by James Whale, 1931.
Starring: John Boles, Mae Clarke, Colin Clive, Dwight Frye, Boris Karloff, Frederick Kerr, Edward Van Sloan.
Rating: 8/10, 6.5/10.
It’s hard to judge old horror movies, more so than it is to judge any other genre of film from the earlier days of cinema. Comedy still carries through, drama is almost always better, but with horror it’s trickier. For one thing, the special effects are more prominent in horror films, and so it’s easy to just laugh at how bad they are compared to today’s. Also, horror films lend themselves to over-acting, and as acting styles change it is the over-acting that dates itself the quickest. But the biggest thing is that nowadays audiences are jaded, more used to the format of film, and what would have scared audiences back in, oh, say, 1931, won’t scare anyone in 2002.
That aside, James Whale’s Frankenstein is wonderful. The story bears little resemblance to the Mary Shelly (or, as she is listed in the credits here, Mrs. Percy B. Shelly) classic, but why does it have to? Anyway, Colin Clive stars as Frankenstein, who has been renamed from Victor to Henry. Oddly enough, John Boles plays Henry’s best friend, Victor. Anyway...so yeah, he’s like totally into his experiments with his assistant Fritz (where did the name Igor come from if not from here? He’s not in the book...), to the point of the exclusion of his wife (though I think the homoerotic undertones have more to do with that) and his closest friends. So he creates the monster (Karloff, of course) and it gets loose and kills some people before he’s burned by a rampaging mob.
There are a bunch of neat little touches. There is a common technique in horror films, where the horror of a certain sight is exaggerated by quick cuts, each from the same angle on the same object, but each closer. Usually these cuts are accompanied by big dramatic chords on the soundtrack. Here, though, when we first see the monster (and an oddly frightening sight he makes), Whale uses this technique, minus the music. While this is not particularly scary (for the reasons I explained), it certainly does convey a sense of revulsion, of the wrongness of this creature’s existance. Also, I don’t know if this was an innovation on Whale’s part, but this is the earliest film I can think of that used a specific camera motion that is now quite common. This is the one where the camera will be following the characters at a certain distance, from the side, and when the characters go through a door, the camera goes right through the wall to follow them. I’ve always liked this technique, and it was nice to see it here.
Anyway, this is still the only Whale film I’ve seen, and I definitely want to see more. He’s got a certain stylish style that I like.