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The mystery of parenthood, "a son to the house of Frankenstein." A dab of Caspar David Friedrich for the opening coupled with a James Whale gag, the graveyard gate before the doctor (Colin Clive) in close-up gives him a pair of iron horns. "The field of chemical galvanizing and electro-biology," the university can only go so far so purloined cadavers are brought to the laboratory in the tower. Lightning jolts the stitched-up figure to life, "quite a good scene, isn't it," the creature lumbers onto the screen and a pair of jump-cuts present Boris Karloff's amphibious sunken eyes. The terror of creation, the nightmare of poets. "Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?" A stark Germanic veneer applied to Shelley's Promethean fable, The Golem is a compositional model and Caligari is directly noted in the fiancée (Mae Clarke) terrorized in the bridal chamber. The creature has a criminal's brain and a newborn's confusion, in the primordial image he reaches with outstretched arms toward the light and is met by the torch of the hunchbacked sadist (Dwight Frye). "The great ray that first brought life into the world" lends a divine elation quickly faded, what's left is the wrathful bewilderment of the shunned offspring, a magnificent pantomime by Karloff. Kafka's "Das Urteil" for the doctor and his father the baron (Frederick Kerr), elsewhere the lessons the world teaches an outsider, for instance flowers float in the river but little girls do not. Whale insists on a mobile camera, and its wobbliness works marvelously in the tracking shot of a festive burg brought to a halt by a local carrying his daughter's corpse. Up in flames goes the sympathetic monster, the reinstatement of normality is an appropriately feeble joke at the close. "Well... we've warned you." History repeated as tragedy, then as comedy (Bride of Frankenstein). With Edward Van Sloan, John Boles, Lionel Belmore, Michael Mark, and Marilyn Harris. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |