Frankenstein (Universal, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After screening Waterloo Bridge Charles and I watched Frankenstein, a movie that has become so ubiquitous it’s almost beyond criticism – even people who’ve never seen it know about it and certainly know what the Monster looks like – and which had a fascinating genesis that James Curtis detailed in his Whale biography. It’s also an indication of the extent of Hollywood’s sexism that the credits list the author of the original Frankenstein novel not as Mary Shelley but as “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley” (maybe someone at Universal thought his name was more box-office than hers – and at least one writer, John Lauritsen, has argued that it was really Mr. Shelley, not Mrs. Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein). I’ve commented extensively on Frankenstein in previous installments of my movie journal, though I don’t seem to have posted previously on it to this blog (I have written about some of the later Frankenstein films in the Universal sequence), and it’s a quite remarkable film I’ve loved ever since I first saw it in 1970. It’s a film that has acquired a mythic aura and power that keeps it compelling even though the image of the Monster has become so commonplace it’s lost its ability to scare – apparently it was so frightening to its original audience that after the first preview screening either Whale or the owner of the theatre where it was shown received a phone call from an irate viewer sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. saying, “Ever since I saw Frankenstein I haven’t been able to sleep – and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you getting any sleep either!”

Curtis’s account of the making of Frankenstein describes the project as being run through the usual set of theatre and Hollywood hands – from British playwright Peggy Webling to John L. Balderston, who had hoped to adapt Webling’s play for American audiences the way he had with Hamilton Deane’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – to Robert Florey (who apparently thought up the gimmick of having the Monster receive a so-called “criminal brain”), to Garrett Fort – and in each new script the pathos Mary Shelley built up in the Monster’s character (especially in the high point of the book, the stunning three chapters actually narrated by the Monster, who in the book is fully articulate and literate, reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost and sees himself as Adam and Frankenstein as God) was reduced until by the time Whale got assigned to the project he was little more than an unmotivated engine of destruction. Then Whale read through all the scripts and told his partner, David Lewis, “You know, I feel sorry for the goddamned Monster.” Whale took Fort’s draft and put on another writer, Francis Edward Faragoh, who had been one of the writers on Warner Bros.’ gangster classic Little Caesar the year before (and there are strikingly similar scenes in both films of the brutal killer approaching the camera straight-on with murder in his eyes), who got credit for the final script.

The result was a viscerally exciting and highly complex movie in which audience sympathies are pulled in different directions at once – and also what I’ve long thought was a quite obvious Gay metaphor in that Frankenstein (Colin Clive, whom Whale had to fight the studio to use – they wanted Leslie Howard because he was a bigger “name” but it’s impossible to imagine nice Leslie Howard as a neurotically driven scientist, whereas Clive was utterly ideal for the role and was essentially playing his Captain Stanhope character from Journey’s End, though this time driven mad not by the strains of war but by the temptation of advancing humankind’s knowledge of its origins) retires to an abandoned lighthouse with a male companion, Fritz (Dwight Frye) – in the novel Frankenstein worked alone – to create a life artificially, while his fussbudget father (Frederick Kerr) goes around the ancestral mansion demanding that his son marry fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza (Mae Clarke) and father “a son to the house of Frankenstein” in the normal heterosexual fashion. (James Curtis in his book has little patience for people who look for Gay metaphors in Whale’s work just because Whale was himself Gay – but they’re there, and in the sequel The Bride of Frankenstein they become even more obvious than they are here.)

Watching Frankenstein after Journey’s End and Waterloo Bridge offered insights into the movie that I hadn’t noticed before – like the parallels between the friendship of Henry Frankenstein and his best friend Victor Moritz (John Boles) in Frankenstein and that between Captain Stanhope and Second Lieutenant Raleigh (David Manners) in Journey’s End. There are also fascinating parallels in the movie – early on Frankenstein boasts that he’s going to create a living being “with my own hands” and later, after his creation has escaped and is terrorizing the countryside, he says, “With my own hands I created him, and with my own hands I will destroy him.” Frankenstein the movie uses almost none of Frankenstein the book but the central premise and some of the character names, but it has its own stunning charms, including a script that makes a lot of the irony that though the Monster physically is a fully developed adult, mentally he’s still a baby, reacting to stimuli in an affectingly child-like fashion that becomes lethal only – literally – because he doesn’t know his own strength. In some ways Frankenstein is a movie at war with itself, between all those previous scripts that made the creature just a monster and the efforts of Whale and the actor who played the Monster, Boris Karloff (his star-making part at age 42 after over a decade in the Hollywood salt mines as a character actor), to build sympathy for him.

James Curtis debunked Karloff’s own account of how he got the part – his version was that Whale noticed him in the Universal commissary one day while Karloff was eating lunch during the filming of the Universal film Graft, noticed Karloff’s tall stature and rather boxy head, and decided he’d be worth testing for the Monster – by pointing out that Whale was actually on vacation back home in England while Graft was shooting. Curtis suggests that it was David Lewis, who’d seen Karloff live on stage in the play The Criminal Code as a prisoner whose big scene was murdering a fellow inmate who had squealed on their big escape plan, and had also seen the film version in which Karloff had recreated the role. According to Curtis, one night at dinner Whale was bemoaning the fact that he was about to start shooting Frankenstein and he still hadn’t found an actor to play the Monster. “What about Boris Karloff?” Lewis said. “Boris who?” Whale replied. The Monster’s makeup was devised by Universal’s makeup head Jack P. Pierce (more than once I’ve walked up to someone who was wearing a T-shirt with the Monster’s face and called out, “Jack Pierce!”, and then explained who that was) and consisted of 42 pounds – much of which was padding to fill out Karloff’s body to make him look monstrous (the Monster’s boots were made with thick rubber soles so people spreading asphalt paving can walk on it safely as they work) and the rest was the facial makeup, built from 24 pounds of face putty and collodion. It was applied over a cheesecloth face wrapping – the normal material was linen, but Pierce chose cheesecloth because the makeup would seep through the holes in the cloth and look like it had the pores of real skin – and Pierce had to be on the set for emergency repair work since the makeup was frequently damaged during takes.

One thing that’s surprising about the original Frankenstein is how agile the Monster is; instead of the slow, shambling gait the Monster acquired in later Universal films, here he’s quite light on his feet even though he’s also barely coordinated, obviously because he’s still learning how his body works and what this walking business is all about. And of course there’s the still-chilling scene in which the Monster befriends a little girl named Maria (Marilyn Harris), who picks some daisies and gives a few to the Monster. “I can make a boat,” she says, throwing a daisy on the surface of the lake where they’ve met (the only actual exterior work in this movie, by the way; the other “exteriors” were built inside Universal’s soundstages and the Blu-Ray format allows home-video viewers for the first time to see what some of the original reviewers were complaining about when they said they noticed creases in the painted cloth backdrops that represented sky) and inviting the Monster to do the same. He does, but then he runs out of daisies and throws Maria into the lake, leading to her death by drowning. It was the one scene in Frankenstein in which Karloff quarreled with Whale’s direction: in the film as it stands (with this scene, cut in virtually all the prints shown between 1957 and 1985, now restored) Karloff gives Harris an underhanded toss with both hands. Karloff had wanted the Monster merely to set the girl onto the water’s surface as he’d done with the daisies, then frantically paw the water as she (unlike the flowers) sinks. Karloff had already become known as an actor who would challenge a director if he thought there was something wrong; in the play The Criminal Code his character had strangled the “squealer” with his back to the audience. In the film, Howard Hawks (a director with a far more “major” reputation than James Whale!) wanted to insert a close-up of Karloff’s face as he strangled the man. No, said Karloff; it will be much scarier if the audience doesn’t see my face – and Hawks conceded the point and shot the scene the way it had been done on stage.

During Frankenstein7 Karloff complained to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – whose original purpose was not to hand out awards but to serve as an industry-wide company union and thereby prevent real unions from organizing Hollywood – that Universal was violating the Academy’s work rule that actors could do 12 hours but then needed at least that long off by taking up so much time making him up, and the Academy ruled that the hours he was spending in Pierce’s make-up chair should be counted as work. Still later Karloff was one of the 12 founding members of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, along with such others as Robert Montgomery and James Cagney. Though I would still hope that someday someone will film Frankenstein exactly as Mary Shelley wrote it – with its fully articulate Milton-quoting Monster (and I also regard it as a major cultural tragedy that no one recorded an audiobook of Frankenstein with Karloff reading it – obviously his association with the story would have given it commercial appeal), Whale’s two movies, this one and the immediate sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (which is even better) come closer than any others to the spirit of what Shelley wrote and in particular to the sympathetic portrayal of the Monster, driven mad not by a “criminal brain” but by his rejection by the humans he reached out to, including his creator.