Not-So-Young Frankenstein

I’m afraid the Frankenstein story doesn’t really resonate with me. Circa 1990, when I worked for Roger Corman  at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a successful Hollywood producer named Thom Mount approached Roger with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mount had been a Corman underling years before, and felt that his mentor should set aside his production company  obligations and return to directing. So he came to Roger with a deal: a cool million dollars to write and direct a film based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, about a scientist who creates and animates a monstrous creature, only to live to regret his own folly.

 As Roger’s story editor, I was charged with overseeing the film’s script, which would ultimately be based on Frankenstein Unbound, a Brian Aldiss novel with a time-travel element: a man from our own era finds himself back in the early nineteenth century, interacting with Dr. Frankenstein, a sensuous Mary Shelley, and of course the monster. Naturally I read both the Aldiss novel and Mary Shelley’s original—and I can barely remember either one. But a few oddball things remain in my memory banks from the completed film. One is Roger’s decision to cast his fourteen-year-old daughter Catherine as a servant girl wrongly accused of murder. Young Catherine Corman played the role credibly, but it’s not every day that a film director hangs his own child on camera. (Today, Catherine, none the worse for wear, is a writer, photographer, and indie filmmaker.)

 I have two other memories of a film that most critics and most audiences have scorned. One is an awkward sex scene between Mary Shelley (played by the very young Bridget Fonda) and John Hurt as a very middle-aged visitor from the 20^th century. The other is the moment when the Frankenstein monster finally finds a mate—and the two inexplicably lapse into a romantic pas de deux. This was in the version of the movie I saw at an advance screening, but apparently the audience reaction was so negative that the moment was cut from the released film. 

 Of course there are other cinematic versions of Mary Shelley’s work. Most of us know the classic 1931 Jamee Whale film, featuring Boris Karloff as an ungainly but oddly likable monster who accidentally drowns a little girl because he doesn’t fully understand the game they’re playing. Karloff’s monster has become iconic, inspiring generations of Halloween costumes and a delicious Mel Brooks spoof. But Spanish director Guillermo del Toro had long wanted to try his hand at creating an intelligent, sympathetic Frankenstein monster. His new approach (with Oscar Isaac as the scientist and the very tall Jacob Elordi as the monster)  is visually exciting, But it also seems endless and, frankly, more than a bit sappy, leaning heavily on ultimate recognition by man and monster that they’re in many ways father and son . . . and that it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

 There’s much philosophical meat in the Frankenstein story, and we in the 21^st century are well advised to be aware of the dangers of taking science too far. But I don’t think del Toro, for all his good intentions, has made a movie that’s philosophically worth our attention. Curiously, it was just two years ago that Yorgos Lanthimos directed a film that—while in no way based specifically on Shelley’s novel—approaches some of that book’s intellectual concerns. I’m talking about Poor Things, in which a female “monster” reminds us of the dangers of science, and what it might take to move beyond them.