The Curse of Frankenstein

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

A 1957 project that launched the Hammer Film series of Frankenstein movies, The Curse of Frankenstein opens and closes with scenes of a disheveled Baron Victor Frankenstein imprisoned in a cell where he implores a priest to believe his tale of bringing to life a humanoid creature cobbled together from various corpses. After the prologue, the main plot picks up with Victor as a wealthy child (he's just inherited his family's fortune) hiring a tutor (Paul) to educate him. When Victor has grown into a man, he and Paul remain friends and test their unorthodox scientific theories by bringing a dog back to life. Victor proposes that they next create and reanimate an ideal human specimen, but Paul balks. Victor pushes forward alone and assembles a creature from the parts of assorted dead bodies. Obsessed by his research, Victor spends little time with his fiance (his cousin Elizabeth) or his mistress (a servant woman who works for him). Nearly fifty minutes into the film (which runs eighty-three minutes total), Victor brings his creation to life as lightning flashes through the windows of his laboratory. The monster promptly attempts to strangle its maker to death, but Paul intervenes and saves Victor's life. The men strap the creature down, but it escapes the next day. Out in the countryside, Paul and Victor hunt the abomination with rifles. Paul shoots and kills it, but not before the creature encounters a blind man and a small child (both presumably meet horrible fates, though whatever occurs to them happens off camera). Victor and Paul bury the monster, but Victor secretly reanimates it. The mistress, meanwhile, threatens to expose Victor's secrets and research if he does not marry her. Victor traps her in the lab with the creature, thereby solving that problem. The night before Victor is to marry Elizabeth, the monster gets loose again and ventures up to the roof. Elizabeth (who has been pressing Victor for details about the nature of his research throughout the tale) explores the laboratory and deduces that someone is up on the roof. She heads up there. Paul and Victor, outside, spot the creature atop the abode. Victor races to the roof just as his creation approaches Elizabeth. Victor fires a couple of shots from a pistol and accidentally hits Elizabeth in the shoulder. Victor throws an oil lantern at the monster, which burns and falls through an angled rooftop window into the lab below, where it lands in a vat of acid. An epilogue back in Victor's cell implies that nobody believes Victor's tale (Paul and Elizabeth refuse to corroborate his story). Guards lead Victor out of his cell, and the viewer spots a guillotine through a window.

For its first fifty minutes, The Curse of Frankenstein is slow-paced by modern standards with lots of lengthy shots of characters gushing exposition through dialogue on lavish sets. Once the creature rips the bandages off its face and reveals its gruesome visage, the tale gains momentum and remains engrossing right up to the end when guards escort Victor (presumably to his execution) from his cell. Peter Cushing vanishes into the role of Baron Victor Frankenstein and gives a fine nuanced performance as the obsessed mad scientist. He chews up the scenery, particularly on the set of the way cool laboratory in which chemicals bubble in beakers and strange equipment glows and hums.

The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Films notes that The Curse of Frankenstein “devotes considerable screen time to the actual construction of the monster (an event that [Mary] Shelley's novel glosses over).” This observation keys into my main complaint about this film – the creature only shows up for the last half hour and even then has little screen time. The filmmakers (director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster) made a bold choice in crafting a project that focuses more on Victor than his creation. If you're willing to sit through a slow first fifty minutes, you'll enjoy an enthralling denouement with a horrific animated corpse lurching around.