Was Frankenstein the guy or the monster?

We watched Frankenstein last night. It says something about the status of the film in the culture that even while watching it I couldn't remember whether I'd actually seen it before. Because even if we haven't seen the film we know about the villagers with flaming torches, about the hunchbacked assistant called Igor (who is actually called Fritz) and above all Boris Karloff's monster, with the bolts in his neck. A few thoughts about the film:

1) Boris Karloff isn't credited. In the credits, the monster is played by '?' Perhaps this was to convince audiences that Universal Pictures had created a real monster out of dead body parts.

2) In the credits it says that the film is 'based on the novel by Mrs Percy B. Shelley', which caused hissing from some of my fellow viewers.

3) Despite some wild acting, the film stands up really well, with its nightmarish architecture and sweeping, long camera movements that Kubrick must have admired. 

4) Karloff's performance has been parodied and mocked and set to music and turned into multiple TV sitcoms. It still clearly remains one of the great performances of the cinema.

I just read the novel as well, which has amazingly little in common with the movie. For example, Mary Shelley is weirdly vague about what Frankenstein actually does to bring the monster to life. And the monster itself is a sort of strange romantic (though murderous) outcast, who learns to speak and philosophize.

Frankenstein is certainly flawed in all sorts of ways, but it is clearly one of the great creations of literature. It is one of that very, very short list of characters that everybody knows about, even if they haven't read the books in which they appear: Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Alice, Frankenstein (and his monster, with whom he is often confused), Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. I can't think of many others. Frankenstein is the only one created by a woman, and Mary Shelley was only nineteen when she started writing it!

PS The headline comes from James Thurber's anecdote about the first editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. He allegedly came out of his office and asked: 'Hey, was Moby Dick the guy or the whale?'

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Sean French]

And so many cigarettes! It's almost like 'Mad Men.'

[Dinah]

Well, maybe I'll re-read Frankenstein, too. I'm amazed that Shelley was only 19 when she wrote the novel. Was she simply mature for her age and/or highly imaginative? Or something else.

This next comment is off the subject, I know. I didn't know where else to put it. I'm almost finished with The Memory Game. Most people have probably read this already but I'm a tad slow with things, I guess. I had no idea that the novel was so sumptuous, so sensual. The food--mushroom risotto--and the wine, lots of wine. I like novels where the wine freely flows. That makes me feel so relaxed . . . put the mushrooms in the hot oil, onions, rice, a touch of "unsalted butter," baking bread, family traditions that seem exotic to me--mushroom hunting. Why isn't my life like that? I need to finish the novel as there is certain to be a twist at the very end.