The Curse of Frankenstein(1957)
For a film of its historical importance, The Curse of Frankenstein is surprisingly bad. The movie led to the third (and longest) wave of horror pictures, lasting until the early 70’s. There would be no Hammer horror without it, nor probably Roger Corman’s Poe films or even the founding of Amicus studio at all. But the picture itself is pretty bad, boring at just 83 minuets, failing to inspire even the smallest of amount of apprehension or chills in the modern viewer and lacking the intellectual depth of Mary Shelley’s novel.
The most interesting parts of the film to note are where it differs from the 1931 James Whale version. Although the novel had been in the public domain, Universal strenuously controlled the rights to their version and Hammer had to be very careful to avoid even the slightest resemblance to that classic. The most obvious consequence of this is the role of The Creature (Christopher Lee) is minimized. Perhaps Hammer was afraid that creating an actual character would make the character to similar to Boris Karloff’s Monster, but the Creature (the main reason anyone is going to see the film) is given so little screen time that at times he seems a bit more like a robot than an actual person (or, to be specific, a collection of people). This is not to say that Lee does not do a good job, but this part should have been much more memorable.
By far the best aspect of the film is the performance of Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein. Beginning here and continuing over the course of the series, Cushing creates a cold, tragic figure. We don’t sympathize with the doctor in the same we did with Colin Clive’s 1931 interpretation, but Cushing makes the character more plausible and psychologically real. This is someone who incapable of love or most other forms of human contact, a brilliant man who became so obsessed in his efforts to make a human being that he forgot how to be one.
Despite Cushing’s splendid performance, the movie is still pretty empty, content to merely repeat the old Frankenstein standby of not playing God without bothering to really deal with the implications of that idea. Director Terrence Fisher, who make some of the finest horror films ever made, is having a hard time here and spends too much effort on gore instead of actually frightening imagery or archetypes (he would correct this in his next film, The Horror of Dracula). Aside from the appearance of the Creature, there is not a single surprise in the entire movie, we find ourselves waiting for it to be over.
Despite the fact that picture is by contemporary standards pretty by the numbers, it’s important to remember just how surprising a color horror film with crimson blood in it was to 1950’s audiences. Even though the movie is difficult to make it through, the fact that it spawned so many wonderful movies can’t be overlooked, and on that level, this bad movie can be celebrated.