Pass the marmalade, will you, Miss Elizabeth?

Briefly, because Arisia has begun and I am very badly underslept to start out—

In many ways, Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) is the get-it-right remake for everyone who couldn't figure out why James Whale kept wasting his time in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with poor, redeemable, conscience-racked Henry when the gloriously immoral Dr. Pretorius was right there, smirking at God and aspiring to the Devil, the acid-tongued epitome of mad science at its most knowingly—even hampered by the Hays Code—decadent and depraved. Instead of Ernest Thesiger stealing scenes, we get Peter Cushing front and center, but I don't consider this a downgrade.

I have remarked before on Cushing's gift for letting audiences in on the vulnerabilities of his characters, even the most apparently ironclad. It is what enables our sympathy for small-souled Harry Fordyce and keeps his Van Helsing from flat cardboard fanaticism; it makes him a heartbreaking Winston Smith. It isn't a quality Baron Victor Frankenstein would recognize if he found it under his scalpel, helplessly bleeding. He hasn't a molecule of self-doubt or compunction, he isn't intimidated by threats of legal action or the laws of nature, and the only human contact he truly needs is regular access to a dissectable corpse—teenybuffalo once described him to me as "a splendid, cold, self-enchanted Frankenstein" and I wish I were dishonest enough to steal that summation outright. He begins the film merely obsessed, at fifteen already brilliant and brazen enough to secure a tutor for himself in his decade-dead father's name and devote them both to pushing the limits of medical science. By the time we return to the straw-strewn cell where our disheveled narrator began his tale, he's revealed himself as an icy, offhand sociopath, increasingly careless of the bodies piling up behind him, whether of lovers, colleagues, strangers, or family.¹ He murders, he manipulates. His monster may delight him more at his doglike beck and call than if it had been able to perform calculus. And he does it all with style, handling bone saws like butter knives, casually wiping off the blood onto the pale morning coat that serves him for a lab coat, as indifferent to the physical messiness of his monomania as to its moral residue. Not until the guillotine is an unavoidable reality does his high-minded composure desert him, and then it's less a terror of hellfire that drives his screams than the sheer unfairness of things.² Of course he's punished for his transgressions in the end. Who cares? Certainly not the next five films starring Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein.

The Curse of Frankenstein isn't a one-man show, quite. I have very little to say about Robert Urquhart as the obligatory voice of reason handful_ofdust has termed "Disapproving Friend Paul," but Christopher Lee is surprisingly poignant as the gaunt, staggering Creature, its mime-white face at once luridly scarred and plaintive—comparisons with Karloff are inevitable, but his monster is his own. Thinner even than the whippy Baron, in tightly buttoned black, it recalls both visually and in its subjugation to an unscrupulous master the chalky severity of Conrad Veidt's sleepwalker in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The beautiful sculptor's hands Victor brought back for it from Leipzig hang heavily at its sides, exercised only in attack or pathetic gestures of balance and bewilderment. It never speaks, except in its death-cry. And it doubles its creator explicitly, in a kind of twist I have never before seen in a Frankenstein retelling: James Whale never had his torch-wielding mobs doubt the reality of Henry's Monster, but Victor goes to the guillotine because he cannot prove that his Creature ever existed; with no convincing alternatives and Paul refusing to back him up, his desperate Promethean confession is reduced to the ravings of a madman. Popular culture calls the monster by its creator's name; now their characters blur together as well.³ With the hindsight of sequels, of course, we know that the Baron is capable of far crazier feats of science than the mere reanimation of flesh, but the frame-structure of Curse forces us to take his word for it. Look how well that worked out for anyone else in this story.

And now I have panels to get to, including the one where I talk about mad science on screen, so there will either be further posts on this subject or there won't. I will probably end up watching The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) off YouTube because I can't find a legitimate copy anywhere. I don't know if Peter Cushing is my definitive Frankenstein, but he is an crackling, unholy delight in the part. Someday I will see Christopher Lee in another speaking role. To a new world of gods and monsters, all.

1. Besides the indispensable figures of Frankenstein and his creation, the film's one real holdover from its source novel is the character of Elizabeth, Victor's cousin, though I am mostly interested in what the film did not do with her. Change the viewpoint and The Curse of Frankenstein could be a book-perfect Gothic of a different gender: on the death of her mother, Elizabeth has been brought to the estate of the wealthy, titled, mysterious relative to whom she has been engaged since childhood, though they last saw one another at his mother's funeral some fifteen or twenty years ago. His letters were amorous and impatient; in person, he is urbane and preoccupied, solicitous only when he can spare the attention from his researches. Her maidservant is sly and insubordinate, not quite flaunting whatever secret she shares with the Baron. More and more, Elizabeth finds herself turning to her fiancé's old tutor, who warned her to leave the day she arrived and has never explained himself since; he is no more forthcoming about whatever goes on in Victor's laboratory, but at least he remembers she's there in the house. But her cousin can be persuasive when he feels like it, which is just often enough; she does not need to be reminded that he supported her family for years. One day, he even promises her with that faint, private smile of his, he'll let her be of use to him in his experiments. It's only on the eve of their wedding, when strange noises knock about upstairs and Paul hurtles out of the house in a rage and Victor races after him without a word of explanation, that Elizabeth finally takes a lamp and goes up to see what Bluebeard's riddle her husband-to-be has been hiding all these months . . . Unfortunately, while all of these elements exist in the script, Jimmy Sangster seems to have cared about Elizabeth primarily as a piece of moveable plot, meaning that while Hazel Court may be a perfectly fine actress, here she has slightly less personality than her décolletage—it is a nice touch that she never sees the Creature, so that she can readily believe Victor's collapse into criminal insanity, but her most significant character traits are absence: of curiosity, of sexuality, of knowledge. She will marry Paul, who lied to her just as much as Victor and for perhaps far worse reasons. What does that say about the triumph of the status quo?

2. It isn't that he's innocent—he's simply been convicted of the right crimes for the wrong reasons. I contradict my previous statement slightly; I do think it's a tribute to Cushing's powers of +10 mortal fear that any sympathy at all can be generated for the Baron at this stage.

3. I cannot believe it is an accident of direction that the Creature kills by strangling: and that both times the imprisoned Victor finds himself denied or challenged, he goes for his antagonist's throat.