Frankenstein (Universal Studios Classic Monster Collection)

Frankenstein (Universal Studios Classic Monster Collection)
by James Whale

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Movie Reviews of Frankenstein (Universal Studios Classic Monster Collection)

Movie Review: It's Still Very Much Alive After All These Years
Summary: 5 Stars

It is Boris Karloff's indisputably iconic and singularly haunting performance as the child-like brute, misunderstood and despised by all, who's only longing and desire is to be loved and cared for by others that continues to be one of cinema's timeless jewels of acting perfection, dramatic magnitude, and note-fully seamless pathos. Karloff's monster, like Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates or Robert De Nero's Travis Bickle, is one of cinema's fortunate accidents of how the exact casting of just the right perfect someone can unbelievably bolster the film. Karloff's casting as the inevitably sympathetic artificial concoction of a mad scientist with a deity complex turned out to be one of many grandiose happy accidents that has allowed this 70 year-old Gothic horror film to continue to be copiously admired, internationally beloved, and enthusiastically cherished up to contemporary times.

Frankenstein retains numerous stellar elements including a magnificently captivating early sound ensemble cast including Edward Van Sloan (Doctor Waldman), Mae Clarke (Elizabeth), Frederick Kerr (Baron Frankenstein), Dwight Frye (Fritz), and the unforgettable Colin Clive, the archetypal mad scientist, (Henry Frankenstein), brilliantly provocative Frankenstein make-up by make-up genius Jack Pierce, manically splendid and cleverly articulated German Expressionistic sets, that place this tale in an indescribable alternate Grimm Fairy Tale reminiscent landscape, James Whales immeasurably eloquent moral consolidation and inventively multi-faceted interpretation of Mary Shelly's tale, and forever crowned with one of cinema's most cunningly virtuoso and unredeemable bravura performances of inarticulate primal indignation and childish rage ever recorded on film by Karloff as the monster.

However due to it's age and Hollywood production values at the time, Frankenstein is not totally absent of problems: lacking of a musical score to counter-match the film's profuse talkativeness, predictably saddled with pedestrian and extremely dated comedic and romantic sub plots, and weakened by an awfully trite comedic conclusion. Despite these blemishes, Frankenstein consummately embodies the finest narrative qualities of the early Universal monster films, contains the simply greatest incarnation of Frankenstein's monster, and stubbornly remains both in ambiance and creative evocativeness the finest film version of the Mary Shelly story.

Either virtually creating or establishing the most memorable template for many of the horror genre's most blessed clichés and stereotypes including the angry mob laced with the burning torches and sharp pitchforks, the rustically appearing European town, the burning windmill, the broadly mentally troubled mad scientist, the tragically misinterpreted monster, the lavishly designed laboratory machinery, the chronically sadistic hunchback, and the supposed evil psychological significance of lightning. James Whale's Frankenstein remains an altogether manifestly influential film landmark that has predisposed numberless incalculable sequels, remakes, homages, and spoofs to habitually exhume its timeworn formula over the last seventy years.

One only has to warmly revisit this beloved perpetual love letter of the classical macabre to immediately lovingly recap its' resplendent spoils of immortality time after exultant time to re-experience all of the perpetual sacrosanct celluloid epiphanies that compose James's Whales Frankenstein and are eternal adjectives of film all by themselves. Imagine the following: the incessant utterance of Dr. Henry Frankenstein's immortally poetic verbally lyrical realization of success, "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive.. It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!" Following this volcanic explosion of scientific fervor the near psychotically elated scientific heretic beguilingly exclaims, "Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!" Who couldn't instantaneously vividly recall the tense furious physical caginess, grotesquely gyrated sweat marinated facial contortions, eye ballet of the pathological, the authentically grisly euphoric vocal earnestness of absolute discovery, and the very specific details of the man that was (and agelessly is with it's fortunate restoration and preservation on film) Colin Clive's Henry as he fervently serenades those hallowed words of revelation with a primordially unnerving flirtatiously ricocheting salvo of eternal laughter that essentially biblically jettisons sanity away from the film itself, for that moment.

In an ethereal totalitarian rush of such narrative spiritual possession and sheer air-tight uncanny intensity, the viewer is ultimately left spiritually adrift in a wanton cinematic wasteland of unnaturally insurmountable depravity where for the moment the clandestine doesn't even seem conceivable. Virtually nothing else in the medium of film has ever been able to produce this peculiar ambiance of malignant domination of film storytelling since. With the possible exceptions of Janet Leigh's liquid demise and Anthony Perkins's earnest feminine confessional in Hitchcock's Psycho, the lynch-party triumph at the end of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and Anthony Hopkins nonchalant walking towards a Caribbean dinner engagement in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, James Whales's Frankenstein endurably inhabits the uncommon role of rarefied unicorn of cinematic perfection, and that's not likely to falter anytime soon.

Talk about staying power!!!

As for Frankenstein's DVD format, it contains a uncannily pristine Pan and Scan standard presentation, a 45 minute absorbingly intriguing making-of documentary, film historian Rudy Behlmer's consistently stellar illuminating time-defying chronological exodus of a film audio commentary, original theatrical trailer, a short 1930's fictional film subject entitled Boo!, and much more.

Universally (pun intended) recommended to anyone interested in film classics, the Universal Monster films, or the everlasting time repelling landmark films of the 1930's. Followed by James Whales' superior sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Summary of Frankenstein (Universal Studios Classic Monster Collection)