grinding out one- minute films. The Black Maria was the world's first film studio and built at Edison's West Orange laboratories where it still stands. It was called the Black Maria because of its resemblance to a police wagon.
In 1910 (eight years after Georges Melies made his famous A TRIP TO THE MOON in France) Edison made the first movie adaptation of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The film was just fourteen minutes long and starred Charles Ogle as the monster. When I first heard about the film it was considered a lost film. There were stills of Ogle's make-up and some descriptions left--that was all. So many old films were lost forever, it was not surprising that this one was also. In the mid-1990s the claim was made that a copy had been found. Soon there were also stories that the man who had found it owned the print and wanted one million dollars for the cinema relic. And that was how things stood. Yesterday I heard that a poor reproduction of the film was available on the web in Realplayer format. It is a terrible reproduction, but it was a film that many people had wanted to see for years and any means seemed good.
Most Frankenstein films assume the title character built a monster of dead bodies and animated them with electricity. But the films have been made in an age of science. Mary Shelley is very vague about how the monster is created, but the approach seems to be more alchemy and mysticism than the rationalistic approach taken in the films. Shelley had the monster be more a mystical creature, created like the medieval mystics created homunculi. That is the approach of the 1910 film.
The story is told very briefly in ten or twelve sentences with action filmed to illustrate the story. Frankenstein goes to college. There within two years he discovers how to create life. He decides he will prove himself by making a perfect man, then to return home to claim his bride. Mixing some volatile chemical together, he puts them in something that looks like a cross between a gas chamber and a kiln. As he watches through a little porthole the chemicals form a skeleton and meat forms on the skeleton.
When the monster is being created it just moves its arms up and down mechanically. Surely a marionette artist at the time could have given it more realistic movements. But for that the creation sequence is fairly effective with burning pieces of body just sort of assembling themselves magically. When a bony arm sticks out of the creation chamber the film comes closest to having a genuine scary moment. Certainly Frankenstein is horrified by what he has created. He faints and the monster disappears. Frankenstein had wanted to create a perfect man, but not all recipes work out. What he got was a ragged and shambling monstrosity, its features and its very expression are horribly distorted. It has long stringy hair and a nondescript torso.
Frankenstein returns home to the arms of his fiancee. But the monster finds him. Frankenstein has the monster hide in a closet so as not to frighten his bride. The monster cooperates but then comes out and in a fit of anger attacks Frankenstein. Frankenstein lives only because the monster sees his reflection in a mirror and is frightened off.
Frankenstein is married, but in the night the monster returns. The bride sees the monster and faints. But before the monster can do anything terrible he sees himself in the mirror and apparently realizing he is too ugly to ever win such a bride, he just disappears. The presence of love does to him what sunlight and thwarted love does to Count Orlock in NOSFERATU. It simply dissolves him. This seems to imply that like Dracula, the monster is an incorporeal being and is more magical than scientific.
The film appears to be on different film stocks to get a slight feel of color, brown-tone for daytime and black for night. Being made a full eight years after the Melies A TRIP TO THE MOON yet being so much more crude and primitive in style one has the feeling that film would not have advanced much if Edison had controlled the American film industry had he tried to do.
I am not rating this film since there is no objective criteria to rate it with modern films. It is really just a very short telling of the story and filmed illustrations, filmed with a stationary camera looking at a stage. One reason that this film disappeared may have been the poor quality of the production. Still, it is an amazing circumstance that the film is visible at all and it was a great pleasure to see it after so many years.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 2000 Mark R. Leeper
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