Mary Shelley

1
Mary Shelleys Frankenstein

• British Novel to Film
• Fu Jen University
• Dr. M. Connor

2
Viewer beware!

• It seems to me that in recent years, there have
  been many film versions of novels or plays that
  contain the original authors name in the title
  Bram Stokers Dracula, William Shakespeares
  Romeo Juliet, and, of course, Mary Shelleys
  Frankenstein.
• I have come to the conclusion that whenever I see
  the authors name in the title, I should beware.
  
• Almost all have been disappointments. The
  exception is Franco Zefferellis Jane Eyre,
  which, for contractual reasons, is supposed to be
  called Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre, but rarely
  is.

3
High expectations

• In 1994, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in
  Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, his first movie
  after his very successful and popular Much Ado
  About Nothing.
• To say expectations were high is an
  understatement.
• Critics had loved Branaghs first film, Henry V
  and his follow-up films, Peters Friends and Dead
  Again met with modest success.
• But he was back on top again after his luscious
  Much Ado. I admit to being a huge fan of that
  particular film.

4
A sexy Frankenstein

• It was certainly a sexy film and gorgeously shot.
• It was also a bit gory, so beware!

5
Not overly popular

• Frankenstein is a beloved novel, and its quite
  true that its never really been brought to the
  screen in a way that is fully true to Shelleys
  novel.
• When the film opened, the reviews were crushing.
  It was universally panned by critics (more on
  this later), and most fans of the book didnt
  like it, either.

6
But oddly....

• But I have usually shown it in class when I teach
  Frankenstein, and to my endless surprise, there
  are usually one or two students for whom this is
  a favorite film.
• Those who like it are quite vigorous in its
  defense, so I feel that it can not be dismissed
  out of hand.

7
On why he chose the project

• "In the last 20, 30 years, Frankenstein has
  been claimed by a whole generation of academics
  and scholars as a seminal piece of literature of
  that time. It's something which now,
  post-Freud, they feel reveals so many
  observations about family life, and incest,
  father-and-son relationships, and husband and
  wife relationships. Frankenstein speaks loudly
  to people, partly because it's so elusive.
  There's no definitive interpretation of it - it's
  certainly more than just a monster story.
  Kenneth Branagh, (Berardinelli).

8
Script War

• Mary Shelley, of course, gets credit for the
  novel, but the two writers credited with the
  screen play are Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, a
  two-time Oscar nominee for screenplay writing
  (1994's The Shawshank Redemption 1999's The Green
  Mile).
• It seems that after the screenplay was delivered
  to the director, there were some massive changes.

9
Ego at work?

• Los Angeles writer Lady says that director
  Branagh, who stars as scientist Victor
  Frankenstein, revised the script to magnify his
  own role and shrink Robert De Niro's presence as
  the Creature.
• De Niro's role, Lady claims, was cut by half.
• "Maybe the Frankenstein myth overtook the movie,"
  says the writer, still reeling from shock after
  finally seeing the film last week. "The fear that
  I had from the very beginning is that we would
  create an abomination, a patchwork monster."
  (Johnson)

10
Ego Trip

• Before I had seen the Lady quote, I thought that
  the biggest problem with the film was that
  Branaghs ego interfered with his work.
• I found a number of alterations to Shelleys text
  that seem to be made for the express purpose of
  making Victor heroic.

11
Victor in the novel is not a hero.

• In the novel, Victor attended Ingolstadt to
  learn, period.
• In the movie, Victor is now specifically studying
  to be a medical doctor. He wants to learn how to
  create the creature in order to bring an end to
  death, since he lost his own mother during the
  birth of his young brother (an embellishment to
  Shelleys text).

12
Cholera epidemic

• In the novel, Victor sees the creature, is
  horrified, and runs away from it. The next time
  he checks his lab, the creature is gone. Out of
  sight, out of mind.
• In the movie, they add a cholera epidemic to the
  town around Ingolstadt, so that when the monster
  escapes, Victor thinks it will die, as newborns
  are vulnerable to cholera.
• Not the actions of a true hero, but at least his
  behavior is somewhat excusable, and somewhat
  better than the behavior of Victor in Shelleys
  version.

13
Justine Moritz

• In the novel, the monster kills William and
  frames Justine Moritz. There is a trial, and
  Justine is hanged. Victor knows that the creature
  is truly responsible, but refuses to say
  anything, because he cannot bear to reveal the
  secret of his creation to anyone.
• In the movie, the onus is taken off Victor
  because as soon as Justine is taken in as a
  suspect, a lynch mob comes to hang the
  child-killer before any kind of trial can happen.
  Victor has no opportunity to conceal his creation
  of the creature because everything happens too
  fast, so he comes across as more heroic.

14
Poor Victor!

• In fact, there is quite a tense, if somewhat
  overblown, scene as we watch Victor trying to
  save Justine from the mob, but he is just too
  late.
• We then watch his sorrow.

15
Then theres the bride....

• In the novel, the monster extracts a promise from
  Victor to create a bride for him. Victor agrees
  at first, but at the last second changes his
  mind, refusing to inflict another monster on the
  world. The monster is furious, and promises, "I
  will be with you on your wedding night."
• Despite this promise, Victor marries Elizabeth,
  never once telling her about the monster.
• In the movie, Victor is going to create a bride
  this until the monster provides Victor with the
  corpse he wants Victor to reanimate the hanged
  Justine. It is only then that Victor refuses to
  build the mate, and only for that reason.

16
Megalomania?

• After the monster says, "If you deny me my
  wedding night, I will be with you on yours,"
  Victor has about fifteen guards around him and
  Elizabeth after they are married and has told
  everyone about the creature.
• As Brian D. Johnson noted in his review, Before
  long, the megalomania of the character and that
  of the director become indistinguishable.
  (Johnson)

17
Other annoying features

• Branagh also overuses fancy camera angles to a
  degree he never did as in his earlier films. He's
  always been fond of the rotate-the-camera-around-t
  he-scene but he overuses it here, to the point
  where I wanted to scream, "Sit still!" at the
  screen.
• Too many vertigo-inducing bird's eye shots, too.
• Also some scenes seemed out of place. The
  dramatic confrontation on Mont Blanc was staged
  like it was a superhero battling a supervillain,
  with giant leaps and dramatic falls down ice
  floes, and this seemed to serve no purpose.

18
Cuts

• The episode with the Turkish girl Safie is
  missing.
• The Monster also does not educate himself with
  classical education. I dont think Plutarch,
  Milton and Goethe fly with modern audiences.
• There is a brutal landlord whom the Monster kills
  when he rescues the blind grandfather.
• Branagh also drops the Monster's narrative.
  (Perhaps this is where the cuts Lady mentioned
  were made?)
• the murder of Henry Clerval and Victor's journeys
  to England, Scotland and Ireland are dropped.

19
What he put back in the film version

• Cuts are inevitable in any film version of a
  novel, and for the most part, I have no problem
  with them. So the differences Ive listed above
  are mostly trivial. But Branagh did have certain
  features in his film that previous film versions
  have left out.

20
Walton

• Most important, he left in the Walton framework,
  though some critics carp that he did this badly.
  
• But I think its important that its there.

Aiden Quinn as Walton. Source Frankenstein in
the 90s. http//members.inode.at/359743/frankenst
ein/frankenstein-seventies3.htm
21
Artic pursuit

• He also left in the arctic pursuit and setting in
  which Frankenstein tells his story .

Source http//www.canalmgm.tv/docs/ficheros/20050
6290014_91_0_2.jpg
22
The Creature

• Most important, though, is the Creature's ability
  to speak well.
• This is a literate Monster we are dealing with.
  And a more human-scaled one as well.
• DeNiro didnt wear lifts in his shoes or bulk up
  his size in any way.
• This is a major difference in a screen depiction
  of the Creature.

http//www.amctv.com/image/content/16/16037.jpg
http//www.charlie.pl/zdjecia/frankenstein.jpg
23
Elizabeth

• Another problem I have with the movie is the
  expansion of the Victor-Elizabeth relationship,
  which comes at the expense of the monster's
  story.
• According to Branagh, "It was important to me to
  have a very strong woman's role in a film of this
  size, and not just a token of love interest.
  ... I wanted Elizabeth and Victor to be two
  equal partners." (qtd in Kenneth Branaghs Mary
  Shelleys Frankenstein, Frankensteins Castle)

24
Pretty hot relationship

• This is a noble sentiment, indeed, but the
  problem is that in the book, Elizabeth is not an
  equal partner.
• Shes is kept away from Victors work, and he
  shields her from the truth of what is happening
  to him.

Upping the sex factor? Helena Bonham Carter and
Kenneth Branagh as Elizabeth and Victor. Source
Pamelas Archive Reviews Mary Shelleys
Frankenstein, http//www.geocities.com/Hollywood/T
heater/5640/archive/frank.html
25
Gratuitous?

• Elizabeths end is both gruesome and grotesque,
  but critics are split on whether or not its in
  the spirit of Shelley.
• I do not like the final scene, where Victor
  brings Elizabeth back to life, and she then sets
  herself on fire.
• I felt it was gratuitous, but perhaps by then, I
  was just tired of the film.

Elizabeths self-destruction. Source Doomed
Moviethon.com http//www.doomedmoviethon.com/image
s/flick_images/maryshelleysfrankenstein_4.jpg
26
Comparisons inevitable

• From Frankensteins Castle "Mary Shelley's
  Frankenstein must be compared is the classic
  "Frankenstein" from 1931 starring Boris Karloff.
  Most striking is the difference in tone between
  the films. The black-and-white Universal film was
  concocted to scare and shock audiences. The
  Branagh film, on the other hand, is more tragedy
  than horror. Its characters are multi-faceted
  instead of relentlessly single-minded. The
  Creatures in each film are also wildly divergent.
  Karloff played a grunting zombie who possessed a
  flat head, metal bolts extruding from the neck
  and only a minimal intelligence. De Niro's
  creature is intelligent to the point of being
  able to speak and read, is saddened by the
  reactions of those around him, and looks like a
  man hastily assembled from parts of other men.
  (Kenneth Branaghs Mary Shelleys Frankenstein,
  Frankensteins Castle)

27
More on comparisons

• As stated in the preface, an important purpose
  of Shelley's Frankenstein is the "exercise of any
  untried resources of mind". The dedication of the
  novel to her father, William Godwin, suggests the
  kind of exercise she designed. Godwin observed
  that, all too often, vital questions are not
  asked, with the result that opportunities to
  produce better results are ignored. In order to
  demonstrate the great value of her father's
  insight, Shelley left the story unfinished.
  Discrepancies, unexplained changes, gaps, and
  curious inclusions are parts of the machinery
  Shelley provided that allow the reader to
  discover some truth in the way Godwin said truth
  eventually appears with "double lustre" in the
  sequel. It is this machinery that Branagh
  discarded. (Wolf)

28
Branagh on DeNiro

• De Niro plays the Creature, who emerges naked
  from a vat of amniotic ooze. De Niro felt his
  creature needed the dazed look of a newborn, so
  he would stand off to the side and spin around
  and around until he was completely dizzy, says
  Branagh, 33, who hoists the slippery creature to
  its feet. He was a deadweight since he was so
  dizzy. I wished he had cheated a bit, so I didn't
  have to lift his whole bloody weight up.
• But then, a little madness was justified on the
  gothic set. We were surrounded by goo, fake bits
  of brain and sawed-off limbs hanging all around,
  says Branagh. It does have an effect on you.
• From People Weekly, Nov 21, 1994 v42 n21 p162

29
Review excerpts

• I like what the critics had to say, so I thought
  Id give a selection of their pithiest quotes.

What Branagh wanted to do to the critics, I
think. Kenneth Branagh and Robert DeNiro as
Frankenstein and his Monster. Source My Hideous
Progeny Mary Shelleys Frankenstein,
http//home-1.worldonline.nl/hamberg/Frankenstei
n/branagh.htmlmisc
30
From The New Statesman Society

• You expect Frankenstein to be stitched together
  from many parts, but Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
  directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, is so
  heteroclite it hurts. A ragbag of medievalism,
  modernism and by-the-book Romanticism, this is a
  Shakespearean's Shelley--tragical-historical-pasto
  ral-farcical. Parts of it work (well enough), but
  that's like Frankenstein looking on his botched
  creation and concluding that, after all, it has a
  rather fine pancreas.
• Branagh's Frankenstein, though, takes itself in
  deadly earnest as the definitive unsullied
  version, Shelley's first edition faithfully
  replaced--in a glossy new binding--among the
  respectful shelves of Eng Lit. Apart from a
  ghoulish major deviation at the end, Branagh's
  idea of respecting the text is very literal. He
  restores the original narrative frame, a showdown
  in the howling Arctic, as well as the original
  Swiss setting, peopled with a cast of minor
  characters, all so unfamiliar that we can't help
  after a while getting itchy and wondering where
  faithful old Igor's got to. (Romney)

31
From The Christian Century

• What ordinarily makes a horror tale horrifying is
  the careful construction of a situation which has
  the appearance of normalcy but then discloses
  some terrifyingly "other" reality" Unlike
  Shelley, however, Branagh never establishes the
  veneer of normalcy in fact, he strives mightily
  to do the opposite. Cameras shoot from wild
  top-down or down-up angles, swirling around the
  actors. Conversation proceeds at a dervish-like
  pace, with much screeching and shouting by
  Frankenstein's adoptive sister and fiancee
  Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) and fellow
  medical student Henry Clerval (Tom Hulce).
  Whereas Shelley's Frankenstein seeks out the
  serene beauty of the Swiss Alps to escape his
  guilt and dread, Branagh's Frankenstein fights
  his way through torrential thunderstorms and fog,
  encountering disaster at nearly every turn. I
  found myself tiring of the film's frenzied pace -
  every scene seeking a climax and the sound score
  hammering it home. Apparently Branagh intended
  with this surrealistic style to evoke
  Frankenstein's megalomania, his hubristic desire
  to create as only God can. (Rike)

32
From The New Republic

• But Shelley's purpose is almost utterly lost
  here. The film is so breathlessly rushing, so
  full of slapped-in characteristics and
  relationships, so bulgy with moments of passion
  that seem arbitrary pauses for romance, that the
  result is like a hard-breathing synopsis. This
  two-hour picture comes off as an attenuated
  storyboard for a four- or five-hour film that
  hasn't yet been made.
• Helena Bonham Carter, as his fiancee, tries
  bravely to give cohesion to what is really a
  series of quick sketches of a woman. Ian Holm,
  fine actor that he is, struggles similarly with
  Dr. Frankenstein pere. Robert De Niro plays the
  Creature, but he didn't need to anyone else
  could have worn the make-up and spoken the lines.
  (He doesn't get near Boris Karloff's pathos.) The
  one interesting performance is by John Cleese as
  a maverick medical professor--a pretty thorough
  transformation of the Cleese we all know and
  love. (Kaufmann)

33
From Macleans

• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a bombastic,
  overwrought spectacle, a clanking melodrama that
  marries Old Gothic theatricality with Hollywood
  overkill.
• There are wild departures from the novel. The
  script lards Shelley's Prometheus metaphor with
  modern references to organ transplants. The
  laboratory creation of the Creature is elaborate
  and clinical discovering that the secret
  ingredient is amniotic fluid, Victor Frankenstein
  swipes a batch from a woman in childbirth. That
  literal naturalism only accents the
  implausibility of the premise. And in a
  ludicrously over-the-top scene derived from The
  Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and stitched onto
  Shelley's story Frankenstein completes the
  manufacture of his creature's spouse in the most
  grotesque manner imaginable. The effect, however,
  is unintentionally comic. (Johnson)

34
From Time

• This is not to suggest that a bunch of 1930s
  scenarists were better writers than Mary Shelley,
  only that they had a clearer sense of their
  medium's imperatives than her present servants
  do. James Whale, who made the 1931 version and
  its even stronger sequel, The Bride of
  Frankenstein, certainly was a better director
  than Branagh. The latter has just created
  isolated sensations that aren't even frightening.
  Whale had real style. He understood that if it
  was too late to take this tale completely
  seriously, it was too soon to camp it up or make
  it an exercise in empty disgust. Delicately
  poising irony, dark sentiment and terror, he drew
  you into his web. Branagh never weaves one. He's
  too busy serving his own expansive ego.
  (Schickel)

35
Sources

• Berardinelli, James. Mary Shelleys
  Frankenstein A Review Movie-reviews.colossus.net
  . 22 Mar. 05 http//movie-reviews.colossus.net/mov
  ies/m/mary_shellys.html
• Johnson, Brian D, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
  movie review, Maclean's, Nov 14, 1994 v107 n46
  p112
• Kauffmann, Stanley, Mary Shelley's
  Frankenstein, movie review, The New Republic,
  Nov 28, 1994 v211 n22 p56.
• Kenneth Branaghs Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
  Frankenstein Castle The Ultimate Frankenstein
  Film Site. 22 Mar 2005
• http//members.aon.at/frankenstein/frankenstein-se
  venties3.htmmary20shelley
• Rike, Jennifer L. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
  movie review, The Christian Century, Feb 15, 1995
  v112 n5 p177.
• Romney, Jonathan. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
  movie review, New Statesman Society, Nov 4,
  1994 v7 n327 p32.
• Schickel, Richard, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
  movie review, Time, Nov 7, 1994 v144 n19 p73.
• Wolfsehr, Tom. Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's
  Frankenstein versus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
  Hailmaryshelley.com 22 Mar 2005.
  http//www.hailmaryshelley.com/kennethbranaghsfran
  kenstein.htm