Original subtitles

Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org

Look. It's moving.

It's alive. It's alive.

It's alive. It's alive

It's alive It's alive

- It's alive - Henry, in the name of God

In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God.

Sometimes I think we film historians are a bit like mad scientists,

poking around in dusty vaults, stitching together our research,

trying to give a jolt of new life to Hollywood's forgotten heritage.

Fortunately one film that's never been forgotten is James Whale's Frankenstein,

one of the most influential and imitated motion pictures of all time.

When the film was first released in 1931,

Universal added a special prologue, part showmanship,

but partly out of real apprehension that Frankenstein might be too much

for nervous audiences of the Great Depression.

I think it will thrill you.

It may shock you.

It might even horrify you.

So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain,

now's your chance to...

Well, we've warned you.

While Frankenstein may no longer really shock or horrify,

it has never lost the power to fascinate.

Boris Karloff's star-making performance created one of the most

instantly recognisable cultural images of the 20th century.

So, if my friend here doesn't make you nervous,

perhaps you'll join us both as we enter the vaults of Universal Studios,

and open the Frankenstein Files.

Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?

Karloff's performance is definitely unique, and one of the great performances,

in my estimation, in film.

My father always referred to the monster as his very best friend.

It's simply the most powerful character make-up ever created for the movies.

I wanted to be Dr Frankenstein. I wanted to be the guy who made the monsters.

Those films were the ones that inspired me.

Most people have come to know the story of Frankenstein through motion pictures,

especially the films produced by Universal and starring Boris Karloff.

But the original tale was the work of a precocious teenaged writer,

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Published anonymously in its first edition,

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,

was the result of a parlour game she played with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron

during a rainy vacation in Switzerland in the summer of 1816.

- Come, Mary. Come and watch the storm. - You know how lightning alarms me.

They were all hole n there, the weather was bad,

and somebody came up with the idea -

Percy or Lord Byron - that they should have a writing contest.

Frightened of thunder, fearful of the dark.

And yet you have written a tale that sent my blood into icy creeps.

Look at her, Shelley. Can you believe that lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?

A monster, created from cadavers out of rifled graves.

We're so used to the Hollywood version of Frankenstein, the Universal picture,

with all of the electrical apparatus and the tremendous production value.

Of course, Mary Shelley, when she wrote the book

back in the early 19th century,

described it somewhat differently, and, if I may read just a paragraph,

it leaves a great deal up to the imagination.

"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils."

"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony,

I collected the instruments of life around me

that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet."

"It was already one in the morning, the rain pattered dismally against the panes,

and my candle was nearly burnt out, when,

by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,

I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open."

"It breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

Then she goes on. She left it deliberately vague.

You're not quite sure whether there was black magic involved,

or whether there was some vague elixir or something.

Certainly not by thunder, lightning,

electrical impulses and so forth and so on.

There was none of that. There are certainly many dimensions to this story.

We can talk about Faust, we can talk about the overachiever,

we can talk about man trying to emulate God.

There are so many aspects, which I think is the keynote

as to why this particular idea has transcended time.

The novel was perfect for stage dramatisation,

and playwrights realised this right off the bat.

It was just a few years after the novel was published

that the plays started coming forth.

In 1823, I believe,

Richard Peake presented Presumption,

which was the fate of Frankenstein,

which actually was quite a melodramatic offering.

It starred as the monster an actor named Thomas Potter Cooke,

who became in the 1800s pretty much what Boris Karloff became in the 1900s.

He became typecast, playing the Frankenstein monster

in all kinds of revivals of that play, in other plays.

The stage production that most influenced Universal's film

was the version written in 1927 by Peggy Webling

and produced by the British actor/manager Hamilton Deane.

Deane himself played the monster.

Film historian and former actor lvan Butler

was a member of Deane's company.

And he had to rely wholly, of course, on stage make-up,

which was quite effective.

Mixtures of greens and yellows and blues.

And a matted wig on the top.

He was as tall as I am, and he wore lifters under his shoes

to make him a bit taller still, and he looked enormous.

Hamilton Deane in the stage production actually was dressed very much like -

he was the monster, the creature -

very much like Henry Frankenstein, the creator.

They dressed very closely, and once again it was the mirror-image bit.

In the late 1800s, early 1900s, it became fashionable to interpret the novel

in a way that Victor Frankenstein and the monster were like Yin and Yang,

opposite sides of the same coin, Jekyll and Hyde.

They were basically the same character.

Deane played Frankenstein in repertory with his production of Dracula,

which partly formed the basis of the Universal film starring Bela Lugosi.

But, unlike Dracula, the Frankenstein monster was a sympathetic character.

There was this touch of pathos with regard to the monster.

He was to be pitied.

He didn't ask to be brought forth into the world, and there he was.

And because of his appearance, which was not his doing,

no matter where he went or what he did, people were frightened of him.

He threw a dove out of the window.

We had a cage full of doves and one stuffed one.

And Deane used to get very angry when he couldn't get hold of the stuffed dove,

cos the other doves were saying "What are you doing?"

And he used to throw it out of the window.

He never said "Fly". He said "Floy". Most peculiar accent he had.

Deane staged his melodrama with almost none of the special effects

that would later become standard.

His creation scene was a masterpiece of theatrical understatement.

You just saw him move and then he got up.

He got up very effectively.

The monster's ultimate revenge on his maker

was staged with the simplest materials, enhanced immeasurably by dim lighting.

He attacked Frankenstein, bent him over a table,

apparently tore his throat out.

He had a bowl of red dye and a sponge.

He used to bend over and he'd pick out this dripping thing and throw it down.

It was really quite effective. There was a tremendous roll of thunder,

flashes of lightning, and that was the final curtain.

Techniques of the theatre, especially expressionist theatre,

had a major influence on prototype horror movies produced in Europe in the 1920s.

In terms of art direction, German expressionist cinema

was characterised by intense light and dark, lots of shadows.

The Hollywood style for a very long time was generally flat lighting,

lighting to make sure people saw everything.

When Hollywood filmmakers were first confronted with the German films,

they were very surprised by the kind of atmosphere you could create,

and that flows into the horror films, especially that Universal made.

Studio founder Carl Laemmle was born in Germany

and imported much European talent to Universal City.

It was his son, Carl Junior, who was most attracted to horror themes,

much to his father's initial disapproval.

But the success of Dracula was all that was needed

for Junior Laemmle to have his way with horror films.

Frankenstein, another classic, was the obvious next choice.

Frankenstein was originally to be directed by Robert Florey and to star Bela Lugosi.

Bela Lugosi was a hot actor. He'd just come off of Dracula,

so it was, again, a logical choice.

And Florey claimed that some of the scenario, if not all of it, was his idea.

Robert Florey was a Franco-American.

He'd grown up partially in France and had started out in the '20s

making interesting little experimental films

that were very strongly influenced by German expressionism.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari starred Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt

in a tale of mind control, madness and murder.

It was one of Florey's favourite expressionist films

and a model for his proposed Frankenstein.

There are similarities in that you have in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

the Werner Krauss character who, in some ways, creates this being,

but he is without his own will.

He is a somnambulist who Caligari keeps bringing back almost from the dead.

Another antecedent to Frankenstein, of course, is The Golem,

which is also a film about a human-made monster

that comes to life and then wreaks havoc.

Although Bela Lugosi was announced as the star of Frankenstein,

he had objections to the assignment from the beginning.

With the success of Dracula, he didn't want to play the monster,

this mute, heavily made-up character.

He thought he was too handsome and too well known.

There actually was a test scene of Lugosi shot for Frankenstein.

The make-up people who were there

all describe Lugosi's make-up as basically resembling the golem.

And the story is that Lugosi had a very claylike skin,

a claylike look and also this big head of hair.

I keep hoping that this footage crops up somewhere. I would love to see it.

The first writer assigned to the project was Garrett Fort,

who combined Florey's ideas with an unproduced stage adaption

of the Peggy Webling play by John Balderston.

Despite Florey's passion for the project,

another director was already waiting in t@
and Florey was soon out of the picture.

There is no paperwork in the files as to why he was taken off the project,

but then, as we know, James Whale became the director.

James Whale had come over from England.

He had directed a very successful play in England called Journey's End,

with Colin Clive, who eventually played Henry Frankenstein.

Whale was a rapidly rising Hollywood director,

noted for his direction of World War I dramas.

Sir lan McKellen was nominated for an Academy Award

for his portrayal of James Whale in the film Gods and Monsters,

which earned writer/director Bill Condon an Oscar for adapted screenplay.

Action.

It was the moment when theatre directors were being imported by Hollywood

to deal with the fact that actors suddenly had to speak.

Whale was more than anything responsible for the choice of Karloff.

My father had been in Hollywood about ten years

when he made Frankenstein in 1931.

And what most people don't know is that it was his 81st film, I believe.

He was in many silent films and also in a lot of talkies before Frankenstein.

He was having lunch in the commissary,

dressed in one of his good suits and looking very spiffy,

and James Whale spotted him.

Whale saw his face and was fascinated by the bone structure of it,

and called him over to have some coffee.

Whale, as he put it, engaged in general conversation about England

and about the problems of English actors and English directors in Hollywood,

and then suggested that he had a role

for which he would like Boris Karloff to do a screen test

and would Karloff be willing to do it?

And Karloff jumped at it without even knowing what it was.

My father used to say his feelings were a bit hurt,

since he was looking his very best that day,

and to be considered for the role of the monster, he thought "Hm".

But he was wise enough to take the part and,

with the help of Jack Pierce and his genius make-up,

went on to make cinema history.

Jack Pierce was the creator of all the classic Universal horror make-ups,

the head of the make-up department at Universal during the golden age.

He was the man that did Frankenstein's monster, the mummy and the wolf man,

and all the classic make-ups.

And he didn't have the luxury that we have today of the modern materials.

Everything that he did was an out-of-the-kit make-up.

Everything was fabricated. He was a master at it.

This make-up, the Frankenstein's monster, everyone knows this.

It's instantly recognisable

and it's one of the all-time great make-ups.

I just hope someday I can do something that comes close to that.

Of course, there's a great deal of debate about that make-up.

A lot of people think that it was inspired by James Whale rather than Jack Pierce.

Jack Pierce, naturally, would say that he was the man,

although he did say at one time that it was a compromise.

Who came up with the monster's make-up and look?

My idea, muchly. From my sketches.

Big, heavy brow. Head flat on top so you could take out the old brain

and put in the new like tinned beef.

The monster's trademark square forehead may have been partly inspired

by Thomas Edison's 1910 version of Frankenstein,

in which Charles Ogle played the monster.

But there's no question about who executed that job. It was Pierce.

Films really are a collaborative effort, and so many people are in the mix,

and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

This was a case where it all worked so well,

when you had James Whale, Boris Karloff, Jack Pierce,

all the people involved in this film, it just clicked.

I've seen photos of an earlier test. It was very similar.

He still had the flat head and the brow,

but there were these two ridges on his forehead

with a little semicircular clamp on each one.

In fact, it's a photo that still crops up when they need a picture of the monster.

I guess the photo editors weren't too careful

about whether it was really in the film or not.

The frontal bone, the brow here, was fabricated out of cotton and spirit gum

and collodion, which is this really strong-smelling,

very solventy-smelling plastic.

You would put on a coat of spirit gum, stick some cotton on it,

paint some collodion on it, and gradually build up the form.

The same with the top of his head. The flatness of the head was built up that way.

It was quite painful to have this cotton and collodion built up every day,

especially so close to your eyes, with that strong solvent smell.

And the painful process of removing it, as well.

He had to have amazing endurance to go through this.

I'm sure it helped that it was early on in his career.

The story goes that Karloff felt that

in some of the original tests he looked too alive, his eyes looked too alive.

So he suggested that Jack do something to it,

so they ended up building up these heavy eyelids with mortician's wax

over Karloff's own lids, only allowing him to open them partway like this,

but he was still able to give an amazing performance with these lids.

Another thing that helped that corpselike appearance was Karloff had a bridge,

on his right side, which he removed so he could suck in his cheek,

on that one side, and Pierce shaded it to accentuate it.

Again, when you think of this make-up, you think of the flat head

and of the electrodes, which most people think are bolts through his neck.

But they are actually supposed to be how the electricity entered into his body.

There's a positive and a negative, like on a battery.

Because it all worked with the contours of Karloff's face,

he was able to express an entire range of emotions

that other actors couldn't do under the make-up when they essayed the role.

That's part of the beauty of this make-up.

He was able to perform in it because so much of it was his face.

If you would have built up much more on him, he would have become very stiff.

Collodion isn't really very flexible, especially when you mix it with cotton.

Not only was the make-up arduous, on and off every single day,

it took three, three and a half hours to put on and almost as long to get it off...

The wardrobe itself was heavy and black,

and they shot in the middle of August.

The boots were heavy and cumbersome.

I know there was one really torturous day, which I think was almost a 24-hour day.

Being made-up like this, being outdoors.

I think they shot the "throwing the girl in the water" scene

and then had to come back and shoot something else.

And it was not a fun job, I'm sure, for Boris.

The most difficult part of the shoot was my father carrying Colin Clive

up a hill time and time again until they got it right.

Ultimately, he ended up having three back surgeries.

He really suffered for the rest of his life, physically,

because of just the physical difficulties in shooting that film.

Designer Herman Rosse conceived a futuristic look for Frankenstein,

but, in collaboration with art director Charles Hall and director Whale,

the film took on a distinctly Gothic look, with angles and shadows

in keeping with Robert Florey's initial expressionist vision.

The concept of the burning windmill also originated with Florey,

who felt the laboratory should also be situated in the mill.

Preproduction concepts for the monster itself by Hall and Rosse

were obviously discarded by director Whale,

an experienced production designer in his own right.

He was very meticulous about every shadow and every camera setup,

and the way that the frame was filled so completely to the top.

There's an amazing verticality to the design of his sets.

Emotionally, so much of Frankenstein leads up to that moment

when the monster sees the sun for the first time

and reaches up, trying to touch it.

And you wonder if the whole verticality of the movie

wasn't designed by Whale just to get you to that moment.

The sizzling laboratory equipment was the handiwork of Kenneth Strickfaden,

a Santa Monica inventor who put his mark on mad-scientist laboratories for all time.

The original machines would continue to put in movie appearances until the 1970s.

Karloff was fourth billed in a cast headed by Colin Clive,

an actor whose anguished roles sadly reflected his own inner turmoil.

James Whale chose him over the previously considered Leslie Howard.

Colin Clive - Henry Frankenstein - was a very broke personality,

having rather a Jekyll/Hyde personality,

Jekyll when he was sober.

Really, the whole company of Frankenstein was apprehensive,

at the time the film was made, that Clive might begin drinking

and become Mr Hyde, if you will, one night in Hollywood,

and it would greatly endanger the picture.

But Whale handled him with great sensitivity.

Mae Clarke played Frankenstein's fiancée, Elizabeth,

and shared her memories with film historian Gregory Mank.

Mae Clarke was still very much the actress and insisted on acting out scenes

from Frankenstein in her bungalow at the motion-picture home.

And she got up and did the monster. She relished playing the monster.

She went marching across the room with the monster steps.

And she acted out his discovery of light and raised her hands to the skylight.

And she was really quite good. She made a good monster.

Mae Clarke adored James Whale. She said he was

"the pluperfect gentleman and the genius".

He had directed her in Waterloo Bridge, in a wonderful part

as Myra, the streetwalker, who dies in World War I.

And so she already had a great relationship with Whale.

She said that he was involved in every capacity of production.

He'd be up on the boom-crane tower, he'd be in the sound room,

he had his finger on every single pulse of the picture.

She talked about Colin Clive, whom she had great sympathy and empathy for.

She said that he was the handsomest man she ever saw, and also the saddest,

and she had great sympathy for the torment that drove him to an early death.

She very much admired Boris Karloff. She said "Dear Boris Karloff was a pussycat."

In her scene with Karloff in the boudoir,

the monster comes through and stalks behind her and growls at her.

She screams. She was terrified. She really was scared of him at that point.

She said to him "If I turn around and see you, I'm afraid how I'll react."

And so Boris said "I'll tell you what we'll do, Mae."

"You just keep your eye on my upstage,

away-from-camera little finger, and I'll wiggle it."

"You'll see the monster wiggling his finger and know it's Boris in make-up."

He did wiggle his little finger, which was a little finger compared to the rest of him,

and she got through the scene all right.

Edward Van Sloan, who had played the role of Professor Van Helsing

in Dracula on stage and screen,

brought a similar note of moral authority to the role of Dr Waldman.

Next to Boris Karloff, seven-year-old Marilyn Harris

gave the film's most poignant performance.

Would you like one of my flowers?

Marilyn had an immediate rapport with Boris Karloff.

She said that on the morning that the company assembled at Universal

to go on location to Malibu Lake for the scene,

there was this little parade of limousines and out came the monster,

and she, at the age of seven, ran right up to him and took his hand and said

"May I drive with you?" And Boris Karloff said "Would you, darling?"

Here was this child who was terrified of her mother,

but who instinctively loved the monster.

She said it was like magic. And the magic really carries over to the scene.

Karloff protested throwing Marilyn into the lake.

He wanted to change the script.

Karloff's idea was for the monster to show his innocence

by playing with the child and not having anything awful come of it.

James Whale said "It's all part of the ritual."

"This has to happen, to show the tragedy of the monster."

So Karloff, of course, accepted it.

But when he did pick up Marilyn and throw her into the lake, she didn't sink.

And so James Whale went up to her and he said

"I'll give you anything you want if you'll do this scene over again."

And Marilyn said "All right, I know what I want."

He said "What?" She said "A dozen hard-boiled eggs."

Her mother always had her on a diet.

So, sure enough, Boris Karloff threw her again into the lake, farther,

and later she received her present from James Whale.

It was two dozen hard-boiled eggs.

As Frankenstein's demented assistant, the former Broadway actor Dwight Frye

followed an equally bizarre role as the insect-eating madman in Dracula.

The character of Fritz, not in the novel,

originated in the earliest stage productions of Frankenstein.

I don't know how James Whale found my father, really.

I don't know whether he saw Dracula and thought he would be a good idea for Fritz

or whether he had seen some other of my dad's work, I don't know.

But James Whale became, ultimately,

during and after the making of Frankenstein,

a champion of my father's.

He was in five different James Whale films throughout his career.

But the versatile actor was soon typecast in over-the-top horror roles.

I think it is true that the larger-than-life figures

that he may have played on film

result from his character work and his acting work on Broadway,

where you do have to project something more than just your own self.

You have to be bigger than life on the stage.

They're all weird and they're all crazy, to one extent or another,

but they are different from each other.

I think the first time I saw them, he was watching my reaction quite carefully.

I was probably six at the time.

And, as I understand it from my mother,

when we came back and I went to bed and got up the next morning,

my father was very upset that I hadn't been frightened by anything I'd seen.

Children seemed to empathise with the creature

and probably understood the message

my father was trying to deliver with his portrayal,

and that was that the monster, or the creature, as he preferred to call him,

was the victim more than the perpetrator.

And children seemed to understand that instinctively, he said.

They were not afraid of him and they were not afraid of the creature.

The Frankenstein monster is totally innocent.

He's rather like an adolescent.

He's in a world that is not of his making

and he doesn't completely understand the rules.

And, like many adolescents, he's a clumsy, very awkward thing,

so of course children across the world

just grafted on to the Frankenstein monster, particularly Boris Karloff,

because they could see the inherent innocence, could see the pathos,

could see that the Frankenstein monster was very much a child like themselves.

Film audiences often confuse Frankenstein's name

with that of his creation, and possibly with good reason.

James Whale seems to have been fascinated

with the dramatic interdependency of the characters,

according to film historian Paul Jensen.

The film works, at least partially,

because its maker empathised with those two characters.

And I can't help but think that these are two people,

each of which is a version of James Whale.

For Whale, a self-made artist who overcame poverty and misunderstanding,

the story of Frankenstein's creative struggle may have resonated deeply.

Whale loved the stage and the theatre.

You get an impression of this, but the dialogue nails it home.

When Henry says:

Quite a good scene, isn't it?

One man crazy, three very sane spectators.

The whole idea of it being a stage setting and he's the orchestrator of it,

Whale brought out of or found in the situation

something I don't think other directors would have bothered or recognised,

and that is something that taps into his own sense of demonstration,

of presentation, of theatricality.

One of the most effective and personal speeches was added during production,

and was possibly written by Whale himself.

Where should we be if nobody had tried to find out what lies beyond?

Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars,

or to know what causes the trees to bud

and what changes the darkness into light?

But if you talk like that, people call you crazy.

Maybe Whale wrote it, maybe not - I don't know.

But it wasn't in the shooting script.

But it's one of the most important scenes in the film.

So, Whale must have wanted it there,

and that's where this side of Henry is expressed.

Sometimes I find that the scenes that don't contain the most dramatic action

might reveal the director's style of work and his talent

in ways that are unexpected, if we look at them carefully, those scenes.

One such scene in Frankenstein, for me, is the first conversation scene,

the one between Victor and Elizabeth where they're talking about Henry.

It's a passive scene.

So what does Whale do to try to make it seem alive or come alive?

Take a look at that scene because,

aside from the fact that it begins with four close-ups - which itself is unusual -

instead of an establishing long shot,

we've got a close-up of a framed photograph of Henry,

close-up of the maid, close-up of Victor arriving, close-up of Elizabeth rising,

and only then an establishing long shot.

We've had to figure out what we're seeing and how those shots go together.

We're involved because our mind has had to relate those shots together.

We have a scene that could be thrown away by a lesser director

that is actually turned into a highly visual and cinematic scene.

The last third of Frankenstein

is the part where at least the story line has its weakest moments, I think.

There are things that happen that you have to simply take at face value

and take for granted, because they're not explained.

And I'm willing to allow that. There are little contrivances.

Dr Waldman's been murdered in the tower.

Who finds Dr Waldman's body?

No one ever seems to go up to that tower. Who found him?

But she has been murdered.

How does the girl's father know that she was murdered?

All he would really realise is that she had drowned.

We just have to accept that. Those don't bother me particularly,

because I accept those statements to move the plot along.

But the scene in which Henry locks Elizabeth in her room

because he's afraid the monster might be around,

and then the monster enters Elizabeth's room and confronts her,

is the one scene where I think a contrivance hurts the film considerably,

because it's a major scene.

There is no way that we can have any idea

how the monster knows whose house that is,

if the monster knows whose house that is.

But 1931 audiences paid scant attention to such implausibilities.

For many, Frankenstein simply was an overwhelming experience.

In 1931, so many of the things that Frankenstein showed and dealt with

were rather unusual and new to people,

and they tapped into things that were perhaps very dormant,

or things that people didn't want to consciously think about.

We had thumping of the dirt on the top of the coffin.

We had things that really were never shown before.

The gibbet with this body hanging there and being cut down,

and the cadavers, and reanimating.

It's hard to believe now,

because of the excess that we've all been subjected to over the decades,

but in 1931 this was a big deal.

What they objected to in Frankenstein were the little girl getting drowned,

there were some fairly graphic close-ups

of the monster being stuck with hypodermic needles.

And where Fritz, the hunchback assistant, is tormenting the monster with a torch,

there are some horrific close-ups of the monster with the torch in front of his face.

These are things that today you would see in G-rated movies on television.

The scene with the monster throwing the girl in the lake was cut in certain areas.

Some people saw the entire scene, some saw him just reaching for her,

which, later, when the father appears holding her and she's in such disarray,

actually created a much more sinister impact than what was intended.

There were pressure groups. The Legion of Decency, the Catholic pressure group.

There were problems with the Colin Clive line "In the name of God..."

Now I know what it feels like to be God.

In the original version that we got on television,

since the 1950s, whenever we would get to that scene,

there'd be a physical splice and you could see a jump cut

where Colin Clive is getting very ecstatic when he realises what he's accomplished.

During the early talkies, sound was not on what we have today, an optical track,

which is a visual strip along the edge of the film.

In the old days, the sound was recorded on big records about this size,

and they were played in the theatre, synchronised with the projector.

In 1966, a friend of mine who was working at a local Los Angeles radio station

called me and he said "You'll never believe what's in our studio -

the sound disc from the original Frankenstein."

And I was always disappointed when all the restored versions of Frankenstein

always left this line out.

With or without the censored footage, Frankenstein was a sensation,

and the monster became a major new Hollywood icon.

Boris Karloff's stardom was assured,

although in real life he had little in common with monsters.

He was the antithesis of the roles that he played.

He really was a cultured, well-educated,

articulate, well-read English gentleman,

who earned his living scaring children and little old ladies.

Robert Florey's initial uncredited enthusiasm for Frankenstein

was finally rewarded with an acknowledgement on the French poster

and the chance to direct a highly stylised horror film in the expressionist manner.

Murders in the Rue Morgue starred Bela Lugosi

as a mad scientist destroyed by his own experiment,

and was partly filmed on the original Frankenstein sets.

Universal spent four years on a sequel to Frankenstein, and it was worth the wait.

In what was finally called Bride of Frankenstein,

Karloff returned and brought a whole new dimension to the monster: Speech.

I love dead.

Hate living.

You're wise in your generation.

A talkative monster and the creation of his mate

were both elements from the original Mary Shelley novel.

She's alive. Alive

The bride of Frankenstein.

Karloff played the monster for a third and last time in Son of Frankenstein.

This time he had a companion who did the talking for him,

the broken-necked Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi.

It's my friend.

He does things for me.

Basil Rathbone played the title role of Wolf Van Frankenstein.

Is it the old legendary monster of my father's time?

Or am I supposed to have whipped one up, as a housewife whips up an omelette?

Daddy Daddy

In Ghost of Frankenstein, the relationship between Ygor and the monster got closer.

Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was the lightning.

Much closer.

I, Ygor, will live for ever.

Next, Universal paired two of its most popular monsters for amplified impact.

I can't do it.

I can't destroy Frankenstein's creation.

I've got to see it at its full power.

Frank You're making him strong again.

Since Bela Lugosi's brain had been sewn into the monster's head in the last film,

it made some sense for Lugosi to finally play the monster himself,

speaking in Ygor's voice.

But the effect was considered ridiculous by studio heads,

and the monster was rendered voiceless again for the release print.

Encouraged by the success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,

Universal pulled out all the stops with House of Frankenstein,

featuring its entire stable of monsters, with the curious exception of the mummy.

Don't go this way. Quicksand. Quicksand.

The creature was now played by former stunt man Glenn Strange,

in a halting, robotic manner.

Boris Karloff, wisely avoiding career quicksand,

made his final appearance in a Universal Frankenstein film.

In House of Dracula, Frankenstein's creation

made the briefest of appearances, a thankless lurch around the lab.

In Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

the classic Universal monsters were reunited for an affectionate spoof,

and for what many considered to be the best horror comedy ever made.

Help me with this excelsior. Come on. Take it all out.

Get it all out.

Well, we got him.

But the Frankenstein mystique didn't end with the films of the '30s and '40s.

The Universal tradition has inspired generations of filmmakers,

even to the present day.

The evil of Frankenstein.

The evil of a man who created a monster by crude surgery,

and harnessed the tempestuous forces of nature

to give it life.

The laboratory equipment in Gods and Monsters

was no longer the work of Kenneth Strickfaden,

but the Universal look was unmistakable.

In 1997, Boris Karloff and Frankenstein had the unique honour

of appearing on a US postal service stamp,

along with four other classic Universal monsters.

It was wonderful. The Post Office could not have been better to work with.

We got about 17,000 signatures.

All over the country people pitched in and helped us.

It was a very, very rewarding experience, because people were so enthusiastic.

I think my father would be the one that would be most surprised and pleased.

He always stressed how grateful he was for having been given the opportunity

by James Whale to play the monster, how it changed his whole life.

He certainly had seen the opposite side of success

for many, many years before fame came his way.

And I don't think he ever had any difficulty with being typecast.

He felt, and I heard him say on more than one occasion,

that a typecast actor was a very lucky actor,

because if you had been able to make a niche for yourself,

do something that nobody else had done or was likely to do,

you were very lucky.

You left your mark in your profession.

He truly felt being typecast was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him.

In her introduction to the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831,

Mary Shelley instructed her hideous progeny

to go forth into the world and prosper.

Exactly 100 years later Universal took her directive to heart

and created the most successful movie monster of them all.

The original advertising campaign for Frankenstein featured the tag line:

"The monster is loose."

And, you know, it still is.

Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org