PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
According to one online source, Hammer’s CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN enjoyed enough good box office in America that it was still playing when producer Herman Cohen began the shoot for TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN in late 1957. CURSE, of course, is known as one of the first Frank-films in which the mad scientist is more central to the story than his patchwork creation. The success of the British film might be why the script for Cohen’s film does not place as much as emphasis on the monster as had the two previous entries in this quasi-series of teen monster flicks, I WAS A TEENAGEWEREWOLF and BLOOD OF DRACULA. All three, as well as the subsequent last hurrah HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, were written by Cohen and Aben Kandel under various cognomens, but the latter two films shift the focus from victimized teens to the menace of middle-aged men. They are also much talkier films, partly due to the generally dull, set-bound direction of Herbert L. Strock.
Lead actor Whit Bissell plays the (allegedly English) Professor Frankenstein, and since no one in the story seems thrown off by the famous name, apparently in this world there’s never been a Frankenstein film, though the professor hints that he had an ancestor in the real-life monster-making business. The modern Frankenstein’s colleagues ridicule the scientist’s overly ambitious theories about organ transplant, and the frustrated scientist rants to his physicist buddy Karlton that he plans to make his associates eat crow, while tossing in occasional platitudes about the advance of science. Providentially, Frankenstein and Karlton (the latter possibly being blackmailed into giving aid) get access to the body of a teenager killed in a car-crash, and they begin their resurrection game. The monster—a bulky teen with a disfigured face (Gary Conway)—has no memory of his previous existence, but he submits to Frankenstein’s tutelage, up to the point that he starts getting anxious about being squirreled away in the scientist’s basement.
While many versions of Shelley’s scientist already have fiancees when they start building their monsters, this Frankenstein takes notice of Margaret (Phyllis Coates), a fangirl of his abstruse theories. Frankenstein courts her, not because he feels anything for her, but apparently because he wants a free secretary to maintain his privacy while he concentrates on his Great Work. The prof eventually reveals his callous, self-involved nature to Margaret, with the result that she noses around and learns about his monstrous project. Unfortunately, Margaret still thinks she can win over the prof by helping him with the monster’s upbringing. Instead, Frankenstein deals with her as the Baron of CURSE did with an inconvenient mistress, siccing the creature on her. It’s probably not a coincidence that though the camera declines to show viewers just how Margaret is killed by the teen monster, her screams go on for a little longer than necessary just to indicate her death. The writers may well have remembered the ambiguous way Mary Shelley handled her monster’s encounter with his “father’s” betrothed, so as to imply rape as well as murder.
Though the scientist does accede to the monster’s pleas to give him a new face—that of another teen, also played by Conway—the teen transplant becomes suspicious of Frankenstein’s true intentions. This results in a hurry-up-and-finish climax that spells doom to Frankenstein and his creation. Though the film’s standout line is the much quoted one about the “civil tongue,” Cohen and Kandel do give the main character a number of other offbeat lines. In one scene, Frankenstein rambles to Margaret about the wonders of science with a quote supposedly from Thomas Huxley. I couldn’t find the line on the Internet, but it sounded a lot like a similar quote from the art-critic Walter Pater. So even though this Frankenstein is an immoral madman, you can’t say he didn’t have a proper Classical education.
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