The Curse of Frankenstein ***** (1957, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Valerie Gaunt) – Classic Movie Review 458

Director Terence Fisher’s 1957 trailblazing Hammer Films studios Gothic horror movie The Curse of Frankenstein is told in flashback as Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) awaits execution for the murder of his maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt). It was a worldwide hit and established Hammer horror as a new distinctive brand of Gothic cinema, two new stars in Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, six sequels and new versions of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959).

Frankenstein re-animates a dog, and then sets about constructing a man using various collected body parts, including the hands of a pianist and the brain of a renowned scholar. He brings the Creature to life, but unfortunately he doesn’t behave as the baron intended.

Cheaply made (£65,000), the film enjoyed an enormous success that equally re-animated the horror genre. The big daddy of all the shudders to come from Hammer is a still eye-catching, gripping and ghoulish experience, confidently and lustily done. It was considered very scary and gory at least back in its day, but obviously times have changed a bit.

It is extremely stylishly played by Peter Cushing as a grave and commanding Baron and by Christopher Lee, who is excellent as the monster but grew to hate the straightjacket his Creature role kept him in for some many years. In spite of all the great work since, it is still the role he will always be remembered for.

The two oft-paired stars met for the first time on the set of this film, though they had both been in the same films, Hamlet (1948) and Moulin Rouge (1952), and they became good friends. Lee recalls in his autobiography his first meeting with Cushing. Lee stormed into Cushing’s dressing room and shouted angrily: ‘I haven’t got any lines!’ Cushing replied: ‘Count yourself lucky, dear boy, I’ve read the script!’

When the 6′ 5″ Lee arrived at a casting session for the film, his first for Hammer, he said ‘they asked me if I wanted the part, I said yes and that was that’. He commented: ‘I was asked to play the creature chiefly because of my size and height which had effectively kept me out of many pictures I might have appeared in during the preceding ten years.’

They appeared in a total of 24 films. Lee said of Cushing: ‘He really was the most gentle and generous of men.’ Incidentally, Lee and his wife were good friends with the 1931 Frankenstein monster Boris Karloff and his wife through the coincidence of living next door to each other in England. Soon, Lee co-starred with Karloff in Corridors of Blood (1958).

Loosely based on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein is an unofficial remake of the 1931 Universal Studios classic horror movie Frankenstein. But Universal Pictures threatened a lawsuit if Hammer copied any elements from their classic version.

So Hammer’s makeup artist Philip Leakey was not allowed to use the copyright 1931 designs, but he went back to the novel and came up with a design that makes Lee’s excellently evil monster look more like the Shelley original than Boris Karloff’s monster. Leakey made the final design the day before shooting began. Jimmy Sangster’s script had to be revised several times to avoid repeating any elements from the Universal series.

It made history as Hammer Studios’ first colour horror film (in Eastmancolor), following its success with the black and white 1955 sci-fi/horror hybrid The Quatermass Xperiment and the 1957 The Abominable Snowman, with trailblazing red blood, eyeballs in jars and corpses dissolving in acid, though of course it still all looks quite tame today. Jack Asher’s cinematography, James Bernard’s score and Bernard Robinson’s production designs are a winning combination, and all help to combine to create a stylish Gothic movie.

It starts: ‘More than a hundred years ago, in a mountain village in Switzerland, lived a man whose strange experiments with the dead have since become legend. The legend is still told with horror the world over. It is the legend of The Curse of Frankenstein.’ Though actually it is not a legend, but loosely based on the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. Sangster said he had not seen any of Universal’s Frankenstein films, but just adapted the book ‘the way I saw it’, saying his awareness of production costs and the £65,000 budget made him not write scenes involving villagers storming the castle typically seen in the Universal horror films ‘because we couldn’t afford it’.

Filming started on 19 November 1956 at Bray Studios with a scene showing Baron Frankenstein cutting down a highwayman from a wayside gibbet.

The BBFC required cuts to the scene where a man’s head is severed by the Baron and dissolved in acid. The severing was cut to a brief shot and no footage survives of the acid scene.

The film premiered in London on 2 May 1957 at Warner cinema in Leicester Square with an X certificate from the BBFC censors, and then it went of UK general release on 20 May 1957 supported by Woman of Rome. It was a sensational hit, and grossed more than 70 times its cost on its first cinema release, earning $1.9 million in the UK.

The plot was reworked as The Horror of Frankenstein in 1970. Six sequels followed, beginning with The Revenge of Frankenstein in 1958, followed by The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). All star Peter Cushing except for The Horror of Frankenstein with Ralph Bates.

The series saw actors other than Lee play the monster, including Michael Gwynn in The Revenge of Frankenstein, Kiwi Kingston in The Evil of Frankenstein, Susan Denberg in Frankenstein Created Woman, Freddie Jones in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, and David Prowse in The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.

Court’s daughter Sally Walsh plays her character as a young child. ‘She hated it,’ Court said, ‘hated being in it.’ Court died on April 15 2008, aged 82.

Supposedly, Robert Urquhart was so disgusted by the film at the premiere that he stormed out of the cinema, hating it so much he never made another horror film or worked for Hammer again. Distinguished British film critic Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times did not like it either, writing that such films left her unable to ‘defend the cinema against the charge that it debases’.

The cast are Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, Melvyn Hayes as Young Victor, Robert Urquhart as Paul Krempe, Hazel Court as Frankenstein’s beautiful wife Elizabeth, Sally Walsh as Young Elizabeth, Christopher Lee as The Creature, Valerie Gaunt as the maid Justine, Noel Hood as Aunt Sophia, Paul Hardtmuth as Professor Bernstein, Fred Johnson as Grandpa, Alex Gallier as Priest, Claude Kingston as Little Boy, Michael Mulcaster as Warder, Andrew Leigh as Burgomaster, Ann Blake as Wife, Middleton Woods as Lecturer and Raymond Ray as Uncle.

Patrick Troughton had a brief role as a mortuary attendant but his scenes were cut.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 458

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