GREAT 70s DADS #10: Gene Wilder in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

As a kid watching the original 1933 Frankenstein on late night TV (where it was shown quite often) I always felt bad--don’t we all?--for the poor monster (Boris Karloff). Dr. Frankenstein (Collin Clive), upon learning his creature is “Alive… ALIVE!” hardly gives the poor brute a chance to examine his new hands before he’s labeled a senseless horror and chained in the basement, where the doctor allows his hunchbacked servant Fritz (Dwight Frye) to torment him with fire and a whip. No wonder the poor monster went on a rampage!

Clearly, Mel Brooks felt the same way I did, the way we all did, and righted this wrong in a genuinely moving scene in his loving satire of the Universal Frankenstein series, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. Gene Wilder, magnificent as the doctor, is determined--in classic 1970s therapy craze style--to break through the communication barrier between him and his monster (Peter Boyle). He decides to go into the room wherein his monster is locked, and instructs his assistants Igor (pronounced ""Aye-gor" - played by Marty Feldman) and Elizabeth (a very sexy young Terri Garr) to lock him in the monster's room and not let him out, no matter how much he screams and pleads (which of course he instantly does) until he's broken through to his self-made son.

Once his initial terror subsides, Wilder’s Dr. Frankenstein is able to dispel the monster’s hostility through flattery. (“You’re kind of cute!”) and gradually the pair bond in a truly beautiful sequence that heals the terrible rift between mad scientist and monster. From the vantage point of the 21st century, where so many men have grown into monsters rejected or ignored by their fathers if their fathers are even there to reject or ignore them-- this scene is something of a spiritual miracle, a turning of the other cheek, a healing moment of transcendence and forgiveness.

Academic film critics love to analyze horror films as instances of Freud’s “return of the repressed,” - i.e. the abject, cast-off ugliness that doesn’t fit in the social order, returning from the outside to disrupt it. The 1970s was the decade where we actually were making headway into healing that continual repression/disruption process through love and tolerance. Nowhere, for my money, is that transformation more succinctly and wittily dramatized than in this scene, a mere throwaway moment between the broader Borscht-belt gags that had them rolling in the aisles--me included--at the theater where I saw it with my parents at age seven, but this touching little moment was something that Brooks clearly felt strongly enough about to do right. Both in this and in the marvelous BLAZING SADDLES, we see Brooks the comic, but also Brooks the humanitarian and, just as the SADDLES is full of good-natured satire towards racism (freely using the N-word, something that would be considered too reckless and controversial today), so too is YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN satirical of intolerance, suspicion and anti-monster conservative positions. Wilder gives a beautiful, loving performance, his eyes dewy with fatherly emotion, and when he cradles Boyle’s bald, sewed-up head in his arms and declares to the heavens: "This is a good boy!" you can, if you let yourself, tap into the electrical current of love that was in the air back in that golden-green decade, feel a true electrical charge of universal compassion. That's Mel's and Gene's gift to all us screwed-up monsters.

HALLOWEEN RECOMENDATION 1: the book of Frankenstein!

Many of you readers will at some point this month be at the DVD section of some store and think: "Man, I should get a cheap spooky movie, or set thereof, to wow the loved ones come All Hallows Eve," but upon looking at the vast expanse of iffy titles, may walk away with nothing or--worse--some piece of trash that will turn you off forever from the obsessive world of horror movie collecting. For that reason, let me steer you to these following can't miss recommendations:

THE FRANKENSTEIN Legacy Collection (Universal)
Packaged in a dark book of greens and blacks, for $25 or less you get FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN SON OF FRANKENSTEIN and right there, that's a great trilogy... that's the lord of the rings of Universal Horror (as opposed to, say, The Matrix trilogy, which would be the INVISIBLE MAN box). The first two are rife with intentional mythic symbolism and eccentric British character actors, cronies whom director James Whale brought over from the London stage to Hollywood. The beauty of Karl Freund's stark black and white photography meshes brilliantly with Whale's gift for staging and lurid symbolism.

If you've grown up watching these films on UHF TV, you will be with jaw agape as whole swaths of detailed information on coded sexual relations is made apparent through the inclusion of long-excised scenes such as the infamous "Now I know what it feels like to be God" line and the actual tossing of the girl into the pond. Hunts through the mountains by torchlight for "the monster!" have morphed from merely exciting small screen stuff to magnificently gloomy Art especially if you have a big screen or projector. All the sequels follow a continuing storyline, picking up where the last left off - with the monster now frozen in oil or crusted over by dry sulfur, waiting to be revived by yet another foolish operator with delusions of godliness.

For SON OF, Bela Lugosi shows up as a crazy proletariat hunchback who controls the monster via his Pan-like pipe through to GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, then the Wolfman shows up and suddenly the production values dip a bit, you realize there's another world war going on behind the camera, and the paucity of lurid decadence shows it - Lon trying to stay sober, looking for his silver bullet ticket out of town, and in FRANKENSTEIN VS. THE WOLFMAN, Bela Lugosi in the throes of drug addiction, struggling under an oppressive mantle of stage makeup as the monster. But that's actually over in the Wolfman set, which is a whole other ball of wax.

After that there's a few more in the story and then it dies a rather timid death in the seemingly censor-transcribed HOUSE OF DRACULA. But for the $$ you can't go wrong... all the giddy delights of classic horror are wrapped up here for cheap, so don't be a chicken... take the plunge into the war-sandwiched nether-Europe of Universal.

Marketers they Just Dont Understand

 

Now if you want to get me to buy your DVD, you need a cover like this! I got this today for the cover alone - let's see why:

1. Hip reference to archaic silent expressionism
2. Hot chick with blonde flip and 50s white summer dress- in b&w!
3. The colors red and black
4. Vanishing Point-ala-Saul Bass psycho-post-expressionist backdrop.

This is just a freebie to all you market research cats out there! Tell your art directors to take a note and promote whomever did this one, because they got their finger on my pulse!

With a love that will echo through the Ages: Reincarnation, the Lost Lenore, SHE, Kate WINSLET, the Mummy, etc.

(Note: This blog was written a month or so ago, but I wanted to wait on it until sufficient time had passed that it no longer makes sense. When you read it, I think this will become clear.)
(Note 2: 70,000 years later I've added some minor details and corrections)
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Rushing to write down my thoughts about ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, which I just watched again on DVD, alone, nursing heartbreak and nicotine withdrawal.
The moving part of that film lies in the concept of lovers through time, it works as a metaphor for reincarnation and the loves that echo through the ages, such those in SHE, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, and the MUMMY.

To commemorate the release of a “special version” of the 1935 epic SHE, I wanted to blog a bit on the nature of love via reincarnation. I just finished watching ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. The last time I saw this amazing movie was with my Swiss-French mistress who is now gone from me (for the third time). The third time that she left me, plus the second time I saw the movie equals where I am now… in the race through time of love. But is it love? Is it love like the love Boris Karloff has for his princess in 1932’s THE MUMMY? This cat Im-Ho-Tep (Karloff) went all out for lovely Zita Johann, even stealing the secret scroll of Thoth to impress her. For his troubles he gets mummified alive in a flashback that spans the ages, and a huge chunk of the center of the film. It’s a stately affair, brilliantly filmed by ace cinematographer Karl Freund. On a big DVD screen you can count the pores on HER face, not just on Karloff’s very shriveled and dead-eyed silken Ardath Bey (his nom de plume once he’s unwrapped thanks to an expedition some years before.)

Before what? Before he meets…her (Joann), his lost princess from the days of ancient Egypt, now reincarnated as a jumpy, cat-eyed English girl of high social position (her dad the British governer of the Sudan, her mom a royal Egyptian), Helen Grosvenor. Johann is an interesting screen presence: she actually seems to be a reincarnated something or other, a cat maybe, and she exhibits the same bland spookiness that her character requires, although it seems an accident. (She was only in a few other films, but what pips they were, including THE SINS OF NORA MORAN). Her acting style seems to reflect a spiritualist's vague contempt for all mortal striving, such as David Mannes' earnest lovemaking and when she remarks how grateful she is to be away from that beastly hot Sudan, a world weary flush passes like a fast cloud over her desert sand visage.

Naturally, Ardath Bey alias Im-Ho-Tep has no problem seeing right through the veils of time to spot his beloved princess reincarnated into this woman, who--alas is stuck on David Manners. Plus, she’s with her father… and they recognize Ardath Bey from the old expedition, some years before, and it begins to dawn on them they're outgunned as he uses his long range hypnosis to get Helen over to his love shack.


Reverse the formula and you have SHE, which makes its DVD debut this month. Did I tell you that already? A very stoic, humorless and therefore (to me) strangely sexy woman named Helen Gaghan is the titular She, who is immortal because she bathes in the art-deco fountain of youth. To get there you have to climb over various rocky architectural leftovers from producer Ernest B. Schodeshack’s previous film, KING KONG (1933).

Doing this is Randolph Scott as a rugged explorer who discovers She (Who cannot be Named) and her art deco fountain and hordes of slaves and nubile servants high in the Arctic. Perhaps she is related somehow to Im-Ho-Tep because she rules her subjects with this broad statement, “I am past, present, and future; I am sorrow and longing and hope unfulfilled. I am Hash-a-Mo-Tep-She who must be obeyed.” Okay, Hashamo. The "longing" in this statement is for her lover, dead these many aeons. But who does she find reincarnated in Randolph Scott? He’s got a David Manners of his own to cling to and prefer to a love that will transcend time itself--chipper little trapper's daughter Helen Mack.

All this can either seem like some mid-life crisis fantasy (“my true love is no longer in my 45 year old wife, but has left her mortal husk and flown into the pleasing shape of this 19-year old homewrecker”) or it can seem like hope for a love beyond romantic expectation waiting for us across the veil of time. We see this later with PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951) and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)... both of which are deeply romantic in the way films can only be when they step outside the confines of linear time. In the latter film, near everyone in the cast is discovering their lost loves through the veils of time, but in this case, time is only a few weeks at most. Does it really matter? As we get older doesn't childhood memory at times feel more 'recent' than things that happened the previous week?

Another either/or lies in the issue of reincarnation. Presuming there is such a thing, and it’s as easy to believe as anything else, do we in fact keep coming back in the same patterns, meeting the same people, passing into intra-dimensional portals to near realities? Don’t let your fearful super-ego convince you to laugh it all off as “hooey.” There’s a lot you don’t understand even about how your own understanding works, understand? I thought not. I’m talking to myself here, but it’s good company just the same. Actually you are reading my voice with your brain, and probably not even “hearing” me at all. It’s all good… though…

Did I mention the new SHE DVD is colorized? Now before you get all bent out of shape, let it be known that producer Mirian C. Cooper envisioned the film originally in color. The problem was RKO ran out of money and had to fall back on good old black and white. So many moons later, Harryhausen lends his name to the project to make sure the color’s done right from the bottom of stop-motion animation’s crazy beating heart. I already have the 1998 Kino DVD which is nice and all, but not as remastered as I was hoping. I imagined from my shitty VHS dupe of yore that it wasn’t the movie’s fault it was so boring; it needs to be seen on a big screen in beautifully restored detail. Colorization? If Ray Harryhausen says it’s okay, I say it’s okay --in a way is it not a meta reincarnation commentary on the eternal youth of film?

I am going on like this because my heart is broken and, like all bloggers deep down, I hope one day my beautiful soul mate will read these words and something will click in her head and she’ll remember me. I get that way looking at Naomi Watts sometimes, and Helen Gahagan too, while we’re at it. I don’t get that way looking at Zita Johann, though. Not my type. But ultimately is this how our types are chosen? Is my memory of comforting Miss Gahagan after her career sank (due to SHE bombing at the box office) real or false? IMDB tells me that she entered politics after this and eventually lost a seat in a congress bid against old Dick Nixon. You can see archive footage of her in action against old Nixon in Oliver Stone’s film, NIXON. That seems like a scary prospect, though. To imagine SHE who is eternally young getting old…and being in NIXON!


Now you know why I am so down, don’t you? That and I’ve noticed my hair-line receded again. One never actually sees it recede, you know. It comes following a period of “unstable euphoria” when one sees only the “ego ideal” when one looks in the mirror. But then, invariably, something happens that shatters your little teepee of ego-mirrors and leaves you seeing the "real" you in the mirror, time beating relentlessly upon you with a big stick of wind and weather. When the shattering of the mirrors comes, at first it feels glorious and freeing... we fall in love with the person who triggered it, like we were an imprinting newborn baby chick. Later we come home damaged by defeat, or torn by obsessive fall-out from petty triumphs...What is this ego shattering moment for you? What is it that splinters your sense of self and time so that for the rest of your life you long to gaze into those shattered shards just one more time? Maybe it’s the the moment you finally got a chance to tell the girl you truly love how you feel and she wasn’t into you. Or maybe you realize that the girl you thought you were in love with years ago, you really weren’t. It was just that she was so gorgeous, and so damaged, and looked like she would fade so fast.