The Curse of Frankenstein

It's almost Halloween, so the various film outlets are pushing scary movies, even the high-toned ones like Filmstruck. They are featuring a slew of films directed by Terence Fisher, who was the director of man of the Hammer horror films of the '50s and '6os. I've looked at a few of their Dracula pictures, and I just watched the first in their long-running Frankenstein series, called The Curse of Frankenstein, released in 1958.

The Universal Frankenstein had petered out, his last appearance played by Glenn Strange in the comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (where the entire trinity, including Frankie, Drac, and the Wolfman, were all killed off). Hammer, a british outfit that had failed with sci-fi films, picked up the baton and remade (or reenvisioned) many of the standards.

This was the first time Frankenstein and his creature were filmed in color. Peter Cushing would play the mad scientist, and Christopher Lee his unholy creation. The film is very loosely based on Mary Shelley's novel, leaving a lot out (it's only 85 minutes long) and inserting other things.

Cushing is a rich baron and Richard Urquhart plays his tutor (who is not in the book). They dabble in a laboratory, bringing back to life dead animals with electricity (this ties into the experiments of Galvani, which inspired Shelley). Cushing wants to try to create a human being, and Urquhart goes along, begrudgingly. They cut down a hanged man, and Cushing, totally clinical, endeavors to steal the hands of a recently deceased sculptor. He wants a great brain for the creature, and invites over an esteemed professor, who somehow ends up dead.

Urquhart grows increasingly disenchanted with these experiments, and when Cushing marries his cousin (Hazel Court) he's determined to get her out of there, especially when Cushing succeeds. Lee is terrific, dare I say almost as great as Boris Karloff, in portraying the silent monster, with a scarred face and assorted limbs. To avoid a lawsuit with Universal, Hammer made the creature look different, without a flat head or lightning bolts with the neck. In color, his face is blue, with one milky eye. I think I would have been a bit spooked if I were a kid back then.

What this film leaves out is what the creature is going through. The whole thrust of the novel is that the scientist rejects his creation, and the creature becomes intelligent and discovers his origins and his rejection by his "father." In this film, almost half of it goes by before Lee appears, as we get a lot of stuff in the laboratory (including some gruesome but unseen vivisection). The creature, though Lee is great, is simply a monster, without any feeling. Karloff did inject some pathos into his creature, but Lee is not called upon to.

There were many more Frankenstein films from Hammer, all starring Cushing, who was an esteemed actor who became associated with these films, but it didn't seem to matter to him, as he embraced his fans' devotion.