Category: Hammer / Classic English

    Frankenstein Must be Destroyed was the next-to-last appearance of Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein.  This movie does have its faults. Probably the most serious; you have virtually no reason to sympathize with the baron anymore.  He is almost
overwhelmingly evil.

But after an undistinguished first half, things change radically.  The movie takes a devastating detour, turning into a bizarre, tragic love story, as powerful as it is unexpected.  You suddenly find yourself in a different tale.  Not the baron’s anymore, but that of Dr. Brandt and his wife Ella.

Imagine being light-years away from the person you
loved most.  Then years later, you are back in the same
house, close enough to watch them sleep.  Yet you know this
is as close to them as you can ever get.

Many reasons for this.  But the strongest
one: you really aren’t you anymore.  It is a
startling idea, especially in a movie made in the late
‘60’s.

Much of the story up till then has gone in a
different direction.  You watch the baron, feeling regret,
but much more, feeling disgust.   His positive feelings
have been bled out of him.  He does violence without
regret.

As the movie opens, a well-dressed man walks down a street.  Suddenly another figure emerges from the shadows, a scythe in his hand.  In one stroke, he slices off the first man’s head, and calmly places it into a box he brought for this purpose.  This is your re- introduction to the new, savagely embittered Baron  Frankenstein.

How has he become so cruel, so lacking in feeling?  Without excusing him, the movie gives you an explanation.

The baron sees himself as a man of vision, someone able to
see past the limits of the scientific establishment. For years, he has waited, relishing his opportunity to show them his greatness and their small-mindedness.

But despite his brilliance and imagination, he has seen frustration after frustration.  Is it God, or fate, or luck, or karma or Murphy’s Law?  The baron, a materialist through and through, is only sure it is not God… because God does not exist.   He is
only sure of his ever-growing fury and ruthlessness, as though he is at war with the Universe.

Baron Frankenstein tries to start fresh in a new town with a new identity, Mr. Fenner.  (He is careful not to call himself “Doctor.”)     In no time, his beautiful landlady, Anna, and her fiancé, Dr. Karl Holst, have become his blackmail victims.  (Anna’s mother lives in an expensive hospice, and Karl has been stealing cocaine from the medical facility and selling it, to pay for her stay.)

The Baron does not need their help for a new creation.  He has something more urgent in mind. It turns out that the Baron’s former research colleague, Dr. Brandt is an inmate at the hospital for the insane where Karl works.

It is Dr. Brandt’s help that the Baron needs. Brandt has made progress where the Baron was unsuccessful. Baron Frankenstein is obsessed with finding out Brandt’s discoveries.

However the medical staff is sure that Brandt is unreachable.  His devoted wife Ella continues to visit him, never giving up hope that he will recover. He shows no response to her.  To the doctors,
he alternates between long stretches of total apathy and short bursts of  violence.

Yet the baron believes he can cure Brandt’s insanity.  He can see only one way to solve this problem. Brandt must literally be kidnapped out of the hospital. With Karl’s help the baron is able
to do this.  Amazingly, he is also able to cure Brandt’s insanity through surgery.  

The surgery transferring Brandt’s brain turns out to be the
easy part 

But fate continues to plague Baron Frankenstein.  In getting free, Brandt has suffered a heart attack.  The baron knows Brandt has only days to live. Frankenstein’s solution is grim but simple; he kills a respected surgeon, Dr. Richter, and places Brandt’s brain
in Richter’s body.

Again his gift for surgery serves the baron well.  And again fate betrays him; Brandt’s wife sees Frankenstein on the street, and believing she recognizes him, follows him home.

The baron greets her warmly, and deceives her with a brilliant mix of truth, lies, and omissions.  He admits he is Frankenstein, and explains that kidnapping her husband was necessary  to restore his sanity.  Then he tells her she may see her husband, though she may have trouble recognizing him, covered with bandages.  Doing this allows him not to tell her that her husband’s brain is now in Richter’s body.

Unable to speak yet, Brandt is able to communicate with hand movements.  In addition, he recognizes his wife’s voice and can tell her this. The baron’s plan is working to perfection.  He convinces Mrs. Brandt that her husband needs rest.   But she is welcome anytime to see him.  The minute she is gone, he turns to
Karl and says, “Pack.  We’re leaving.”

Frankenstein, Karl, Anna and Dr. Brandt (in Dr. Richter’s body) find refuge in a deserted estate.  In the next few minutes you start to realize: this is not Frankenstein’s story anymore.  It is Brandt’s story now; his desperate try at returning home, in every sense of the word.

Perhaps Brandt realizes right away that he and his wife can never regain what they have lost. He has access to all his former consciousness, but the wrong body; the old one is dead.  His wife will only see him as another face, hear him as another voice.

And if she could ever accept him this way, it is too late now.   She has been shocked, traumatized too many times.  Already she has lived through his plunge into insanity, followed by years in the hospital. Years he was unable to even give her a smile of recognition.  The kidnapping.  Her joy at the baron telling her, her husband has returned and is sane now.  Then both her husband and the baron disappearing.

And the final stab, the police showing her, her dead husband’s body. A brilliant, resourceful man, Brandt must realize too that Baron Frankenstein will never leave them in peace again.The baron is a force of nature, dead set on finding out Brandt’s conclusions.  At the risk of stretching things a little, Frankenstein reminds me of Hannibal Lecter—he never stops coming at you.

Brandt escapes from the baron and heads straighthome.  Already he can sense just how poor the odds are
that he and his wife can start a second life together.  Life
has hurt her too much for her to accept him.  Second,
Frankenstein will stop at nothing to get to his (Brandt’s)
research conclusions. The baron would even kill Ella; her
life means nothing to him.

Brandt gets home.  He knows how much he needs to
do before Frankenstein gets there.  Time is precious beyond belief.  He yearns to speak to Ella after so long.
Yet he realizes full well how difficult it will be; to explain all that’s happened.  The music is poignant as he stands there a moment, watching her as she sleeps, but afraid to wake her.

The best he can do is leave her a note, hope she reads it next morning, and speak to her then.

Next day he is there when she wakes. Ella reacts with even more pain than Brandt expected. Perhaps he never realized that after his disappearance, his wife was told he was dead.

He can only try to explain (in another man’s voice) all that has taken place.  He quickly realizes that she cannot take all this in.  Life has already dealt her one too many grim surprises.

He speaks to her from behind a screen, afraid of the added shock of her seeing him.  When Ella finally does,  she faints.  She regains consciousness but the couple is past the point of ever communicating:

“Don’t touch me.”

“I wouldn’t harm you, Ella.  I’m your husband.”

“You’re not anything….human.”

Veteran director, Terence Fisher described this movie as the love story he had wanted to create. He ultimately succeeded… although of course it is a tragic one.  Ella is faithful to her husband’s memory for years, while his mind was imprisoned.  And when he finally can return, he can’t reach Ella.

Give credit too, to a powerful script from Bert Batt, an assistant director who was never able to sell another screenplay.  And to Fisher, for a unique, powerful love story, taking place under bizarre circumstances.

Peter Cushing as always, is excellent as the baron.  Maxine Audley is effective too, in the difficult role of Ella Brandt.  And Freddie Jones, so powerful as the cruel carnival owner in The Elephant Man, has probably never been better as the tormented
Brandt/Richter.

     The Revenge of Frankenstein was the second of seven movies that Hammer Studios produced featuring Baron Frankenstein and his many creations.  Six of them starred the remarkable Peter Cushing as the baron.  The baron turned out to be one of the most memorable characters not only in Hammer history but in movie history.  Revenge shows you many of his multiple facets, his contradictions as a human.

   The Curse of Frankenstein, the first of the series, was a major money-maker in Britain, the USA, and in several other countries.  The money it earned gave Hammer a great deal of freedom to explore their vision. This was especially true for one director, Terence Fisher, previously unknown except in Britain.

   In general, Curse got terrible reviews from movie critics, who were horrified, scornful, contemptuous.  Looking back, this is no big surprise. Horror movies, like rock and roll and comic books, were treated like an embarrassment by the mainstream; as if they
deserved no place in culture.  Probably the most appropriate word for their status would be “marginalized.”

   Remember too, that in 1956 people were a lot more frightened by other things.  Atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just 11 years before.  Not only the USA but the Soviet Union too, now had nuclear capability.  Movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them!  had a strong emotional pull on
audiences frightened about bombs being tested, possibly used in
war.  A wave of “giant” movies followed: giant wasps, grasshoppers, a praying mantis, spiders, a scorpion, a Gila
monster, even crabs and lots lots more.  Never had Frankenstein or Dracula seemed so irrelevant.

   But Hammer had the insight to realize that they had something worth sticking with, in the character of Baron Frankenstein.  His contradictions kept you from judging him guilty—just when you were sure he had committed the unforgivable, he had the capability to make you change your mind…or at least reserve your judgment.  You never doubted his superior intelligence or his skills as a doctor. Often you admired his lack of pretense, his no-bullshit
attitude that few characters around him shared.

   Yet none of that could blind you to his arrogance, his self-centered motives.  He was more than willing to use people, then throw them away with no regret.  He viewed his personal success as more important than the lives of the unenlightened.  And for the baron, “the unenlightened “was a group that included practically everyone.

   The Curse of Frankenstein ends with the baron checkmated, condemned to death for the killing his monster did.  Revenge picks up the story soon afterward, with him awaiting execution.  But you notice a new character along with the priest and the executioner.  A man with a paralyzed, contorted arm and leg but something in his expression revealing native intelligence and calm under stress.  This is Karl, a man the Baron has gotten to know well in prison.  Karl’s eyes meet those of the executioner; you hear sounds of a struggle.  Soon afterward, you find the baron healthy and free.

   Months later, the baron, now calling himself Dr. Stein has re-invented himself, far better than anyone could have imagined.  Not only has he become the most respected (and best-paid) doctor in his town, he has established a clinic for the poor which allows him to cover a multitude of sins.  The charity work makes him a teflon man; it is impossible to criticize a humanitarian like Stein.  Other doctors in town are jealous of his money and reputation, but have no way to bring him down.

   The truth is far more ambiguous.  Though Dr. Stein is dedicated to his moneyless patients, these same patients serve as organ banks for the new creation he intends to show the world.  He dreams of the glory that awaits him for his achievement.  But he is obsessed too, with all who have condemned him in the past.  Almost as important as the admiration of fellow scientists is the fantasy of shoving his creation in the faces of everyone who have ever called him arrogant, crazy, or blasphemous.  “I will
have my revenge,” he predicts.

   Karl has dreams too.  For long stretches of
Revenge, they overshadow Dr. Stein’s plans and
schemes.  Karl is someone you relate to—you feel for him
a lot.

     Not that the idea of putting someone’s brain in a new body was anything original.  This theme was used several times in the Universal Frankenstein series of the 30’s and 40’s. But I cannot recall any scene from Universal with the power of this one in Revenge: the contorted Karl looks upward, longingly, at the body he dreams of inhabiting. It’s not a long scene, but you find it sticks in your consciousness.

The body Karl dreams of inhabiting

     Anyone who has ever felt a dislike or hatred about the way they look can understand what is in Karl’s heart.  You find this theme in
The Glass Menagerie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mask, the Ray Bradbury short story The Dwarf, even the Springsteen song Dancing in the Dark (“I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.”) and countless others.

   To Stein, his plan seems simple enough: remove Karl’s brain, place it into the new body he has constructed, wait for Karl to recover from surgery, and receive his due credit from the world’s scientific community.  But outside forces will take this quest in a different, horrible direction.  It is as if the world means to stop him cold.  As brilliant as Stein is, he is helpless to control all the variables in his complicated world.

   Margaret, a beautiful woman of much wealth, insists on volunteering at Stein’s clinic.  Stein, afraid of alienating her powerful father, allows her to do this, within his limits.

   But Margaret’s presence sets off a deadly chain-reaction.  A sneaky, manipulating servant at the clinic (Richard Wordsworth, so powerful in Curse of the Werewolf) tries to impress her.  He tells her Stein is doing surgery in secret on clinic patients, and shows Karl to her, in his new body.  To complicate things more:  Stein’s assistant, Dr. Kleve, talks to Karl about how famous he (Karl) will be as a result of Stein’s scientific triumph.

   Karl had met Margaret once before, in the days when he thought of himself a cripple and nothing more. Immediately he felt a strong infatuation.  Now, the chance he has for a real relationship blinds him to every other possibility.  He is genuinely afraid that Stein will use him, like a personal trophy, in the victory celebration for his
achievements.  A basically shy man, Karl has no desire to show off his new body (“I’ve been stared at all my life.“)

Karl–His surgery goes according to plan–but complications he
never planned on

     Without much advance warning, Stein finds everything he worked for slipping away.  You feel his disappointment, then your own guilt for feeling that disappointment.  But the real loser is Karl, who kept his end of the bargain (saving Frankenstein/Stein from the executioner) and finds that his new body fails him
painfully.

The aristocrats’ world abruptly stunned; Karl’s plea for help
exposes Frankenstein

     It’s not a surprise that the Baron’s failures make him more bitter as he ages.Frankenstein Must be Destroyed and
Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell show him as meaner, less caring, even more of a user.  But part of us somehow continues to root for him.  At least one critic has written about the scene in Psycho where Norman waits desperately for Marian’s car to sink into the swamp.  Suddenly there we are, like Norman hoping that it sinks too.  At its best, Hammer’s Frankenstein series has a similar effect.

      How can our search for love, and a violent
outcome, be chained together so intensely?  

     How many of us can remember and regret,
hurtful things we’ve said to the person we love most?  

     Why do Frankenstein and
Bride of Frankenstein move us, sometimes to
tears?

     Probably because we feel two enormous forces
at war inside ourselves: 

     First, our search for love; someone we can
love, someone to love us.

     Second, our inner beast—trampling over our
loved one, and over ourselves.

     At one time or another, how many of us have
wished we could take out a knife and physically cut
out the beast in ourselves?

     The credit sequence of
Curse of the Werewolf achieves something rare,
especially in 1960.   It shows you the
beast—crying  actual tears.   He looks back on his life
and realizes what might have been.  His story will
spatter you, shower you with a mix of tears and blood.

     Curse is basically a story of
good and evil.  Its director, Terence Fisher was not
interested much in current psychology, for example: cycles of
abuse, dysfunctional families,
subconscious motivations.  (Although you can watch the
movie on that level, and get plenty of insights.)

     Fisher wanted more to tell a story about an
evil legacy; how so much evil can find its focus on one truly
gentle man, Leon.

     To understand Leon’s heritage, you need to
know the story of the Marquis’ wedding day.  A beggar
(Richard Wordsworth) enters a small town and hears bells
announcing a wedding.  But no one he meets feels any joy
for the Marquis;  a cruel man who abuses his power.  For
some reason the villagers tell the beggar to go to the
Marquis’ castle if he is looking for food.

     When the beggar reaches the castle, the
wedding feast is in full swing.  Right away the
doorman warns him, “Go away before he sees you.”  He
knows the Marquis; too much drinking is about to turn the
celebration ugly.  

     The Marquis does his best to turn the beggar
into a cruel joke, offering him to his bride as “her pet,”making
him dance for food but giving him only wine first.   Then
throwing food to him like a dog.

     As the Marquis and the bride get up to leave,
the beggar offers the mildest of off-color remarks. 
For this, the Marquis imprisons him in the castle dungeon.

     The narrator tells you the beggar was
forgotten.   But “forgotten” only hints at what he suffered.
 He loses his freedom, and all that goes with it: 
laughter, conversation, the chance of love, the sight of a
beautiful sunset, a road to walk on.   Everything is lost to
him but the smile of a little mute girl who feeds him scraps.

     Years pass.  The Marquis’ wife dies.
  The little girl grows into a beautiful
woman.  The beggar is still forgotten.  The
Marquis looks just like the monster he is inside. When he
tries to drag the serving woman into his bed, she bites his
hand.  The Marquis orders his men to throw her into
the dungeon with the old beggar.

     The horror of his imprisonment has turned the
beggar into a monster too.  All hefeels for the
serving woman is lust.  He rapes her, but she stabs him
to death the first chance she gets.   She is brought
back to the Marquis who is sure she has learned her
lesson.  He is wrong.  She stabs him to death too,
then runs away.

     Sometime later, the serving woman (you never
find out her name) is found, near death.  The man who
saves her, Don Alfredo, and his servant, Teresa are clearly two
compassionate people.  The nameless woman is pregnant
and dies giving birth to a son, Leon.

    Even before Leon is born, you sense the battle
beginning for his soul.  On one side his savage father,
and the man who brought out the beast in him, the Marquis. 
On the opposite side, Don Alfredo,Teresa, and the village priest.
 

     Teresa is afraid that Leon will be born on
Christmas Day, a traditional omen of misfortune.  She
hires a folk-healer who tries her best to prevent this.
  But she is unsuccessful.  The day Leon is baptized
the sky suddenly turns dark, and the water in the font begins
to boil.

    Leon grows into a goodhearted, sensitive boy. 
He is too young to explain hiscomplicated, opposing impulses
but they’re tragically clear.  Leon describes his only
experience with hunting to Don Alfredo.  

    He shot a squirrel, and seeing it dead, tried to
kiss it back to life.  But he tasted blood for the
first time, and has loved the taste ever since.  When
the moon turns full, goats outside the village begin to turn
up dead, their throats ripped out.  Leon’s kitten dies the
same way.  

   Don Alfredo and Teresa find a trail of evidence
leading back to Leon.  They decide the only answer is to
fit Leon’s windows with metal bars.  Their fears are correct,
but the bars do the job.  The next scene is the most
terrifying in the movie.  Leon, his face contorted
with animal lust, grips the bars and struggles against them,
shaking insanely. Justin Walters, the young
actor playing Leon is superb here.  Terence Fisher’s
direction is as usual, excellent.   But I don’t want to
forget the script too.  Anthony Hinds was a high-level
executive at Hammer Films during their most creative period.
  He wrote several fair-to-average screenplays and a few very
good ones; probably he came up with his all-time best in
Curse.

More than 45 minutes pass before you meet the adult Leon (Oliver
Reed), venturing out for the first time.  Don Alfredo
and Teresa understood that they can only protect him for so
long.  Leon has the same gentle, caring nature, but he’ll
soon find that the outside world is not a safe place. 
Most people he meets are not as evil as the Marquis or as kind as
Don Alfredo.  But they are people trapped by tradition
and class boundaries.   Closed-minded people, knowing only
what they were brought up with. 

   The winery owner who hires Leon refuses to shake his
hand; that is a privilege saved for fellow aristocrats. 
All he cares about are his business, his finances, and a suitable
match for his daughter, Christina.  Christina’s fiancé
is a greedy man with no real feelings.  Only Christina has
the heart and the insight to see what is inside Leon. 
Soon, they are in love.

   A great deal has been written already about the way
Fisher sees the world.  Fisher does not view it as
an evil place.   Much of the time, people with true
faith can overcome evil.  But the world can be uncaring,
a constant struggle for someone like Leon.  To
Christina’s father, Leon is just another peasant.  End
of discussion.  

   Sadder still, Christina’s love is able to save Leon
for a while.  With the moon full and the curse at
work, Leon spends an entire night with his head in
Christina’s lap, immune to the werewolf.  But
stronger forces soon keep them apart.

   Many critics have pointed out how little time the
werewolf is onscreen.  But what you do see is effective;
Roy Ashton’s excellent make-up lets you see Leon’s agony and
anger.  This is not a beast who takes pleasure in
killing.  On the contrary, he is screaming in pain.  
       Leon–beginning to transform

You don’t know the adult Leon in detail, but you do know he is the
same good-hearted man he was a child.  He desperately
wants to do the right thing. 

    Work hard, learn a trade, save his money, read all
he can. Most of all, marry Christina.  The thought of
spending his life chained up in a monastery makes
himfurious.  Christina’s love is his only path to
salvation and he knows it.  When he realizes her father means
to keep them apart, Leon wants only death.

    It is the characters and their struggle against fate
that make this movie so powerful. 

    You will most likely remember Leon’s pain and
yearning more vividly than the killing he does.  Oliver
Reed (Women in Love, The Devils, The Brood, Gladiator) is powerful as the adult Leon.  Anthony Dawson as the
degenerate Marquis is also excellent.  His scenes as an old
man are some of the scariest in the movie.The beast–screaming in pain