Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Certainly a film maker is entitled to alter a novel's text, but here both the choices and the motives are somewhat spurious. By grafting stylistic affectations onto an otherwise naturalistic movie, Kaufman blunts the raw power that, is The Wanderers' greatest asset. Like his characters, he would have fared far bet ter if he had stopped showing off and practiced a little self-control...
Such speculation may seem lugubrious to those who know the monster only through Boris Karloff 's film impersonations or through such burlesques as the TV sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway...
...vision to her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day." Not long after Mary started her novel, Shelley's abandoned first wife Harriet committed suicide...
...Frankenstein is not simply a woman's revenge. It is not, in fact, simply any one thing. Beneath its rhetorical, overwritten surface, the novel moves as fitfully as a dream, allowing as many interpretations as there are willing interpreters. The classic Karloff films take only part of the story and twist that as well...
...jointed and barely verbal; Mary Shelley's monster is quick on his feet and can speak like a Romantic poet on an off night: "I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Similarly, most popular dramatizations of the novel have singled out the Faustian side of Frankenstein's quest: the monster is his punishment for seeking too much power...