Last month we took a look at a short that
is considered by many as the first "horror" film ever made, Georges
Méliès's The
House of the Devil (France, 1896). This month we take a look at another
Goldie Oldie in the history of horror, namely the first film version ever made
of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's proto-science fiction novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818). The movie was considered lost for decades, only for a
copy to show up in Wisconsin in the mid-1970s amidst the collection of the reclusive
silent-film collector Alois F.
Dettlaff, Sr, who, when he died in July 2005, lay dead and decomposing in
his house for about a month.
Mary Shelley's book has been filmed
and remade and reinterpreted innumerable times by now, and it is doubtful that
even the most novice horror film fan has not seen some version or the other.
(Our personal favorites are the two standard works, James Whale's Frankenstein [1931 / trailer] and Hammer's The
Curse of Frankenstein [1957 / trailer], but we do also
have a soft spot for the loose TV adaptation, Frankenstein: The True Story [1973 / trailer].) But before
all the feature-length films, there was this early and somewhat primitive short
which, well, doesn't win any awards in direction or acting or narrative, but
does have a pretty groovy creature with bad hair. The early special effects are a creative hoot, too.
Directed and scripted by James Searle Dawley (4 Oct 1877 – 30 Mar
1949), a former actor, the movie was shot over three days in the Bronx. A production
of Thomas Edison's Edison Studios, Frankenstein
is a typically loose adaptation of Shelley's novel. When originally
released, the small cast of the "photoplay" was not even credited,
but by now the names behind the main characters of the small cast are general
knowledge: Augustus Phillips (1 Aug 1874 – 29 Sept 1944) is Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Ogle (5 June 1865 – 11 Oct 1940) is
the Creature, and Mary Fuller (5 Oct 1888 – 9 Dec 1973), pictured above, is the Elizabeth, the doctor's
fiancée. Though none are familiar names today, all three were actors of varying
success. Mary Fuller's popularity, for example even supposedly rivaled that of
Mary Pickford at one point, but the loss of her career and other personal
tragedies saw her spend the last 26 years of her life in, St. Elizabeths
Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C.
As can be imagined due to the short length
of Frankenstein, the narrative is
somewhat choppy and incoherent. The music, by the way, is new: it was composed
by Donald Sosin.
Frankenstein (1910):
No comments:
Post a Comment