Cinema
Frankenstein
James Whale · 1931
Synopsis
Near Goldstadt, Henry Frankenstein and Fritz, his hunchbacked assistant, dig up a barely buried corpse and cut down a hanged man whose brain is unusable. Fritz goes to steal one from the medical school, drops the jar holding the normal brain and brings back the one marked “abnormal”. In an old watchtower turned laboratory, on a stormy night, Henry hoists the table on which the assembled body lies towards the open roof. Lowered back down, the hand stirs: “It's alive!”
Context
The film does not derive directly from the 1818 novel but from a play by Peggy Webling first staged in 1927, adapted by John L. Balderston. The role of the creature was first meant to go to the actor of the vampire film the studio had just shot; according to accounts, he refused a part without lines or was dropped after a make-up test. The man who played it was forty-three and had more than seventy films behind him, often in small roles; a question mark stood in his place in the opening credits, and his name appeared only at the end. Jack Pierce's make-up required more than three hours in the chair every morning.
Who it is for
An hour and ten minutes in black and white; the creature is mute in it, whereas in Mary Shelley's book it learns to speak and to read.
Prizes and reception
Added in 1991 to the United States National Film Registry; its line “It's alive!” appears in the American Film Institute's ranking of film quotes.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.