Word: monsters
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Branaugh's latest vision--De Niro slathed in what appears to be Freddy Kruger's discarded latex--demands comparison to Boris Karloff"s popular 1931 interpretation of the monster. The Brattle Theatre's current series, "The Monster Within," provides an opportunity to re-examine Karloff's nifty neck bolts, and several films inspired by Mary Shelley's myth. Each presents a version of Shelley which contributes in various ways to our understanding of her classic work...
...original inspiration for all these celluloid Frankensteins is James Whale's 1931 film which in fact takes only minimal plot elements from Mary Shelley's novel. Karloff's monster stands out in a production which is in many ways simply a Hollywood fluff treatment of the story. This time around, the handsome Dr. Frankenstein animates a monster who terrorizes the countryside, and Frankenstein's lovely fiancee, until he is hunted down and dies in a bizarre finale sequence at a windmill...
...Mary Shelley's own traumatic family experiences. The frustrations of her position--her selfimposed exile with the radical, and still-married, Shelley, her confinement in the home and her failed pregnancies--are expressed in the passion with which she narrates the creation, birth and development of Dr. Frankenstein's monster...
Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein is a man obsessed with the discovery of knowledge at any price, committed to the exploration of charlatanry, if necessary, to learn all the secrets of the natural world. He is above all completely self-absorbed, unable to see beyond the experiment at hand. His monster is the product of an inevitable sequence of events: he believes reanimation is possible, and works maniacally until it is achieved. The Frankenstein films have been less successful than Shelley in defining his motive for creating inhuman life. Branagh chooses to make the death of Victor Frankenstein's mother...
...film treats the moment of birth as a dark triumph of reason and science. The monster, laid out on a surgery table, moves slowly under his clinical white sheets, just as the doctor hopes. This strips away the physical element of the birth as unnecessary in the face of governing science. This is in strong contrast with the child of "Spirit of the Beehive," in which the creative act is a spiritual calling to the monster to enter the world of the child The birth is perpetrated by the monster himself at her invitation and on her imagination...