Frankenstein (1931)
4
Of course this film is good! People don't keep watching and talking about a movie after almost seventy years if it isn't. Unless it's unbelievably bad, that is, which, in and of itself is a kind of greatness, really. Well, this film is not in that category. The only reason I gave it only four stars, instead of the full five, is by way of acknowledgement to the modernists out there that, were it made using today's technology, it could be better. Funny thing though. It hasn't been made "better". Just differently.
The story is simple enough. Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive), assembles a vaguely human-looking body from various parts assembled from grave and gallows. Unknowingly, he puts a damaged brain into it's large, remarkably flat head. He brings it to life ("It's alive! It's alive!" Line restored to new prints after about sixty years- "In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to BE God!"), learns that it is brain-damaged, and rejects it. It escapes, kills a litle girl by accident (It's a touching scene, also fully restored: The little girl, unafraid, accepts the monster as a playmate. They throw flowers into the lake to watch them float. When the flowers run out, the monster, likening in his childlike mind the little girl to a pretty flower, tosses he in, as well. She drowns, and he leaves, confused and scared). He is hunted down, trapped in a mill, and burned to death. It's true that this small story is far from the novel by Mary Shelley from which it was taken. The novel is an epic story of science versus humanism. The creature it presents is articulate, struggling against the circumstances of his birth and his appearance to find out who he is and to gain some measure of acceptance. The killings he commits are not accidental, but deliberate murders motivated by pain and a desire for vengeance. This is more fully explored in "Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'" (1994).
What this film offers, instead, is a basic and moving story about a creature who, after all, is only a man, despite his appearance, and who is rejected, from the moment of his birth, because of that appearance. Those who encounter him, from the learned man of science, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloane), to the ignorant villagers, operate on the assumption that if someone is ugly, he is only capable of ugly things. It is the arrogant Waldman who first calls the creature a "monster". This is the tragedy central to the story presented here. With not a word of dialogue to speak, the remarkable Boris Karloff shows us the soul trapped inside the deformed body. With his eyes, with his hands, with the pathetic sounds which are the creature's only means of communicating his confusion, fear and pain, Karloff makes us understand that this is nothing more than a child, struggling to survive alone. Seen in this light, even his deliberate murder of the lab assistant (Dwight Frye) who torments him with, amongst other things, a torch (Instilling in him a fear of fire, which makes the way he ultimately dies so much sadder and lonelier), is little more than a bullied child striking back at the bully, except in this case the terrified child has a man's strength.
James Whale directed this film. As a homosexual in Hollywood at a time when such a thing caused one to be considered abnormal and freakish, the themes explored in "Frankenstein" hit very close to home for Whale. This becomes even more apparent, and is developed with far more sly humor and style in the sequel, "The Bride Of Frankenstein", Whales last contribution to the series, made three years later.
