Views from Crestmont Drive

So Dracula begat Frankenstein, and Frankenstein begat Bride of Frankenstein (no ‘the’ in the title, note). Though actually it took nearly 3 ½ years, and there were intermediaries: Boris Karloff did The Mummy next after Frankenstein, and James Whale next directed The Invisible Man. More on those when I get to them.

Comments, more in the context of a plot summary than previous posts.

• The structure of Bride roughly parallels the first Frankenstein film, with a further experiment to create life bringing on tragic and unexpected consequences. And again, the main character(s) die, apparently, at the end of the film.
• Boris Karloff is back again as Frankenstein, and Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein, but not Edward Van Sloan, whose character Dr. Waldman was killed in the first film. James Whale follows up with his direction, and the result is regarded as an improvement on the first film, and one of the best sequels of all time.
• The credits now show “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” not “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley.” Maybe someone realized that wasn’t quite properly respectful to the author. Music is by Franz Waxman. And the monster is credited simply to “Karloff,” as if no first name was necessary.
• The film begins with yet another castle amidst a stormy night. Inside are three elegantly dressed people in a drawing room with a fire. But, in a clever introductory device, these aren’t characters in our story, but rather an historical flashback showing Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, three of the very people who, in reality, inspired Mary to write her novel Frankenstein. We see them discussing the savagery of nature (that storm outside), introduce each other for the sake of the audience, and hear that Mary has already written her tale, though not yet published it. She repeats the moral lesson of the first film: it’s about the punishment for a moral man who dared to emulate god. As flashbacks of the first film remind us of its story, Mary is ready to tell what happened after that…
• And so we return to the mill fire from the end of the first film. The mill collapses; the crowds move out. A cackling woman – this is Minnie, later seen as a servant – talks as if there have been lots and lots of murders and drownings — though we only saw one murder and one drowning, in the first film, IIRC; or were some of the torch-bearing villagers at the end also killed? But this establishes the monster as a killer. Sure enough: Hans, the drowned girl’s father, lingers, anxious for proof the monster is dead. It’s not dead! Down in the stream beneath the mill, the monster lurks, and kills first Hans, and then his wife. Minnie sees the monster, and shrieks, and runs.
  • Back at the mansion, Henry, thought dead, is brought in on a stretcher. When he moves his hand, Minnie (now in her servant garb) shrieks “He’s alive! He’s alive!”, echoing the first film’s signature lines. Humor!
• Henry recovers and the new story gets underway, after some conversation between Henry and Elizabeth about how “we’re not meant to know those things” about the power to create life. She worries about a dangerous apparition—
  • And sure enough, someone new shows up. We lost Dr. Waldman last film, so in this film we have a Dr. Pretorius to serve as a foil for Henry Frankenstein. Pretorius is an apparently disgraced professor of philosophy who urges Henry to resume his work.
• Pretorius takes Henry by coach to his lab, serving him gin and toasting him “To a new world of gods and monsters.” He displays a row of glass cylinders containing tiny homunculi – tiny little people, fully dressed as a queen, a king, an archbishop, a devil, a ballerina.
  • These are remarkable special effects for the time! We see the tiny people moving around and talking, in tiny insect voices, in the same shots as the full-sized Pretorius in the background.
  • (At the same time, how does Pretorius keep these creatures fed and clean and clothed? One wonders.)
  • Henry is appalled; this isn’t science, it’s black magic. Pretorius explains that he grew these creatures from cultures, like nature does, from seed.
  • –and so here is creation of new life in a way Dr. Frankenstein in the first film did not, by merely reanimating patched up corpses.
  • (More comedy, as the king climbs out of his cylinder and pursues and queen and has to be returned to his jar by tweezers.)
  • Pretorius wants to collaborate with Henry, citing Biblical tales about being fruitful and multiplying: they must create a mate for the monster. A woman. (And, implying that Henry is indirectly responsible for the earlier deaths.)
• Then follows a series of scenes in which the monster roams the hills, frightening people. Men from town pursue and capture him, but the monster easily pulls out his chains and escapes. It encounters a camp of gypsies.
  • In film’s most poignant scenes, the monster encounters a blind man in cottage playing Ave Maria on a violin. The man hears someone outside and invites him inside, giving him food, realizing he cannot speak. The man welcomes the visitor as a friend he thought he would never have. Later he teaches the monster words, and explains good and bad: cigar good, music good. But monster, once burned, considers fire bad.
  • But then two lost hunters come by, see the monster and shoot it, and set the cottage on fire.
  • Monster escapes, scares a group of children, rages through a graveyard, and takes refuge in an underground crypt… just as Pretorius and his assistants come through, looking for an appropriate brain for the creation of that bride. Pretorius explains to the monster what he is doing…
• We return to the mansion, where Pretorius pressures Henry to cooperate by having the monster kidnap Elizabeth and carry her into a cave.
• Final scenes, as in the first film, are in a hilltop tower, the tower experiment room, where a wrapped body lies on a pallet. The heart fails and Karl, the assistant, abducts a girl on the street to provide another.
  • The storm rises. Kites are sent up. (No mention of ray beyond the ultraviolet.) The body on the table is lifted up through the ceiling, as in the first film. They talk about the ‘cosmic diffuser.’
  • The table lowers, and the eyes move. “She’s alive! Alive!”
  • Unwrapped, the bride for Frankenstein – played by Elsa Lancaster, who played Mary Shelley in the intro scenes – has a huge mound of frizzy hair. (Where did that come from? A few moments ago she was wrapped in cloth.)
  • And then, in a tragic irony, the original monster enters, approaching his bride. Friend? Bride screams, screams again, runs. She’s just as terrified of the original monster as all the humans are.
• And so the monster, telling Henry and Elizabeth to flee, but Pretorius to stay – they deserve to die — pulls a lever that causes the entire castle to explode and collapse. The end.

Summary comments:

• The bride’s image is the most striking of the film.
• The great irony is that she finds the original monster just as horrifying as everyone else did.
• The center section with the blind man is the most poignant, and shows, again, that the monster is not inherently evil, but responds to kindness, and is able to learn.
• Again, did the monster and wife actually survive? What’s the setup for the next film?
• Note the trailer for this film confuses the monster with its creator: “Frankenstein returns…. In search of a bride!” Popular culture has always confused the name Frankenstein with both the monster with its creator.
• The Wikipedia entry on this film is extensive, with much detail about the film’s production, issues of censorship, and interpretations of Christian imagery and Queer reading.

I mentioned this on Facebook a couple weeks ago: I finally watched, all the way through, Metropolis.

Tonight I watched the 1927 silent film Metropolis, for the first time all the way through. (I watched the first 45 minutes or so a couple times before.) A fascinating film, of course, for its futuristic dystopia, its vision of an enormous city ruled by elites and powered by underground workers — but also because, in its last half hour or, it’s an action-adventure disaster film! The first, long before movies about the Titanic or earthquakes or burning skyscrapers?

And in a comment to comments about that post:

I never saw the Moroder version. What I just watched was a restored version using footage found in Argentina, of all places, in 2008, grainy bits edited back to recreate the original release. Somehow they smoothed out the music (re-recorded it? not sure) so everything fits. The music is pretty good, very expressive in a Wagner/Strauss sort of way.

Here are some specific notes.

• First: years ago I had a very old DVD of this film which didn’t play on my current DVD/Blu-Ray players, so I ordered a newer version. The one I got was a ‘restored’ version that includes footage that was cut after the film’s premiere – rather as Kubrick cut 20 minutes from 2001 after initial showings – footage that was found, in all places, in Argentina, in 2008. (Perhaps they didn’t get the memo about cutting too long a film.)
• It’s a silent movie, with lots of music – pretty good music, as mentioned above – but otherwise we only see actors speaking without hearing them; in the convention of the day, we see occasional title cards displaying lines of dialogue, when it’s really important for us to know what the characters are saying. But most of the time, the film – as did most silent films – assume you can deduce, from context, what the characters are saying to each other, from context.

The film begins.

• We see credits for director and screenplay, etc.; and the cast. And then an epigram: “The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart!”
• And then we see a huge city, an imaginary, futuristic version of New York City. Then: images of huge pumps going up and down; a clock, with a 1 to 10 scale reaches zero and whistles blow; and the shift changes, with side-by-side lifts, one row of workers marching to leave, another to enter, all very robotic, all in black dungarees. “Deep below,” the title card reads, “the earth’s surface…lay the workers’ city.” The city is an underground cavern, with squared building rising several floors toward the ceiling. The workers march off the elevator, literally looking downward. Very stylized.
• And then we see the land above, the “Club of the Sons,” we are told, “with lecture halls and libraries, stadiums and theaters.”
  • We see an open-air track field, with many rather skimpy white men [not physically fit by any modern standard] racing around it, in white shorts.
  • And then we see the “Eternal Gardens,” a place with huge plant-like structures, and a man dressed like a foppish orchestra conductor trying to corral a number of young women in outlandish garb. He is, we gather, choosing a companion for Master Freder, Joh Frederson’s son. The ladies curtsy and turn. Freder runs in, quickly chooses one woman to chase around the fountains and pheasants. Freder wears all white, shirt and tie and odd pants that billow at the top, as if dressed like a boy; he’s not an adult. He grabs one the women and they speak—
• But then a door opens, and a plainly dressed women enters leading a group of children, all poorly dressed. They look around tentatively; the music is plaintive. “Look, These are your brothers” she tells the children. Freder stares at her. She stares back, as other men arrive to guide them back into the elevators. Freder asks the ‘conductor’. “Who—was that?” and he rushes out to follow her. Title card: “But this is what happened to Freder – son of Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis – when he went to search of the girl:”
  • [Oddly, the son here is named Freder, while the father is named Fredersen; generally, it’s the other way around.]

• We then see Freder down among the huge machines, where men work at banks of dials and levers. The direction is very stylized: the workers bend back, and forth, in unison. There’s a huge machine with central stairs. Then there’s an accident: steam erupts. The worker there can’t reach the lever; he struggles, fails. The temperature rises; steam hisses—men collapse, Freder falls back.
  • Freder has a vision: the machine is a monster, Moloch, a huge head with an open mouth, the stairs leading up the mouth, where priests lead slaves up the stairs to throw them into the fire.
  • The illusion fades; Freder sees injured or dead workers being taken away on stretchers.
• Freder runs outside and commands a taxi to take him “To the new Tower of Babel – to my father–!”

• Now we see the grand city shot with bridges of motorways and trains among the skyscrapers, and biplanes (!) flying between [banking oddly in tight turns]; a shot of three highways full of cars; then the grand building in middle distances, traffic in front and below. Also dirigibles.
• And then we are inside a huge office, on a high floor in one of those skyscrapers, with enormous windows giving a view of the city. Fredersen, a distinguished older man, walks back and forth giving orders to minions. On a wall creep numbers, like stock tickers. Nervous underlings write everything down.
  • His son, Freder, rushes in, crying expressively to another man, and then his father [about the accident in the underground, we understand]. The father responds by turning to this other man: “Why is it, Josaphat, that I learn of the explosion from my son, and not from you–?” “The details—”
  • The son pleads with his father, worried about those “in the depths” who might rise up against him.
  • Another crisis: the chief foreman of the Heart Machine arrives with two more plans, diagrams of some kind, found on the men involved in today’s accident. Didn’t Josaphat know about this?
  • Father fires Josaphat.
  • Freder follows Josaphat out, offering assistance.
• Freder returns to the factory, offering to trade lives with one of the workers, to tend the machine.

• Frederson, the father, visits a “strange house” in the middle of Metropolis, where lives Rotwang, an inventor. Rotwang shows Frederson a female robot. It stands, walks, to delicate music. Rotwang promises that soon no one will be able to tell it’s a robot.
  • Frederson asks Rotwang for advice—what to do about these secret plans that the workers have?

• M/w Freder finishes his shift and follows other men down into the catacombs, where a woman, Maria – the same woman he saw earlier, with the children – stands before several tall crosses and speaks to the crowd, to tell them the legend of “THE TOWER OF BABEL.”
  • We see the story told, the tower rising, then collapsing; the men could not understand one another.
  • “Head and hands need a mediator… the heart.” Who could the mediator be? She looks at Freder. He offers himself. They kiss.
  • But Fredersen and Grot, the foreman of the Machine, are spying on them; Frederson tells Grot to make the machine into an image of Maria.

And that’s just the end of the ‘prelude,’ about a third of the way in.

The ‘intermezzo’ and ‘furioso’ show the transformation of the robot into Maria, and the infiltration of this robot into the workers’ underground to foment, or quell, revolution. Workers panic, attack the machines, and the city begins to crumble. In particular, flood water pours into the underground city. This becomes a disaster film, as actors, including many children, are washed away, and miniature building sets crumble.

Eventually the mobs catch up to Maria, who they think is a witch, and burn her on a pillar of fire… only to see she is really a robot.

The real Maria survives. The film ends with workers meeting with Fredersen, Freder, and Maria, and the offering of a handshake. And the epigram: “The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart.”

Comments:

• The takeaways from this film are the visuals: of the vast cityscape, with enormous buildings and levels of different modes of transportation; of the stylized humanoid robot Maria; of the monstrous underground machine and the robotic human workers; of the aerie-like office of Fredersen, the Master of Metropolis.
• The plot is both simplistic, in its contrast between the elites above and the workers below, and muddled, with a confusing subplot about Fredersen and the scientist Rotwang and their past – the original reason for the robot, you see, was to recreate the daughter lost by something something. Soap opera. The central theme is pure science fiction in its dystopian depiction of the dangerous of industrialization and the way mass production would dehumanize workers, but the film doesn’t offer any solution to this problem except for the shaking of hands.
• As noted I was surprised that the last quarter or so of the film was an extended, disaster movie-like action sequence, with riots and cascading waters and collapsing buildings.

Have been busy the past few weeks with 1) family visits and 2) work on sfadb – the end is in sight. Very little reading in the past two months. But I have taken the occasional couple hours to watch old classic movies.

Today: the 1931 Frankenstein, which I’ve seen a couple times before, but not in decades. I’ll just post a few bulletized notes.

Sunday 29Sep19: some additional comments, and the bottom of the post.

• The film is directed by James Whale, about whom a much later movie, Gods and Monsters, was made, with Ian McKellan as Whale.
• The opening credits credit the source material to both a play and to the original novel by “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley,” because Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had been married to Percy Shelley. That’s how women were regarded, nearly 90 years ago, as attachments to their husbands.
• The opening shot has a man — Edward van Sloan, who’d just starred in Dracula and stars here as Dr. Waldman — come onto the stage, as if in a theater, to address the audience, and advise them that the film might be disturbing, because, it is about a scientist “who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God” — immediately setting the conflict in homey terms, appealing to religious prejudices about scientific investigation and the supposed risks of “playing God.” I very much doubt these sentiments were in the original Shelley novel; but the film was made in 1931 Hollywood, and so appealed to American prejudices. Indeed, Wikipedia documents several examples of censorship or banning of the film.
• Yet the central theme is not what it’s fear-mongeringly advertised to be: Frankenstein doesn’t “create” life in the sense of making something living from a petri dish of chemicals; he is reviving dead people. Or more precisely, reviving a collage of dead people parts.
• I haven’t seen yet why the character names were changed from the novel, where it was Victor Frankenstein; in this film it’s Henry Frankenstein, and another character is given the name Victor. And Frankenstein’s assistant here is Fritz (not Igor as in Young Frankenstein).
• The critical theme, it seems to me, is about the monster itself: innocently created, why does the film portray it as evil and violent? Well, because the crucial element of horror and thriller movies (and many stories) is that anything new and strange must be evil and dangerous. (Rather the opposite of science fiction’s presumptions.) The excuse here is that the brain used was a criminal brain. That’s doesn’t explain the monster’s physical power.
• To the film’s credit the monster’s essential innocence is fully evident in several scenes, notably his encounter with a young girl at the lake. The monster’s innocence — it doesn’t understand the difference between tossing flowers into the water, and tossing in the girl — is tragic, but not evil. (And yet, the girl drowned from being thrown in a couple feet of water?)
• This is the film in which the seemingly mad scientist cackles “It’s alive! It’s alive!”. This is the film in which the townspeople rise up with torches and chase the monster into a hilltop windmill and then burn it down.
• It’s also about the scientist’s wealthy father, Baron Frankenstein, a dotty old man who’s only worried about his son’s marriage. The house they live in is lavish, with enormous drawing rooms and high ceilings and a large staff, lying at the edge, apparently, of a small village otherwise occupied by peasants. But lavish lifestyles depicted in films were one thing that drew people to the movies, in those days.
• They key scientific premise, by the way, is that Dr. Frankenstein has discovered some new ‘ray’ beyond the ‘ultraviolet ray’, and this new ray is what brought life into the world, which he proceeds to prove through demonstration. He hoists the monster’s body up into the thunderstorm (it’s quite a grand set, actually) so that the electricity will activate the ray, apparently, not because electricity will directly bring the stitched-together corpse (back) to life.
• The actors all speak in very flat American, almost New Yawk, accents, even when speaking German words (Herr as “hair”).
• There’s virtually no music in the film, save at beginning and over the end credits.
• The film is shot mostly on sound-stages, on those forced perspective sets you see in films of this era, where the stage rises and curves away at the back as if to suggest the other side of the hill is where a stage backdrop actually is. There’s one scene in which the cornered monster keeps turning as if to leap over a cliff, but he can’t because the stage doesn’t go back any farther.
• The lake scenes were filmed at Lake Sherwood, just south of Thousand Oaks, northwest of LA.
• Whale’s direction is occasionally very expressive, some of the closeup shots of the monster downright poignant, even if the editing there is abrupt.
• The film ends with a wedding — as so many pulp SF stories of the day did — and a toast to the house of Frankenstein.

Later comments:

The Frankenstein story is famous, part of popular culture and known far beyond the field of science fiction, where it is regarded by some as the first actual science fiction novel (long before the idea of the genre of science fiction existed). Because it is about the idea of scientifically experimenting to see what the results are.

But I suspect the Frankenstein story endures because it confirms the fear many people have about what scientists do – the popular conception of the singular ‘mad’ scientist working alone in his lab – even if that was not the point of Shelley’s novel. This plot never seems to get old: scientist, not properly humble before the will and domain of god, creates something that gets out of hand, and then destroys him before the threat can become a danger to everyone else. Michael Crichton wrote this sort of story over and over, the story that fears discovery and change and whose resolution means defeating the change and returning everything to normalcy. There will always be conservatives and reactionaries for whom this story resonates.

At the same time, while I haven’t read Mary Shelley’s original novel in decades, I suspect that was not the simplistic message of her original novel, but that playwrights, and Hollywood, have simplified her book in a way to appeal mass audience prejudices. Just as, to take another example at hand, the idealistic themes of the original Star Trek series have become degraded and forgotten into the basis for standard Hollywood action/special-effects films.