Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?

!9th Century Seduction Scene -Byron and ClaireIn present times we tend to have a modern revisionist view of human behavior in the past. Some behavior in relationships and sex seems a constant from ancient forgotten times to the present, but the rules of society, the prism through which we view them as acceptable or taboo changes and shifts. What was common to men and women in days of old has new meaning in the age of #metoo. I was recently reminded of this in a discussion of the movie version of Mary Shelley. The thematic premise of which seemed to be how Mary was seduced by Percy only to find out later he was married, and Claire was seduced and abandoned by a libertine Bryon, and that Mary was deliberately denied credit for writing Frankenstein because she was a woman. While the question of credit due for Frankenstein’s authorship is a complex subject, especially in a time when anonymous publication was fairly common and the risk to social reputation was as much a consideration as any financial reward, and deeply bound in the difficult search for a publisher for a manuscript rejected several times, I’ll stick to the seduction discussion.

I find it odd that what is intended to be a feminist view of a patriarchy chooses to make women so weak in character that they are unable to make deliberate choices in their own lives, at the mercy of scheming cads. In the recent movie version of the story, Shelley and Mary meet in Scotland, she falls for him, then later discovers! he is married. And then, that Shelley encourages Mary to be pursued by Hogg in some kind of free love invitation which horrifies Mary when Hogg seems to chase her around the furniture. This architecture is inaccurate at best, and disingenuously revisionist.

Mary, of course, knew that Shelley was married before she ever met him. He was in continual correspondence with her father William Godwin, and supplying Godwin with financial assistance when Mary was as young as fourteen. Mary first met Shelley when he came to visit Skinner Street with his new bride, Harriet Westbrook. It was with Harriet that Shelley had eloped with to Scotland, where they married privately and then remarried in London at a formal ceremony, where the Godwins may have been witnesses. Percy Shelley had been a visitor to Skinner Street while Mary was away in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.

Harriet Shelley, as the aggrieved wife, accused Mary as the romantic schemer, writing at the time that, “Mary was determined to seduce him, she is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him.” This is hardly the picture of the unwitting naïve waif presented in the film version of the story.

As for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he was more infatuated with Shelley’s wife, Harriet, than he was with Mary. It had been Harriet who Hogg had pursued with an intensity of ardor that seems to be the inspiration for the chasing around furniture, and rebuffed by her. As for Mary, he was her confidante during the difficult days of pregnancy and the tragic loss of her first child, a time when Shelley was desperately dodging creditors. Shelley is notoriously on record as suggesting in the spirit of their shared philosophy of “free love”, that Mary could be with Hogg. Shelley meant this as an expression of freedom for her, that she enjoyed Hogg’s company and if they were true to their ideals he would not stand to the way. Mary rejected this idea outright, having no expressed desire for anyone beyond Shelley. If she did have a romantic thought for someone outside her relationship with Shelley it would have been Byron, with whom she seemed to share a sympathetic temperament and a respect of his talent. But any thought of a physical liaison had been tempered by her step-sister Claire’s difficult relation with Bryon.

In the film version, this is treated as Byron seducing and then abandoning Claire. However, it is much more likely that it was Claire who deliberately sought out Byron, who already had the public reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, from his scandalous affair with Caroline Lamb. Claire had an early infatuation with Byron as a famous figure of the time, like a modern girl might with a pop star. Claire (her actual given name was Jane, but she took on Claire as a romantic affectation), had an interest in the theater and sought an introduction to Bryon when he was a director of the Drury Lane Theatre. Drawing on her family connection to William Godwin and an introduction, very likely through Bryon’s publisher John Murray, she had delivered to him a copy of her, then and forever lost, unpublished manuscript of “The Idiot” or Ideot, written following the elopement trip with Mary and Percy, asking that he might consider it for a play and give her his reaction as a mentor, as many a young hopeful writer of today seeks out a peek at an over the transom unsolicited submission.

She went to see him to gain his response and later wrote of the sad treatment he had given as his reaction to her writing. Whether on this visit, he, like a Regency Harvey Weinstein demanded a sexual payment for her naïve theatrical ambitions, or instead, like a romantically infatuated groupie, she seduced him, I think is entirely open to conjecture. Claire had demonstrated a willfulness toward a sexual freedom notion of “free love” that was much more literal than the more intellectual ideas held by Shelley and Godwin, which was more about the financial strictures of legal marriage than it was about sex. In either case, the result was a pregnancy after apparently one brief encounter on a theatre office or London hotel residence casting couch.

It was Claire who then designed to pursue Bryon with the intent to snare his name in marriage with the evidence of the child growing in her. Claire suggested the trip to Geneva to introduce them to Bryon. Whether Mary or Shelley were aware of Claire’s intent is unknown, but it is clear that once the pregnancy was revealed to Lord Byron, he wanted nothing to do with a continued relationship with her. He agreed to financially support the resulting child, but his interest in the mother was less than nil. Byron’s temperament and Mary’s were much more compatible, and he likely felt much less a risk of his fortunes in a friendship with her than Claire.

Their friendship, even from afar, would continue until Byron’s death, with Mary caretaking the publication of his work along with Shelley’s, and a fondness in their Italy travels, even as Shelley’s relationship with Byron had become strained.

As for Shelley and Claire, whether he ever had a sexual relationship with her is also a matter of two-hundred years of conjecture. Mary herself insisted vehemently that they did not. Could she have been naïve about it, willingly blind, or just publicly defensive, protesting loudly to assuage the rumors? Maybe. Shelley clearly enjoyed Claire’s company at some level. She was less serious than Mary, more frivolous, and they could share ribald humor together that Mary chided as disgusting. Shelley was more amused by Claire’s antics than Mary, who seemed to view their life in each other’s constant company as mostly annoying. The salacious scandal rumors at the time among London gossips, the equivalent of tabloids, were that William Godwin had “sold” both of his daughters to Shelley, and every form of lascivious behavior was attributed to them. It had even been suggested that Claire’s daughter Ianthe was Shelley’s child and not Byron’s, but none of the actual participants ever accepted this.

Did Percy Shelley sleep with Claire or encourage an orgy of free love? This is a question Mary clearly answers in her Secret Memoirs, at least up to that point in her story and found at the heart of their journey.

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Mary Shelley gets to theaters in the U.S.

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the film version of the Frankenstein author’s story, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley arrives at theaters in America on May 25th, 2018, from IFC Films. The film which we’ve been following from its inception a few years ago under the title “A Storm in the Stars”, to its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival has taken the long road of an independent film production to the big screen,  released in the UK in 2017.

The movie, an Irish production, filmed on location in Dublin standing in for London, and in Luxemburg for the Geneva Villa Diodati scenes tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing, finding inspiration when she meets the dreamy Percy Shelley. Mary soon becomes pregnant with his child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and visit Lord Byron and John Polidori at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva, where the stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein monster story. Then, Mary struggles to find a publisher and to get the credit for her creation.

The film also stars Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane. The original script was by Emma Jenson with Al Mansour as additional writing. Ruth Coad and Amy Baer produced.

Reviews for the film have been mixed. To sample a few – Fanning gives an earnest performance, though perhaps a little miscast, while Tom Sturrage as Byron chews the furniture, and Booth as Shelley pouts and broods, a traditional period biopic flavor trying hard to be modern. The film does make a mark for inclusion, written by a woman, directed by a woman, and produced by women, and adds a decided feminist cant to the story around whether Mary would get the credit for writing her story. Shelley comes off as a bit of a cad, not revealing he’s married until after they get involved, but in fact Mary went into the relationship with her eyes open and she had already met his wife. Though, he does arrive at a saving bit of honor in the perfunctory, tied-in-a-bow ending. Beautifully photographed by David Ungaro, with moody atmospheric production design by Paki Smith, the film is a little more intent on stating its theme, than illuminating the complex characters and relationships which make up this world. Still room for more.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Bride of Frankenstein Left at the Altar

bride_of_frankestein_lookThe she-mate of the creature of Mary Shelley’s imagining is not jilted, just put off for some soul(less) searching. The Universal Pictures version of the “Bride of Frankenstein” which had been moving forward on the production and release schedule of Universal Studios under the direction of Bill Condon, best known for recent Hollywood musicals (Chicago, Beauty and the Beast) has been pushed back for more work on the script with writer David Koepp (The Mummy, Angels & Demons).

The studio released a statement: “After thoughtful consideration, Universal Pictures and director Bill Condon have decided to postpone ‘Bride of Frankenstein”. None of us want to move too quickly to meet a release date when we know this special movie needs more time to come together.”

The lackluster box-office and critical reception for the Tom Cruise starrer “The Mummy”, the first film in Universal’s new “Dark Universe” idea to turn their horror movie library of the past into a modern franchise world like Disney’s Marvel comics superheroes and Warner Bros. DC Comics, finally getting some steam with “Wonderwoman”, has apparently made the studio a little gunshy, and the experiment in rebooting a true classic of horror is causing a few shivers up the spine in the executive suite.

Javier Bardem has been attached to play the monster of Frankenstein’s creation for some time, while Angelina Jolie has recently been in discussions to play the eponymous “Bride”, but she may be putting a sequel to “Malificent” for arch rival Disney in front of the schedule, perhaps allowing more time to rethink the script. In the original 1935 Universal Boris Karloff version of the story, directed by James Whale, which takes its concepts more from the later parts of the novel, left out of the first “Frankenstein”, the female mate the creature demands his creator make for him for a little companionship doesn’t appear until the last few minutes of the movie, and then just sort of freaks out like a mail order bride getting a look at her scary husband for the first time.

The bride story was always a bit of a flight of fancy. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein only briefly attempts to make a female mate, gathering a few “materials” for the gruesome task but doesn’t complete it, deciding that creating a franchise race of monsters was a rather horrific idea. But since the intent of the Dark Universe idea is to build a franchise world, in this rebooting of a pure movie story, the “Bride” in the title gets to be a major character, befitting a star for the role, though what sort of kitchen table discussions the creature couple might have is of curious conjecture.

Production of the film was set to start in February of 2018 in London, but the decision was made to hold pre-production to allow some time to sharpen the script for the vision Condon and Koepp have for the film, lest the audience have the same reaction to their creation as Elsa Lancaster’s creature bride did the first time around.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

“Mary Shelley” to Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the movie, (formerly Storm in the Stars) has been announced as the Saturday Night Gala Premiere film for the Toronto International Film Festival, held from September 7 to 17, 2017. Toronto is one of the most commercial festivals on the International circuit, launching films like the Academy Award winning “Room” and horror film “Cabin Fever”.

The film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley was filmed on location in Dublin and County Wicklow, Ireland and Luxembourg, was shot in Ireland with funds from the Irish Film Board by Parallel Film, the same company behind Soairse Ronan’s’ “Brooklyn”.

Mary Shelley tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing but yet finding inspiration when she meets Percy and is struck by love, but Percy is married with a child (actually it was two). Mary soon becomes pregnant with Percy’s child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and grieving for their child, they depart from London and Percy introduces Mary to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva and the a stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein Creature story. Mary struggles to find a publisher and must fight for her monster and her identity.

The film also stars Douglas Booth as Percy, Maisie Williams as Mary Scottish girlhood friend Isabel Baxter, Bel Powley as Claire, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane as the parents, and Tom Sturridge as the mad, bad Lord Byron. The original script is by Emma Jenson with Alan Maloney and Ruth Coad producing for Parallel Films with Amy Baer of Gidden Media who originated the project.

The story covers some of the same ground as “The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Romantics” but skips lightly over the 1814 elopement trip and jumps to 1816 to 1818.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Frankenstein Universal Movie Sets

Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein Europe Village Universal Studios Tour

Frankenstein Universal HollywoodTCM cable channel Turner Classic Movies recently ran a Boris Karloff day and I had a chance to watch the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1934 Bride of Frankenstein shot four years later, both directed by James Whale. The difference between the two movies was quite fascinating. Boris Karloff had gone in the credits from a “?” to simply the one name KARLOFF by the send movie, having become a household icon in between. The original film deviated so far from the original book to be almost unrecognizable, and oddly switched Victor to Henry Frankenstein and Victor’s friend from the book to Victor in the movie. The Bride of Frankenstein went back to the book to borrow more, and famously dramatized the introduction with Byron and Percy Shelley in Geneva.

It is striking that the second movie relies much more on a humorous slant to the material, with the added villain character of Dr. Pretorius almost a comedy. Boris Karloff’s make-up had changed to a heavier face with almost a receding hairline in some angles rather than the black bangs of the first. If you go to the Universal lot you can still run into a green-faced Frankenstein monster wandering about, ready to snap a selfie. It’s become rather standard for the movie Frankenstein to be green, but in the black & white films, the make-up was actually a monotone gray.

Universal 1931 Frankenstein Village SceneThe Frankenstein Village set had changed quite a bit as well. In the original it was a Bavarian style village with the Frankenstein family house a high ceiling mansion in the middle of the village with an entrance looking out on the street. In the Bride of Frankenstein, the town had turned into a larger walled castle city with a gate and drawbridge. In the first movie, the science lab was in a mill tower on a hill, in the second, a castle tower as part of the city complex. Both films were shot on the Universal studio back lot.

western_front_archThe 1931 Frankenstein village set was actually built for the World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” shot by Lewis Milestone a year earlier in 1930, for where the soldiers left home to the fervor of marching bands, before the devastations of war. The archways and street scenes can be recognized between the two films, with the archway into town shot from different angles. Some small parts of the Old Europe called the Court of Miracles set on the Universal backlot is still there but much of the set areas were burned in a fire at the studio some years ago. A few remnants called Little Europe still remain on the Universal Studio Tour.

universal_tour_europeThe stored laboratory sets and equipment were famously used again in Mel Brook’s “Young Frankenstein” and some of those props still remain in the Universal props shop. The lake where the little girl scene was filmed is out in Agoura about 40 minutes from Universal out the 101 highway. Malibu Lake is now surrounded by houses and a golf course. The Paramount Movie Ranch with its much used western town set is about five minutes away from the lake, and is now actually a National Park as part of the Santa Monica Mountain Recreation Area, but the western sets, used for countless movies and TV shows also recently burned in a wild fire.

Curiously the idea of a Frankenstein Castle only comes from the movies, even though there never really was a complete one, and in the Mary Shelley novel, rather than working in a laboratory in a watch tower, Victor Frankenstein created his creature in his lodgings at Ingolstadt University. Imagine carrying dead body parts into your dorm late at night for a little all-nighter monster surgery. In the movie, the village where the Frankenstein’s lived was modified to a fictional “Goldstadt”. While a real village named Frankenstein, in the Rhineland of Germany where the ruins of a castle still guard on the hill above, bears little resemblance to the Bavarian Alps style architecture of the movie set design. TMC Hollywood Movie Locations Tour

Of course, the book is set in French speaking Switzerland and the country of the movie is never specifically stated, but it’s obvious German feel perhaps comes from the availability of the Bavarian style sets. The other oddity of the two movies Frankenstein and the Bride are the costumes. The original film was apparently set in contemporary 1930, post WWI, at least by the clothes, while for the Bride, they decided to make it more late 19th Century in style. It was the same director, so maybe budget played a part or they wanted to go more period in line with the Regency opening.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley's Lost Book HateThe story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”

But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?

At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.

There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?

In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.

This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?

And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

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“Game of Thrones” Stars tossed in the “Storm”

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Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth as Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley

More casting has been announced in the now filming Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley story “A Storm in The Stars” added to the principal lead characters of Elle Fanning as Mary, Douglas Booth as Shelley and Bel Powley as Claire. Some time ago a Game of Thrones cast member, Sophie Turner, had been announced to play Mary Shelley in an alternative project “Mary Shelley’s Monster”, which hasn’t taken off, but more alumni from the HBO medieval hit have now found their way into the Haifaa Al-Mansour directed version of the stormy relationship of the 19th Century poetic personalities from a screenplay by Emma Jensen and Conor McPherson.

 

Maisie Williams (Arya Stark on Thrones) has been tapped to play Mary’s childhood friend Isabel Baxter, who Mary knew from her stay with the Baxter family in Dundee Scotland, and Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon on Thrones) will play Mary’s father, publisher William Godwin, alongside Joanne Froggatt from Downton Abbey who plays Mary’s step-mother and Claire’s mother, Mary Jane Clairemont. The actor chosen to play the mad and bad Lord Byron with whom Claire has an illegitimate child, Allegra, has been revealed as Tom Sturridge (Henry IV in “The Hollow Crown” and the romantic soldier from the recent remake of “Far From The Madding Crowd”). Ben Hardy is also in the cast and Ciara Charteris is playing Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

Some newcomers are also in the film, Ingridi Verardo De Moraes, Michael Cloke, and Donna Marie Sludds. The picture has been shooting in Dublin for the London scenes and production is scheduled to move to Luxembourg sound stages.

A Storm in the Stars Film Shoots

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Douglas Booth as Shelley

The Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley biopic “A Storm in the Stars” has begun production in Ireland, with Elle Fanning as Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, Douglas Booth as Percy Byssche Shelley and Bel Powley as Claire Clairmont. The cast has been spotted about Dublin in costume, rather shivering in the cold weather, despite woolen coats and cravats, while the recent casting of Ben Hardy has been announced (it’s unclear whether he is playing Byron, Polidori or Hogg), and Ciara Charteris is playing Shelley’s first wife Harriet, who committed suicide before Percy and Mary could be married.

 

The film is being directed by Saudi-Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour following her acclaimed debut film “Wadjda”. The film’s story from a screenplay by Romance novelist Emma Jensen with co-writing credit by Irish writer Conor McPherson, follows the period in the saga when Claire moves in with the Shelleys for the writing of the novel of “Frankenstein”, and the young author’s tempestuous love affair with Percy Shelley, the infamous and familiar trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, Claire’s illegitimate child with Bryon and all the drama surrounding the rocky road that turned Mary into a legend. Filming has been spotted around the Collins Barracks in Dublin. The film should be released late in 2016, at least to the festival circuit. No US theatrical distributor has been announced, while international sales are being handled by the UK’s HanWay

The period of this film takes place after the journey of Mary, Percy and Clairmont to France and their early relationship explored in The Frankenstein Diaries, The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley. Douglas Booth is currently appearing in another Regency era literary mashup “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. Elle Fanning most recently appeared in “Trumbo”.

Victor Frankenstein Movie – Sewn of Borrowed Parts

It’s Alive – The Monster Arrives and Quickly Dies

victor_frankenstein_mcavoy_radcliffeReview – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.

There’s something about the opening with its rip off of the “movie” Sherlock Holmes style of stopping the action for a graphic representation of what the characters are sensing, with the music and graphic tone that almost immediate says “hey, I’ve seen this before”, from which it never quite recovers, like a patient with a fatal flaw that will ultimately kill it. The effect is abandoned for most of the movie until the end, when it reappears and you’re head is saying, “oh that’s what that was for”. The film story certainly has some inventive turns and tricks, but staggers unevenly between clever solemnity and buddy comedy. For purists, it has as much in common with the literary “Frankenstein” of Mary Shelley as did “Frankenstein’s Army” but the director, Paul McGuigan, stated on the publicity trail that the book of Frankenstein was boring, so might as well have at it. Victor Frankenstein offers at least one reference to his sewn together creature as “The Modern Prometheus”, so there, but all the rest is pretty much movie iconography references including one lame mispronunciation of the name as Fronkensteen, so you presumably get the Mel Brooks crowd. In fact, the whole Igor as hunchback assistant, mostly comes from the “Young Frankenstein” take. The club scene could have added a tap dance of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, but that was an opportunity missed.

Victor Frankenstein, neither a doctor, nor a baron, but a bright medical student gathering animal parts from zoos and in this case the circus, where he has cut of a lion’s paw, from some lion we have not seen, witness the circus hunchback perform a medical miracle to save the beautiful trapeze artist performing (without a net), who falls, breaking a collar bone. Frankenstein rescues the hunchback from a cage and in the escape through a clever bit with a mirror, a pursuer is killed. The two are sought for murder by an oh too clever police detective on his own crusade of God verses science.

Victor Frankenstein transforms the hunchback into a fine upstanding young man by draining the puss from a cyst on his back that has somehow also bent his body, straightening his posture with the brace, that also manages to transform a young man who has never left the circus since he was a small child him into an erudite charmer, given the name of Igor, who can now enter London society with the slightest notice, whose medical genius has come from some medical anatomy books, while a London hospital can’t seem to manage to properly medicate a patient with a broken bone.

Victor Frankenstein, who seems to have the skills of the most masterful surgeon of his age while still a student ignoring his studies, and a chiropractor to boot, claims his purpose is to improve mankind but has built a horrid animal monster from decaying flesh in the form of a sort of monstrous monkey that attacks the college theater when shocked into life with his special “Lazarus Fork”, which presumably a wealthy young toff is impressed enough by to be willing to murder to corner the technology market of bringing dead flesh to life.

The God thumping cop closes in on Victor Frankenstein’s London mansion laboratory, without a warrant, mind you, and the whole operation moves, rather like the second super expensive device from Contact, to another location, a remote castle in Scotland belonging to the rich kid, where the creation of a giant man with a heart to spare and extra lungs, turns into an epic failure, when Frankenstein finally realizes he can’t bring back his brother, whose death he feels responsible for in a childhood accident, to the living.

Frankenstein says he wants to create a sentient, intelligent being, but doesn’t seem to take the least precaution, when his animal experiment goes viciously wrong, but decides to proceed on Igor’s suggestion to build a powerful giant, without any thought at all to its mind and that it might have a bad temper being shocked to sudden life by a lightning bolt. The brain consideration only seems to come with some thought of a sequel (I doubt we will ever see). The creature when it comes to life, however briefly, seems to have an uncanny similarity to the monster as drawn for the Mr. Magoo cartoon version of the Frankenstein story, but where in the cartoon, the horrible creature spoke with the intelligence Frankenstein intended, here the monster just pretty muck breaks things before its two hearts become a pin cushion with anatomical directions. And the last line, “this is not life”, a slant riff on the old Colin Clive line “it’s alive” from the 1931 version, as Victor Frankenstein looks in the dead eyes of the botched monster he’s created, discovering that he has not made what he intended,  seems oddly apt for the effort as a whole.

Frankenstein 1970 – Karloff Returns as Victor Frankenstein

Boris Karloff Returns to His Monster in Frankenstein 1970

frankenstein1970_color_fdThe Frankenstein legend has made another movie screen appearance, and of the latest incarnation of Frankenstein adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, reviews have been mixed to say the least, and the box office, rather a disappointment, though perhaps one might agree that it is if not the best, at least the most imaginative reimagining of the Frankenstein story since Frankenstein 1970.

Despite the date in the title, the film was shot in 1958 in Cinemascope Black and White. The 1970 was intended to give the low budget film a futuristic sense, though the only futuristic science fiction was its place in the 1950’s atomic bomb energy craze in horror films. The most stand-out feature was that it starred Boris Karloff (again as the monster, sort of, and that’s the final twist.

frankenstein-1970_alternate_fdThe storyline has a modern day Baron von Frankenstein who was tortured and physically mangled at the hands of the Nazis in post WWII Germany, because he refused to use his science skills for the Nazi war effort. The Baron is continuing his work as a scientist, but needing money to continue his experiments, he agrees to rent out his castle as a film location to a movie crew to film a television movie about his famous family, and his grandfather, the old Baron von Frankenstein of monster reputation. Little do they know the current Baron is following in his ancestor’s footsteps. The money allows Frankenstein to obtain a nuclear reactor to power his creation, rather than the old standby lightning bolts. But when he runs out of body parts he starts killing off the members of the film crew. This is done through his partially completed monster, a lumbering figure with his head completely bandaged, serving both a story function in the later reveal, and a budget saving device of not having to create a monster make-up. His creature has no eyes at first and kills the wrong girl, until he can get the right ones. When the end finally comes in a climactic burst of atomic reactor steam, and the bandages are removed, inside them is revealed the face of Karloff/Victor Frankenstein as he was before he was tortured, with a recoding played explaining that the Baron was trying to create a lasting version of himself for perpetuation of the family name.

frankenstein_1970_monster_fdOn an entertainment level it was very low budget and a bit of a cheat, with the monster. a mummy-like creature, a guy stumbling around in a bandage helmet ranking somewhere between Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (a gorilla suit with a space helmet) and Project Metalbeast (with Kane Hodder – Friday 13th’s Jason, in a rented werewolf suit) but certainly an imaginative take on the legend and the lore of extending the Frankenstein world. I don’t know what poor Boris Karloff felt about it, but I can imagine. His career had reached a nadir in the late fifties. Abbot and Costello had come and gone, and Hammer horror was taking over the classic stories with new stars like Christopher Lee. The aging great horror star would see a bit of a resurgence in the early 1960’s, with some modestly decent horror projects, but perhaps a more reverent casting in television, where he would appear in episodes of shows like I Spy as a kindly but eccentric old gentleman in a Don Quixote quest, and even lend his name to a series of spooky comic books from Gold Key.

Frankenstein 1970 was shot on a left over set from an Errol Flynn film at Warner Brothers and directed by Howard W. Koch, who would go on to a rather illustrious career, ultimately as President of Production at Paramount Studios and producer of the Academy Awards shows. The film also starred Don “Red” Barry, who for actors like Karloff, who felt they were type cast, carried the actual name of his most famous character (Red Ryder)  in his professional name – imagine Sean “Bond” Connery or George “Spanky” McFarland. After Victor Frankenstein, maybe it’ll have to stay Daniel “Potter” Radcliff, because I doubt “Igor” is how he’ll be fondly remembered.