Amazon.com Essentials:
"It's alive! Alive!" shouts Colin Clive's triumphant Dr.
Frankenstein as electricity buzzes over the hulking body of a revived
corpse. "In the name of God now I know what it's like to be God!" For years
unheard, this line has been restored, along with the legendary scene of the
childlike monster tossing a little girl into a lake, in James Whale's
Frankenstein, one of the most famous and influential horror movies
ever made. Coming off the tremendous success of Dracula, Universal
assigned sophomore director Whale to helm an adaptation of Mary Shelley's
famous novel with Bela Lugosi as the monster. When Lugosi declined the
role, Whale cast the largely unknown character actor Boris Karloff and together with makeup designer Jack Pierce they created the most memorable monster in movie history: a towering, lumbering creature with sunken eyes, a flat head, and
a jagged scar running down his forehead. Whale and Karloff made this mute,
misunderstood brute, who has the brain of a
madman (the most obvious of the many liberties taken with Shelley's story),
the most pitiable freak of nature to stumble across the screen. Clive's Dr.
Frankenstein is intense and twitchy and Dwight Frye set the standard for mad-scientist sidekicks as the wild-eyed hunchback assistant. Whale's later
films, notably the spooky spoof The Old Dark House and the
deliriously stylized sequel The Bride of Frankenstein, display a surer
cinematic hand than seen here and add a subversive twist of black comedy, but
given the restraints of early sound films, Whale breaks the film
free from static stillness and adorns it with striking design and
expressionist flourishes. --Sean Axmaker
