Frankenstein (1931)

1931
Directed by James Whale
Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff

Welcome back to the Lick Ness Monster October Universal MonsterFest.  Truly a title worthy of any marquee in in the universe!

Universal Studios expected Dracula to be profitable, but not the huge deal that it would become.  When it made enough in 1931 profits to buy a solid-gold island, it didn't take long for them to commission more horror films.  Thus was the beginning of movie studios viewing horror movies as a surefire, low-risk way to make some bucks and scare plenty of people doing it, but it really does stand out once again how much Universal really did seem to LIKE this stuff.  I don't sigh often, but this is truly one of those situations that is sigh-worthy, isn't it?  Can you imagine a movie studio thinking so much of literary horror monsters today that they would devote so much studio space to filming a bunch of them in a row?  Then again, movie studios these days are also pretty much extinct, since virtually nothing is actually filmed in California anymore, but I digress.  But while Dracula was a very successful flick, nothing could have prepared Universal for what was to come with the advent of the freakiest looking monster that cinematic audiences had ever seen in 1931.

Just like Dracula, this movie was based on a stage play rather than a strict adaptation of the original novel.  This move really was a stroke of genius by the Universal brain trust, because it meant that not only were things more filmable, it also meant that a limited number of sets needed to be built.  The basics of the Frankenstein story are here, and surely everyone knows this stuff: nutty, misguided doctor pieces together a human body out of dead people, brings it back to life, mayhem ensues, moral lesson at the end about tampering in God's domain or something. 

Yes, we've gotten movies that are much closer to the original novel.  1994's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is probably the closest, but all these years later, this is still the definitive film version of Frankenstein for many.  Myself included.  What can I say, a lot of people have screw fetishes.  Clearly, this was also true back in the early '30s as this flick made something in excess of $12 million (which was ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH back then) off of its $200,000-some production budget.  I don't throw this word out there often, but that...is scrum-tralascent. (/Will Ferrell)

Yes, this movie does look like a big deal, but it starts in decidedly smaller moments.  Within roughly a minute of screen time, we meet pretty much every main principal human character.  Doctor Victor Frankenstein himself is played by Colin Clive in one of those performances that truly encapsulates the whole "mad scientist" subgenre of characters.  The basics are left intact from the book, as Victor has an assistant (named "Fritz" here, and his hunchback is truly the stuff of legend) and a fiance, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), who is worried that the guy she is marrying spends so much time in a creepy watch tower.  Eh, don't worry about it, honey.  I'm just...thinking up here.  It doesn't take long for the movie to give us a true laugh-out-loud moment as Fritz manages to steal the WRONG BRAIN to put in the beast that they're pasting together from MacGyver-style used parts, resulting in a creature that doesn't quite behave the way the good doctor wants.

So yeah, ol' Victor is obsessed with wringing death from life and actually manages to do it (complete with lots of nifty electrical set imagery, special effects and that legendary "It's alive!" scene that I knew well as a fan of Weird Science).  But the movie really kicks it up a notch when the creature himself makes his first appearance.  Played by Boris Karloff, with makeup coming straight out of the 1931 population's nightmares, the character is an icon for a reason.  It might not have been quite what Mary Shelley intended when she wrote the book, as director James Whale definitely went for the more "shock and awe" approach.  In this reporter's opinion, the move paid off big time.  How?  This flick is in the godforsaken Library of Congress Film Registry.  So suck on it, accuracy Nazis.

After a couple close calls and a couple notches in the movie's body count, the creature escapes.  This is where the movie really shows its true power, as both the script and Karloff do a phenomenal job getting us to care about the monster.  Now, I'm not going to give everyone a fourth-grade level English class lecture about what we're going for here with this story, but it is a tragedy.  The middle portion of Frankenstein consists largely of the monster wandering around in the countryside interacting with various town denizens.  The BEST sequence in the movie consists of his meeting with a little girl where he learns to skip rocks.  Only little girls don't skip like rocks.  Really, really awesome, powerful stuff, but this is also the incident that clues the rest of the world in on the existence of the beast.  Time for the angry mob to grab their pitchforks...

Yeah, there's room to nitpick here with some of the script decisions.  The fact that Frankenstein escapes at the end has always sat at least a little wrong with me since his fate in the book seemed so much better and more poetic, but it really doesn't matter in the least bit.  This is a movie that's all about kinetic energy.  It starts off moving really fast and just keeps moving.  Not in the crappy way that Michael Bay likes to do it; this stuff actually makes sense.  It's refreshingly brisk at something like 75 minutes.  The horror stuff is all quick and relatively painless.  The emotional scenes hit just the right notes in that timeframe.  Even the performances have this really cool little sense of urgency, with everyone seeming to talk and move just a little faster than usual.  Karloff was so awesome here that he would parlay his fame from the movie into a career that lasted another 30 years, almost exclusively in the horror genre. 

In short, there's a reason why this movie has managed to stay popular for 70-odd years.  Yeah, it's a history lesson and you're not going to be pissing yourself in terror.  But in terms of history, you're not going to get much better than Frankenstein.  Oh, and I once carved a jack-o-lantern of Boris Karloff's creature face.  Yeah.  October. 

Without guilt, bah Gawd, I award this flick **** out of ****.  Everyone should check this movie out at least once in their life, because it's basically moviemaking 101.