Review: Frankenstein (1910)

The sole existing print of the first film version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is in sore need of restoration and preservation. It's scratched and faded. It jumps and flickers. It runs little more than 12 minutes. But those 12 minutes are some of the most important in cinema history.

Not only in the 1910 version of Frankenstein, produced by Thomas Alva Edison's movie studio, likely the oldest surviving American horror film (there may have been others made before it, but the overwhelming majority of movies made before 1920 no longer exist in any form), but it establishes a tradition that carry forth to this very day: Taking a well-known horror novel or story and tossing out virtually everything but the title.

It's slightly more forgivable in the instance of Frankenstein, given the year it was made (when most movies had extremely short running times) and the difficulties in adapting Shelley's narrative, which was written in the form of letters and first-person accounts, to the big screen. But when, beneath the name of the film, you see it described as "a liberal adaptation," you'd better believe it.

In the movie, Victor Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) heads off to college, with his fiancee Elizabeth (Mary Fuller) and his dad waving as he goes. Two years later, Victor discovers "the mystery of life" (what, sex?) and writes to Elizabeth about it while playing with a skull and his pen, telling her that he's about to create "the most perfect human being the world has yet known." (Uh-oh.)

Using what looks like the world's largest EZ Bake Oven, Victor cooks up his "perfect human being," which appears to grow piece by piece through the opening in the door. What grows within hardly looks "perfect," though--the monster (Charles Ogle) is very hairy, with elongated fingers, a barrel chest and a distorted, grotesque face. When the monster comes out of the oven, Victor does what any sensible person would--he goes to his bed and faints. Victor's servant finds him and comforts him by stroking his head over and over again. Meanwhile, the monster stalks off, unseen by anyone but his creator.

Victor goes home after his traumatic experience, only to find that the monster has followed him, fulling intending to torment Victor for creating him. Then, the monster gets a look at himself in the mirror, is horrified by what he sees, and leaves, only to return on Victor and Elizabeth's wedding day (when the monster comes in, the tinting of the film abruptly changes from sepia to blue). The monster chases Elizabeth around, and Victor and the monster struggle. The monster stalks off yet again, with Victor in pursuit this time, and finds himself before the mirror again, this time stepping into it and vanishing from reality, a reflection of the evil in his creator's mind and the hubris in his heart. Victor and Elizabeth live happily ever after. The end.

If not for the moment when the monster chases Elizabeth, it could have been fairly argued that the monster was merely a figment of Victor's fevered imagination. That would have been a cool way to deal with Shelley's story, almost all of which is scrapped here, though the moral of the story--that Man should not presume to play God--stays intact. And as inventive as the creation scene is, it also wasn't in Shelley's novel--she never described the methods Victor used to bring the monster to life. So every adaptation you've ever seen of Frankenstein that shows how the monster is made is just yanking the explanation out of its celluloid ass. Even so, audiences in 1910 must have been startled by both the creation scene and the monster produced from it.

Brief and battered though it may be, the "Edison Frankenstein" (as it has come to be known) is still a landmark in American filmmaking, setting the stage for much of what was to come, even if The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was far more influential--especially on the next version of Shelley's novel, which wouldn't hit movie houses until 1931, during the first true wave of American monster movies.

But it all had to start somewhere, didn't it?