I had found my way around to the Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Hammer movies The Mummy and Horror of the Dracula within the past year. Why not go for their take on the Frankenstein story as well? I’ve read Mary Shelley’s novel and seen the Universal take on it (among others). It’s a classic story of a man’s hubris as he tries to play God and learns the hard way that that is a really bad idea.
Hammer’s take is also a somewhat short movie I can watch on a worknight without staying up too late.
The Frankenstein story is more or less well-known. A brilliant scientist decides to create life, but his results are horrifying to just about everyone, and the creature ends up going on a rampage, killing innocents until the scientist has to do something about his own creation. Shelley’s original novel had the doctor dying while chasing the monster through the arctic with the monster then slipping off, and the Universal movie ended with the monster in an old windmill while angry villagers burned it to the ground. Hammer takes a different tact, focusing most of the movie on Victor Frankenstein (Cushing) as he, well, just won’t give up his mad scheme. A genius even from his teen years, he and his friend and tutor Paul (Robert Urquuhart) work on a variety of experiments, finally succeeding in reviving a dead puppy.
Yet another movie with a cute dog that made me wish I had a puppy…
Regardless, the movie takes its time before bringing out the Creature (Lee), here seen as a pale, mute fellow with some bad scars and what looks like one blind eye. Instead, we see Victor, obsessed with his goal to create a man, break every sort of rule of decorum possible. Paul objects many times along the way before finally quitting the project, staying only in Victor’s manor house to try and protect Victor’s betrothed Elizabeth (Hazel Court). Additionally, Victor’s actions show someone with no real moral scruples whatsoever. He may be engaged to Elizabeth, but he’s also carrying on with a maid (Valerie Gaunt), and let’s just say he isn’t waiting around for a brain for his creation either.
Now, like The Mummy, Lee’s Creature is a mostly silent being. Given how deep and effective Lee’s voice can be, that was a bit of a shame, but again, this movie is not so much about the Creature as it is about Victor, a morally repugnant man in every way possible. The Creature, arguably, is as much a victim as anyone else, even if in this version he kills the blind man he meets rather than befriending him. Still, I would have preferred Lee’s voice get put to use.
The movie ends with Victor getting more or less what he deserves. At no point in the movie does he seem to learn any lessons from his experiments, even reversing an action of Paul’s that would have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache. Victor is a deplorable man, one who only finds some modicum of sympathy when he is found out as someone who decided his own experimentation was more important than being a decent human being. Paul may have been his tutor, but Victor wasn’t the sort to listen to his teachers when he had to, and he ended up paying a well-deserved price for it in the end.
Grade: B+
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