Frankenstein (1931) – Fall is here, and Halloween stuff has cranked into high gear (I visited Salem MA over the weekend, and the joint is hoppin’ with tourists). So I pulled out my copy of the Universal classic while I was working on something.
I’ve commented on this film before. It departs significantly from Mary Shelley’s original. The story and script are the work of many hands – the Peggy Webling play it’s ostensibly based on (but of which virtually nothing survives), the Robert Florey first shot, of which only a few things survive, Garrett Fort’s and Francis Faragoh’s and John Russell’s contributions, and John Balderston’s final script. The movie script is as much a cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster as its lead character is. (Balderston is the guy who took Hamilton Deane’s original stage play for Dracula and completely rewrote it for the Broadway stage. Garrett Fort wrote the screenplay for Universal’s Dracula, adding all the scenes in Transylvania that couldn’t be done onstage.)
So, a few thoughts:
1.) Director James Whale makes pretty dramatic use of the camera. He moves in for closeups, and does does quick cuts with them. He moves the camera up for dramatic angles, shooting down on the characters. He does a lot of tracking shots, swinging the camera around to follow the actors. It’s worlds away from Tod Browning’s static camera in Dracula, released only a few months later. Browning’s camera isn’t completely stationary – he does do a bit of tracking in and tracking around (like the scenes where Dracula and his brides first rise from the crypt). But for the most part, he might as well have put on a stage play and simply bolted the camera in place. You can really see the difference if you compare Browning’s version to the Spanish language version directed by George Melford, shot on the same sets at the same time. Melford’s camera moves around dramatically, enlivening the scenes that are so static in Browning’s version.
Nevertheless, what struck me this time is how “stagy” Whale’s Frankenstein is. Despite all the acrobatic camera moves, it feels like a filmed stage play. So many elements in it are more appropriate for the stage than for the screen. The Monster’s initial reveal has the Creature approach the door to the room where Frankenstein and Waldman are talking backwards, then open that door while still facing away from it, just so that we can get a dramatic reveal of the monster’s face as he turns around (which is followed by a jump cut to a close-up of the face, to a second jump cut to an even closer-up shot). The whole scene plays out as if on stage – Frankenstein and Waldman discussing the Creature, then hearing him approach the door, then shutting off the light, then the door opening to reveal the creature, back to us. Then the creature comes in and is directed to sit down. Then Frankenstein opens the skylight, allowing the light in. It’s all on a single set, visible from one side of that set. You can easily see it playing out exactly the same way on stage. For a film there’s no need for the artificial backwards approach to the door (would even a newly-created monster do such a thing?) – the camera can simply cover Frankenstein and Waldman as the creature enters, then cut to a close-up of the Face. Or, better still, track over to it. There’s really no need for that Unity of Space stage set. The camera is free to move around and see things from all angles, and to provide its own Dramatic Reveals.
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The film is filled with such scenes that look as if they were composed for a single stage set, with characters playing to a preferred direction and with carefully crafted exits and entrances.
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The sets are extravagant, high, asymmetric, and dramatically lit. A movie set ought to be, as well, but, again, these seem much more appropriate to a theater stage than a movie. The stairs down to the front gate of the “watch tower” where Frankenstein’s lab is located gets a lot of use, and is filled with exits and entrances. It’s gloriously uneven and way too damned tall, and is filled with atmospheric lighting.
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It still bothers me that, near the climax, the cloud-filled sky backdrop is very obviously wrinkled. That they let this footage exist rather than fixing the damned backdrop annoys me.
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The scene with Fritz (not Ygor) getting the Normal Brain, dropping it, and absconding with the Abnormal Brain is iconic. Except, of course, it inevitably makes me think of the Mel Brooks version. (“Brain depository. After 5 PM slip brains through slot in door”. “Hand Delbruck – Scientist and Saint” “Abnormal Brain . DO NOT USE.” “Abby something. Abby Normal.”)
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All of which brings up a secondary issue in the filmed versions of Frankenstein. Nothing like this occurs in Shelley’s novel. Frankenstein creates his creature de novo. He may use people material and even animal parts for his raw material (Shelley’s book talks about Frankenstein getting some of his stuff from slaughterhouses, so it’s obviously animal material, unless the Germans had taken to anthropophagy). I thought of it as comparable to Clark Ashton Smith’s story The Colossus of Ylorgne, where the sorceror Nathaire creates a huge artificial giant from human bodies that he’s rendered down into their component substances. Shelley’s Frankenstein didn’t just sew excavated body parts together – he created them “from scratch”, only using the bodies he obtained as sources for the chemicals, fats, and other such stuff. The closest the movies got to this was the brain of the Bride of Frankenstein, which Dr. Pretorius said was “grown, as from seeds”
This becomes important, in fact, when we get to that brain. Because if Frankenstein simply used a pre-existing brain, why isn’t the Creature basically that person in a different body? You have to explain why there’s no pre-existing mind to go with that brain. So you use an Abnormal brain.
In fact, other movies go to some length to try to deal with this problem. In both the 1957 Hammer film The Curse of Frankenstein and the 1994 Kenneth Branaugh film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the Frankenstein attempts to use the brain of a professor in the body (Waldman’s, in fact, in the Branaugh version), but is stymied by the brain getting injured. In the 1957 film the brain gets injured (with broken glass, no less) while being stolen. In Branaugh’s version, there’s a severe head trauma as the Creature is being vivified.
so the Creature is a case of Brain damage. It’s made clear in other films that personality and memory go with the brain – there are numerous cases in the Universal films of the 1940s and in the later Hammer films. Even in Branaugh’s version, the Creature explains that there are things he knows that he has no recollection of actually learning, so he is retaining some memories of his earlier existence.
All of this is very different from the Freshly Created Brain that Shelley envisioned, which was abandoned and note properly nurtured by the student Frankenstein.