LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Despite the high-toned diction and philosophizing in Mary Shelley's most famous novel, FRANKENSTEIN is more than a little perverse in its psychology. The titular experimenter grows up with his adoptive sister Elizabeth (his cousin in the first edition) and they plan to marry when they come of age. Yet Frankenstein's ambivalence is reflected in a weird dream of his mother coming back to life. When he decides to create a patchwork man, guided by old alchemical texts, it's in defiance of his father's scorn for such a project. And when his creation gets loose-- largely because Frankenstein had no plan for what he'd do with his "offspring"-- the monster devotes himself to killing off most of the people in the scientist's orbit.

Going on the account of director Mel Welles, who said that he wrote it with fellow American Edward de Lorenzo-- LADY FRANKENSTEIN was conceived from the start as being a sleazier version of a Frankenstein film. Yet to some extent Welles gets closer to the core perversities of Shelley's novel than most movies about the erring scientist.

In LADY, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) has been experimenting on transplant surgery for twenty years since he was expelled from the medical academy for his radical ideas. Only his slightly younger colleague Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) knows that for the past three years, while Frankenstein's daughter Tania is away at medical school, he and the Baron have been working on assembling and rejuvenating a patchwork man. They use a corpse-thief named Lynch to provide them with body parts, and once he provides them with the fresh brain of a hanged man, they're ready to proceed. However, the same day they plan to bring the dead form to life, daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) returns to Castle Frankenstein.

Initially Tania seems nothing more than a loving daughter, one who spied on her father's early experiments and who has emulated him by finishing her training as a surgeon. There's no sense of improper emotions between Tania and her father, though Marshall, who nurtures a concealed affection for Tania, might be viewed as a father-surrogate, though actor Marshall was only about ten years older than actress Neri. We know nothing about Tania's sexual history, but the first hint of her perverse nature is slightly suggested by her lingering interaction with studly stable-boy Thomas (Peter Whiteman), though he can barely speak coherently due to a past bout with fever. 

On the night of the experiment, Marshall warns Frankenstein that damage to the creation's brain could make it dangerous. Tania learns about the experiment and wants to assist. Initially Frankenstein doesn't want her to risk getting in trouble with the law, and then he changes his mind for no stated reason. Frankenstein and Marshall revice the body with lightning, but as Marshall feared, the resulting Monster is a mindless berserker and kills Frankenstein without provocation. The deformed creature then stalks off into the countryside and begins knocking off nearly everyone he meets-- though he does forego mudering a young boy after killing his parents. How the unthinking beast-man knows to hide itself after getting the local constabulary on his tail, the film does not say. The creature also kills Lynch and other corpse-thieves but does not seem to know them.

Tania formulates the idea that the only way to take vengeance on the superhuman ravager is to make a second monster to fight it. Prior to Lynch's killing, Tania approaches the reprobate for new body-parts, but he will only accept sexual payment. Though Tania declines, the encounter possibly gives her the idea to use her beauty to make a monster in a different manner. Aware of Marshall's suppressed passion for her, she tells him that she loves his mind but must have a beautiful male body to love as well-- and proposes that the two of them murder the hunky Thomas and swap out Marshall's brilliant brain for Thomas's impaired consciousness.

                        

Tania then lures Thomas to her bed and seduces him, so that Marshall can smother him to death with a pillow. Tania makes some mention of giving Thomas the chance to be a "whole being," but it's pretty clear that she wants to indulge her desire for father-substitute Marshall, but within a youthful body like her own. Significantly, she does marry and bed Marhsall before they kill the stable-boy, so if all she wanted was sex with an older man, that inclination would have been voided. But making a new "child" to kill the creation of her father-- her symbolic "brother," if one goes by the logic of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN-- seems to be the means of both avenging and surpassing her father. So Tania completes the experiment and births her second monster. "New Monster" is not deformed like the first one and could pass for an ordinary man. But since all the story-pieces are now in place, the "Old Monster" wanders back to the castle for no particular reason, and soon the two super-strong beings duke it out. As monster-fights it's just adequate, and the Old Monster seems the more powerful until both Tania and "Charles" stab him to death. Then some convenient villagers burn the castle down, and Tania and "Charles" have sex amid the flames. Yet "Charles" decides that it isn't a Frankenstein film without a monster turning on its creator, so he strangles her before the flames get him.

By assigning high psychological mythicity to LADY FRANKENSTEIN, I'm not saying any character is psychologically complex, even on the level of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO. It's only the total pattern formed by all the characters that has a certain complexity that taps some of the original Shelley perversity. Also, while I often class mad scientists as being just as monstrous as their creations, here I felt Tania had more of the "villain" vibe.