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Frankenstein (75th Anniversary Edition)

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Frankenstein is the kind of horror movie that I remember watching on late Saturday nights growing up. These old-time horror movies relied on psychological terror and strong acting performances rather than blood and guts to captivate an audience. Frankenstein succeeds on both of these counts.

Colin Clive stars as Dr. Henry Frankenstein and Dwight Frye stars as his hunch-backed assistant Fritz. Dr. Frankenstein has taken to robbing graves in his effort to create his own human being. In his search for a human brain, Fritz inadvertantly steals a brain from an evil person. Frankenstein is unaware of this as he transplants the brain into his human. What results is Boris Karloff's monster. However, Frankenstein's monster isn't the "killing machine" that we see in today's horror movies. Rather, the monster seems to be searching for his own identity (witness the scene with the little girl near the river). The people of the town perceive him to be evil when perhaps he is merely searching for acceptance.

The acting in the movie is excellent. Colin Clive does a masterful job as Dr. Frankenstein, while Dwight Frye is excellent as Fritz. The scenework, such as the shots of Dr. Frankenstein's castle and the final scene at the windmill are captivating as well. I highly recommend this movie along with other classic horror movies of this time period. They will bring back memories of sitting around the TV on dark Saturday nights and jumping up from your seat at each scary scene.

A classic. A truly scary movie and sad without the graphics and
video manipulation of todays movies.
Any real collector must have a copy of this movie.

The film is based on the first half of Mary Shelley's gothic novel Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein reanimates life. The being that he creates becomes a product of its' environment while continuing to learn through trial and error. Unfortunately, its' errors become magnified by its' physical attributions, which causes unrest among those it comes in contact with through simple attempts at communication. Whale's horror creation was made over 70 years ago; however, one catch phrase, "It's alive!", that terrified audiences in the 30s, still produces chills in audiences today. Therefore, regardless of age, the film still provides a tremendous cinematic experience.

I feel this is the eeriest horror movie ever made. The sequel and Robert deniro remake were great but this is the one.

This movie classic was the best for its time.. Just imagine what it must of been like being at Radio City Music Hall when this film first came to the big screen.Boris Korloff, was the greatest movie monster of all time. James Whale was a genius.

Say what you will, but the classic Universal Monsters had style, grace and class. Often considered outrageously lurid and shocking in their own time, they now function as models of restraint compared to their contemporary successors. Heck, even Frankenstein's monster has the good manners to wear a suit whilst conducting his murderous rampage throughout the countryside!

Having grown up watching Universal's Dracula (1931), I came pretty late to the party when developing a similar affinity for this film. I'd always preferred "Dracula"'s stately, mannered, gothic atmosphere, so it took me many years -- and the perspective of adulthood -- to appreciate this film's more aggressive, darkly humourous tone.

While less flamboyant (read: camp) than its somewhat more comedic sequel, the 1931 Universal "Frankenstein" adapts Mary Shelley's original 1818 novel as a straight up, tightly wound little horror film, infused with a gleefully grotesque sense of wit. Karloff's portrayal of the monster is an accomplished pantomime; a combination of pathos, innocence and rage that favourably compares to some of the greatest silent film performances from films like Sunrise and The Passion of Joan of Arc. The film itself is an intriguing stylistic amalgam of theatrical histrionics, shadowy German Expressionism and technical showmanship that, in these DVD restorations, is truly wondrous to behold.

As of this writing, Universal have released no fewer than three separate DVD editions of "Frankenstein." The original 1999 edition, which I personally own, is still widely available on Amazon. The newer Legacy Collection and 75th Anniversary editions contain similarly excellent film transfers and many of the same special features, with the addition of sequels in the former release and additional documentary material in the latter. Whichever version you choose is, therefore, entirely a matter of pricing, convenience and desired extras.

Given its importance to the development of early horror cinema, any horror fan worth their salt should see Universal's "Frankenstein" at least once during their lifetime. Any serious collector should consider adding it to their library, if they haven't done so already. In any event, spending a candlelit evening with such an entertaining classic is a no-lose proposition.

Believe it or not I had never seen the original 1931 Frankenstein until now. Except for some clips on television over the years all I really knew was the origins of the story, the basic premise and what people have said of it.

An interesting experience. In all candor I find it a bit creaky and awkward. Much of the acting is stiff and unconvincing. But Boris Karloff is definitely, unquestionably the reason this film works. From when we're first introduced to him to the very last frame of him I felt nothing but sympathy for his monster. Without uttering a word Karloff outclasses everyone in the film, no question.

I'm glad I finally got to see it and now have it in my dvd library.

James Whale's adaptation of "Frankenstein" is the most well-known version of Mary Shelley's tale. Purists have objected to the artistic liberties the filmmakers took with the original work, but the passage of time has firmly established the lumbering Boris Karloff as the definitive representation of the Frankenstein monster in the minds of the general public.

Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) leaves medical school to pursue his experiments in re-animation. In the privacy of a Bavarian castle, the scientist pieces together a single body from assorted corpses and screams in ecstasy when he succeeds in brining it to life on a stormy night. However, his enthusiasm wanes when the brutish creature (Karloff) he created proves difficult to control. Doctor Waldman (Edward Van Sloan) eventually convinces his former student to destroy his creation but it escapes into the countryside. The creature is then hunted down by villagers after it kills a young girl (Marilyn Harris) and terrorizes Frankenstein's fiancée, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke).

The story of "Frankenstein" is today more relevant than ever with the dramatic advances in the field of genetics and the ethical dilemmas that have accompanied them. Yet at its heart, the film is a good old-fashioned scare-fest full of creepy shadows and chilling images. "Frankenstein" is a not a slasher film that relies on gore to create cheap thrills. It generates its suspense by way of careful storytelling and it generates its scares by way of careful filmmaking craftsmanship. Clive delivers an amazing performance as the mad genius who is driven to prove his theories true. He is wonderfully complemented by Karloff who delivers spectacularly in the role of his career. Not many films contain a performance that becomes iconic in the annals of pop culture - "Frankenstein" has the good fortune of having a pair of them.

No class on horror films would be complete without this movie. It was one of the first and still one of the best ever made. The movie that made Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. Jack Pierce provides the best make-up since Chaney's Phantom of the Opera.

Superb directing! See the uncut version if you can.

After repeated attempts of securing a Frankenstein, director James Whale hired a middle-aged character actor named William Henry Pratt (stage name: Boris Karloff) who had previously been limited to cameos, stand-ins, and predominantly small eccentric parts to play Frankenstein's monster. Karloff's restrictive age, massive obscurity, and absence of experience may have emerged as hindrances for this newly discovered personality. However, time and popular opinion has obliterated these fears into long lost paranoid hallucinations.

It is Boris Karloff's indisputably iconic and singularly haunting performance as the child-like brute, misunderstood and despised by all, who's only longing and desire is to be loved and cared for by others that continues to be one of cinema's timeless jewels of acting perfection, dramatic magnitude, and note-fully seamless pathos. Karloff's monster, like Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates or Robert De Nero's Travis Bickle, is one of cinema's fortunate accidents of how the exact casting of just the right perfect someone can unbelievably bolster the film. Karloff's casting as the inevitably sympathetic artificial concoction of a mad scientist with a deity complex turned out to be one of many grandiose happy accidents that has allowed this 70 year-old Gothic horror film to continue to be copiously admired, internationally beloved, and enthusiastically cherished up to contemporary times.

Frankenstein retains numerous stellar elements including a magnificently captivating early sound ensemble cast including Edward Van Sloan (Doctor Waldman), Mae Clarke (Elizabeth), Frederick Kerr (Baron Frankenstein), Dwight Frye (Fritz), and the unforgettable Colin Clive, the archetypal mad scientist, (Henry Frankenstein), brilliantly provocative Frankenstein make-up by make-up genius Jack Pierce, manically splendid and cleverly articulated German Expressionistic sets, that place this tale in an indescribable alternate Grimm Fairy Tale reminiscent landscape, James Whales immeasurably eloquent moral consolidation and inventively multi-faceted interpretation of Mary Shelly's tale, and forever crowned with one of cinema's most cunningly virtuoso and unredeemable bravura performances of inarticulate primal indignation and childish rage ever recorded on film by Karloff as the monster.

However due to it's age and Hollywood production values at the time, Frankenstein is not totally absent of problems: lacking of a musical score to counter-match the film's profuse talkativeness, predictably saddled with pedestrian and extremely dated comedic and romantic sub plots, and weakened by an awfully trite comedic conclusion. Despite these blemishes, Frankenstein consummately embodies the finest narrative qualities of the early Universal monster films, contains the simply greatest incarnation of Frankenstein's monster, and stubbornly remains both in ambiance and creative evocativeness the finest film version of the Mary Shelly story.

Either virtually creating or establishing the most memorable template for many of the horror genre's most blessed clichés and stereotypes including the angry mob laced with the burning torches and sharp pitchforks, the rustically appearing European town, the burning windmill, the broadly mentally troubled mad scientist, the tragically misinterpreted monster, the lavishly designed laboratory machinery, the chronically sadistic hunchback, and the supposed evil psychological significance of lightning. James Whale's Frankenstein remains an altogether manifestly influential film landmark that has predisposed numberless incalculable sequels, remakes, homages, and spoofs to habitually exhume its timeworn formula over the last seventy years.

One only has to warmly revisit this beloved perpetual love letter of the classical macabre to immediately lovingly recap its' resplendent spoils of immortality time after exultant time to re-experience all of the perpetual sacrosanct celluloid epiphanies that compose James's Whales Frankenstein and are eternal adjectives of film all by themselves. Imagine the following: the incessant utterance of Dr. Henry Frankenstein's immortally poetic verbally lyrical realization of success, "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive.. It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!" Following this volcanic explosion of scientific fervor the near psychotically elated scientific heretic beguilingly exclaims, "Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!" Who couldn't instantaneously vividly recall the tense furious physical caginess, grotesquely gyrated sweat marinated facial contortions, eye ballet of the pathological, the authentically grisly euphoric vocal earnestness of absolute discovery, and the very specific details of the man that was (and agelessly is with it's fortunate restoration and preservation on film) Colin Clive's Henry as he fervently serenades those hallowed words of revelation with a primordially unnerving flirtatiously ricocheting salvo of eternal laughter that essentially biblically jettisons sanity away from the film itself, for that moment.

In an ethereal totalitarian rush of such narrative spiritual possession and sheer air-tight uncanny intensity, the viewer is ultimately left spiritually adrift in a wanton cinematic wasteland of unnaturally insurmountable depravity where for the moment the clandestine doesn't even seem conceivable. Virtually nothing else in the medium of film has ever been able to produce this peculiar ambiance of malignant domination of film storytelling since. With the possible exceptions of Janet Leigh's liquid demise and Anthony Perkins's earnest feminine confessional in Hitchcock's Psycho, the lynch-party triumph at the end of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and Anthony Hopkins nonchalant walking towards a Caribbean dinner engagement in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, James Whales's Frankenstein endurably inhabits the uncommon role of rarefied unicorn of cinematic perfection, and that's not likely to falter anytime soon.

Talk about staying power!!!

As for Frankenstein's DVD format, it contains a uncannily pristine Pan and Scan standard presentation, a 45 minute absorbingly intriguing making-of documentary, film historian Rudy Behlmer's consistently stellar illuminating time-defying chronological exodus of a film audio commentary, original theatrical trailer, a short 1930's fictional film subject entitled Boo!, and much more.

Universally (pun intended) recommended to anyone interested in film classics, the Universal Monster films, or the everlasting time repelling landmark films of the 1930's. Followed by James Whales' superior sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).