Young Frankenstein (Gruskoff/Venture Films, Crossbow Productions, Jouer Limited, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 28) my husband Charles and I watched a film we hadn’t seen in a while but regard as one of our favorites: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). According to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, it came about in a casual conversation between Brooks and Gene Wilder on the set of their immediately previous film, Blazing Saddles (1974), in which Wilder told Brooks that he’d like their next film to be a parody of the classic Universal Frankenstein monster films. Wilder also stipulated that Brooks could direct it but should not be in it, even though Brooks did work his way into three audio-only bit parts (he’s listed on the film’s imdb.com page as “Werewolf,” “Cat Hit By Dart,” and “Victor Frankenstein [Voice]”). According to a cover story published by Newsweek when the film was first released, Wilder and Brooks fought all through the making of the film, always over the same issue: Wilder wanted the humor to be more subtle, Brooks wanted it more broad. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz told an anecdote I’d never heard before: the great scene in which Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and the Monster (Peter Boyle, billed second; in the original 1931 Frankenstein Boris Karloff was billed fourth) appear on stage and do a dance number to Irving Berlin’s song “Puttin’ On the Ritz” was entirely Wilder’s idea. Brooks didn’t want to shoot it; Wilder spent 20 minutes arguing with him over the scene, and finally Brooks said, “If you care about it so much you’re willing to argue with me for 20 minutes over it, it goes in.” It’s one of the highlights of the film! Brooks and Wilder insisted that the movie be shot in black-and-white to reproduce the look of the Universal films they were parodying – which cost them their original distribution deal with Columbia. No problem: Brooks and Wilder simply went down the block to 20th Century-Fox, whose production head, Alan Ladd, Jr., agreed to make the film in black-and-white. (Ladd was the visionary who accepted George Lucas’s Star Wars for production after 12 other studios and production chiefs had turned it down.) It’s ironic that Young Frankenstein is now older (52 years) than the original Universal films it was lampooning were when it was made (43 years after the original Frankenstein, 39 years after The Bride of Frankenstein, and 35 years after Son of Frankenstein). It’s also a film that arguably shouldn’t have worked at all given that it was parodying something that was already a parody; director James Whale and writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston had already made fun of the original Frankenstein mythos in The Bride of Frankenstein, ramping up the comic-relief elements to a point at which they were at least as important as the horror aspects. In a way Brooks and Wilder (especially Brooks) replaced Whale’s and Balderston’s campy British Gay humor with out-and-out Borscht Belt schtick.

Young Frankenstein emerged as a beautifully balanced film, containing enough raunchy sex jokes to please the most jaded Mel Brooks devotée (including the one between Gene Wilder and Teri Garr, much less annoying than usual, that ends the film), but also with genuine moments of subtlety and wit (his send-up of the scene with the blind hermit from The Bride of Frankenstein, with the late Gene Hackman superb as the hermit who accidentally lights the Monster’s finger while trying to light his cigar for him, is quite bittersweet in its humor). It's also ironic that while Young Frankenstein was shooting in Great Britain, another crew under contract to 20th Century-Fox was filming a quite different parody of the Frankenstein mythos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and while that’s a great movie (I once paired it with The Bride of Frankenstein and told Charles we were going to watch “the two Gayest versions of the Frankenstein story”) it pales by comparison to Young Frankenstein. Indeed, while Young Frankenstein satirized the Universal Frankenstein films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was much more a spoof of the Hammer remakes. Dr. Frank N. Furter even created his monster in a giant fish tank that had previously been used in Hammer’s first foray into the myth, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while for Young Frankenstein Brooks scored all the original lab equipment that had been built by Kenneth Strickfaden for the Universal films. Strickfaden had retained ownership of all that gear and had merely rented it to studios that wanted to use it, and as of 1974 it was all sitting in his garage until Brooks learned about it and arranged to use it even though that meant it all had to be taken to Britain. Brooks even gave Strickfaden the screen credit he’d deserved on the originals but hadn’t been granted. Strickfaden’s involvement puts both Boris Karloff and Mel Brooks two degrees of separation from Bix Beiderbecke, since Charles Strickfaden, Kenneth’s brother, had been a reed player in Paul Whiteman’s band when Bix was in it from 1927 to 1929. And there’s an even closer association to a jazz great in Young Frankenstein than that: Marty Feldman, who exploded onto the movie world as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (pronounced “EYE-gor” instead of the usual “EE-gor,” a gag I suspect Brooks got from the 1933 horror classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was also the source for the gag in which Feldman’s head, labeled “Freshly Dead,” appears at the end of a series of skulls), was the brother of Victor Feldman, who’d played piano for Miles Davis in the early 1960’s. (Miles fired Victor Feldman in the middle of recording his troubled album Seven Steps to Heaven and replaced him with Herbie Hancock.)

While Young Frankenstein is mainly based on the first three Universal Frankenstein films, it also is full of in-jokes from other movies; Brooks and Wilder moved the setting to Transylvania (Mary Shelley’s original novel had been set in Switzerland, where she’d been living when she wrote it) and couldn’t resist cribbing from the Universal Dracula as well. All those vertiginous stone stairways with no rails, as well as the rat-infested cellar where the earlier Victor Frankenstein concealed his equipment and even the opening scene, when an emissary from Castle Frankenstein tries to wrest a box from Victor’s cold, dead hands so he can take it to New York and give it to Victor’s grandson Frederick, are from the Dracula rather than the Frankenstein mythos. The scene at the theatre in which the Monster goes berserk after he and Dr. Frankenstein do their song-and-dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (one wonders how Brooks and Wilder got permission from the still-living and infamously fiercely protective of his intellectual property Irving Berlin to use his song in that bizarre context) and the audience flees in terror is a pretty obvious cop from the 1933 King Kong. And there’s an even more oddball reference to Richard Cunha’s 1958 film Frankenstein’s Daughter in which the grandson of the original Victor Frankenstein angrily reacts to being called by his full last name and snaps, “Here my name is Frank!” That makes it even more ironic that the imdb.com cast list for Young Frankenstein includes an actor whose name is Clement von Franckenstein, indicated as playing the “Villager Screaming at the Monster from the Bars.” Young Frankenstein cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld flawlessly reproduced the look of the Universal films that were the inspiration. I particularly liked the use of iris-ins and iris-outs and some of the other oddball transitions that were part of the basic grammar of film (iris shots actually pretty much went out with the silent era but the wipes used extensively in this film were quite common in the early 1930’s), and given the cold war between directors and cinematographers over moving-camera shots (directors liked them, cinematographers didn’t because they took too long to light), it’s ironic that Young Frankenstein begins with an elaborate and quite long moving-camera shot. The film is also quite creative in its use of music, even though John Morris’s background score, though perfectly fine, doesn’t have the demented imagination Franz Waxman brought to the music for The Bride of Frankenstein.