Review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) by Edith N — 22 Oct 2007

Of course, the Creature never gets a name; everyone who knows anything about this story knows that. But what fewer people seem to know is that Mary Shelley never established how Victor Frankenstein (who is not, in the book, a doctor) created life in the Creature. In fact, he refuses to say, because he is afraid that someone will try to replicate his experiments. Thus, the image we have of lightning sparking through the giant iron pole and into the Creature is, I am afraid, pure Hollywood. It first appears in the James Whale version, the Karloff, and has been a popular feature of the Frankenstein mythos since.

This is not all that this version of the story changes. Kenneth Branagh changed quite a bit to produce what he then called [i]Mary Shelley's Frankenstein[/i]. A lot of it has been taken from other film adaptations of the story, apparently; IMDB has a fairly lengthy list. It seems Branagh took bits that he liked from every major film and several of the minor ones.

The character of Professor Waldman, while not entirely invented for film, is certainly strongly altered for it. It is also, I note, a rare dramatic appearance by John Cleese. So hurrah for John Cleese, whose character is stabbed to death early in the film and, if I have things figured, may well provide the Creature's brain. (Mary Shelley is also more circumspect on the matter of the Creature's bits than film versions; while logic holds that Frankenstein takes bits of other dead people to build the Creature, Shelley never says so.).

I have to admit, I've never seen any other movie versions of this story. Not even the Whale (though I have seen [i]Gods and Monsters[/i], which talks about it a fair amount). I am therefore not really qualified to say what bits of the movie are from what other movies, though I can say pretty clearly what bits aren't in the book. And quite a lot isn't in the book. The Tom Hulce character is supposed to be a childhood friend, for example, who is further supposed to be studying literature. The father is not a baron; I'm not sure there [i]are[/i] barons in Switzerland. There is, therefore, no Castle Frankenstein, no matter what Hollywood's been telling us for some eighty years.

It is true that there are actually two different versions of Mary Shelley's own work, and I've only read the one. However, once again, we have a situation wherein the movie folk have invoked the author's name in vain; this is [i]not[/i] Mary Shelley's [i]Frankenstein[/i]. This is Kenneth Branagh's [i]Frankenstein[/i]. And while there's nothing really wrong with that, putting the author's name on it does produce a rather stronger presumption of accuracy to the source material than the movie really has any right to.