James Whale | Frankenstein / 1931

rooting for the monster

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Edward Faragoh, Garrett Fort, Robert Florey (uncredited), and John Russell (uncredited) (screenplay, based on a play by Peggy Webling, based, in turn, on the novel by Mary Shelley, gathered by John L. Balderston), James Whale (director) Frankenstein / 1931

 

The other day I determined to watch Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein again, films I had not seen since my childhood. I was far more impressed with James Whale’s filmmaking this time than I was as a rather snobbish child, when the horror genre little interested me.

      Of course, there is still a great deal of nonsense in Whale’s version of Frankenstein; the very idea that Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr), who speaks like a blustery country Englishman, should live in a Tyrolean village where the “peasants” celebrate his son’s wedding with Schuhplatter dances makes for some quite ridiculous moments.

     What I was also struck by this time was what a real scientific nerd Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) truly was—even his professors had thought he had gone too far. Yet how quickly he turned against his own monster—the strangely handsome, at moments, Boris Karloff—even threatening his creation with his torch, while permitting his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) to actually torture him, leading the monster to kill his assailant.

     Despite the fact that Henry declares he must complete his work in privacy and see no one, he fairly readily allows Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), Victor (John Boles), and Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan) into his old mill laboratory, inviting them to watch him perform the miraculous (and in this version, rather brief) resurrection of his stitched-together body parts.

      Also surprising to me was how few monster encounters appeared in the original film, as opposed to the several sightings by characters in The Bride of Frankenstein. Yet the one major scene depicted is worth everything just for its black humor: when he meets the little girl who gives the monster half of her flowers and shows him how, if you throw them into the lake, they will float. They each throw them, one by one, watching them gaily drift away. When they run out of flowers to toss into the lake, the joyful monster picks up the girl and tosses her into the water; evidently, she can’t swim. You might almost think that Mel Brooks wrote the scene.

      How the girl’s father immediately knows that the monster has killed her (or for that matter, that anyone has killed her) is somewhat inexplicable, as is the mass hysteria that overcomes the villagers. But by that time, after sensing that something is wrong, Henry’s bride-to-be is attacked by the monster, and Henry leads one of hunting parties in search of the beast, shouting to his men “Stay together men!” while ordering them, in the very next second, to break up into two groups.

      Even though the craggy hills look very much like a sound-stage, Whale creates stirring portraits in nearly all of his night scenes, and the chase, with the creature capturing his maker, Henry’s fall from the tower, and the mill’s being set afire certainly doesn’t disappoint in its excitement.

      Fire and light, indeed, are the subthemes throughout this work. The monster is kept the dark for days before he finally, and only briefly, is allowed to witness light, a very touching scene as Karloff slowly raises his hands in his pleasure of the beneficent sun. As I already mentioned, both his creator and assistant control and torture the monster through his terror of fire. And it is fitting that, apparently at least, the monster is consumed by fire as well.

     Frankenstein’s monster seems to not have been given even the slightest of chances by human beings to be spiritually “brought into the light.” Endowed with a “bad” brain, he is doomed, as evidently many are in this German-like territory where hanging is a common occurrence, to die before he has even come to life. The purported murder of the monster, accordingly, is almost a kind of abortion, turning him into the most poignant figure of the film—despite his murder of two and attempted killing of others. Whale was a kind genius to make us root for the monster instead of those who attempt to free themselves of him.

    And, finally, of course, there is the whole quite Freudian notion underlying this powerful film, of a father who turns on and sacrifices his son, as if this time Abraham does willingly and without question give up Isaac to the societal gods. The monster is an outsider from birth, and his lack of knowledge, or what we might describe as his innocence, is what puts him at odds to the closed-minded society. Since he is “born” as a full adult, he does not have the time to learn the behavior of the patriarchal world around him, and fails to obey its rules without even knowing that there are such restrictions. His “father” himself has also disobeyed the restrictions of a male in his bringing to life (“birthing”) of his own son, a gender role he has undertaken that the world around him perceives as totally perverse. The product of that ungodly act, accordingly, must be destroyed by both the society and the perpetrator if he is to live on. The “queer” offspring who is unable to mimic societal niceties is doomed. This film is a “queer” film even if it has little directly to do—unlike its follow up Bride—with sexuality.    

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2017).