Word: frankenstein
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Frankenstein (Universal). Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Percy Bysshe Shelley) wrote this story, supposedly to win a bet from her husband and Lord Byron. It is a grisly conceit about a young doctor who, experimenting with synthetic animation, produces a live, dangerous and somewhat human monster. Universal, encouraged by the success of Dracula to produce a series of horrific weirds, in which Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue will be next, entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs...
...mechanical means of forecasting the efficacy of mechanical entertainment. Said he: "Instead of the old hit or miss previews we can now know exactly the emotional effect of any film, can cut out the 'dead' spots, and generally improve the pictures distributed." A live spot in Frankenstein as revealed by the "Lie-Detector": one in which the ugly face of Frankenstein's dwarfish assistant pops up from behind a graveyard fence. Dead spots: the reappearance of the dwarf's face in subsequent scenes when familiarity has made it less frightening...
...works of a machine are superior, in this case, to the works of man. It is a question if either one is a valuable addition. Football is a boys game: it is not a man's livelihood. All these trappings reduce a team to a Frankenstein constructed for the purpose of crushing other Frankensteins. They aren't necessary elements of any game. An espionage by camera might just as well be carried on in baseball. A slow motion picture would show the batting weakness of a rival college, or it would prove the exact trajectory of a star pitcher...
...German Delegation at The Hague last week was Foreign Minister Dr. Julius Curtius, successor to the late, great Stresemann, and a comparative tyro at diplomacy. He had asked Dr. Schacht to come on from Berlin as a financial expert, found him suddenly as troublesome as a Golem or a Frankenstein...