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The one that launched Hammer Studios as a spook-house Ealing, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee their gruesome Alec Guinness. Shelley's tale is soberly visualized from a convict's cell, a note from Caligari or Amadeus as the guillotine waits outside. Cushing's Baron Frankenstein is a snotty heir who graduates to medical obsession alongside his mentor (Robert Urquhart), his first success in the field of revivification gets a lifeless puppy to play catch again. The Promethean experiment is the next logical step, the "framework" is a brute's corpse cut down from a crossroads gibbet. When his cohort complains of the chewed-up noggin, the doctor swiftly slices it off—Terence Fisher keeps the incision just below the frame, the bloodied hand is absent-mindedly wiped on the tweet coat. "Forget the whole! Now we must take the parts..." Hands of a sculptor, eyeballs bought like contraband. The brain? "The trouble with us scientists is that we quickly tire of our discoveries," declares the old professor who meets his demise before a Rembrandt canvas, his cerebellum is removed in the crypt and dented in a scuffle. Lightning provides the missing spark, the Creature staggers outside its tank, a sped-up zoom reveals Lee with jagged scars behind the gauze. The clueless fiancée (Hazel Court), the scorned maid (Valerie Gaunt), the blind man in the woods with reference to Lang's M, victims of "obscure truths" one and all. The ghastly laboratory in the elegant Victorian mansion is a Hammer cornerstone, Romero in Day of the Dead has the insurrection of the chained ghoul. A dry epitaph ("Neither wicked nor insane, just too dedicated to his work"), the moral is that horrors threaten British order but do wonders for British cinema. With Paul Hardtmuth, Melvyn Hayes, and Noel Hood.
--- Fernando F. Croce |