Persuasive Essay On Frankenstein

Over one hundred years after a young Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein in 1818, a relatively small Hollywood Studio, Universal Pictures, brought Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his monster (Boris Karloff) to the big screen in a film adaption of the same name. When it hit theaters on November 21, 1931, Frankenstein immediately succeeded as a box office hit, launching a franchise which eventually grossed over twelve million dollars (IMDb). Even today, the image of Frankenstein’s monster from this film (hereafter simply referred to as the Monster) appears every Halloween. But Frankenstein was no cinematic masterpieces as it was riddled with technical problems common in early sound films. So why was Frankenstein able to succeed in defining
Mordaunt Hall wrote in a review for the New York Times just a few weeks after Frankenstein’s release that “Colin Clive as the doctor and Boris Karloff as the monster give tremendous performances. No matter what you think of the picture, you can take nothing from these players for the performances they have turned in. They are magnificent.” However, Karloff’s iconic portrayal almost never happened. Before James Whale came aboard as director, another director, French expressionist filmmaker Robert Florey, had enlisted Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi – Lugosi had played the titular character in Universal’s first horror film, Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) – to play the Monster. In the end both Florey and Lugosi left the project, Lugosi refusing the part when he realized the Monster did not speak in the film because he “was a star in [his] country and [would] not be a scarecrow over here.” Once Whale was in place to direct, he met Boris Karloff, an unknown actor at the time, in a lunch room and asked him over for coffee. When Whale asked Karloff to do a screen test for the Monster, Karloff recalled in a 1963 interview he was “delighted,” even though he thought “well that doesn’t speak very well of my nice straight makeup and my good suit,” (Boris Karloff Talks Frankenstein). A few
All the Monster wanted was to live. In Whale’s Frankenstein the Monster was just a few days old, a child really, when he killed three people, who could not speak and had never seen anything but cruelty until he met little Maria. In fact, two of the people he killed incited the conflicts. Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye), antagonized him, poking and prodding at him with a flaming torch in his hand. The Monster only attacked Frankenstein’s college professor, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), in self-defense when the professor tried to kill the Monster. On a similar note, when he accidentally killed Little Maria (Marilyn Harris) by tossing the child into a lake, he was only mimicking how she tossed flowers into the water after she asked him to play with her. And then he even leaves to go seek help when she cannot swim. For having existed only a few days, he certainly has noble intentions. Even on set Karloff’s own kindness radiated through the Monster makeup. When seven-year-old Marilyn Harris met Karloff in full makeup and costume to the film the lake scene, she ran up to him and asked “May I ride with you?” to which Karloff replied “Would you, darling?” (The Frankenstein Files: How Hollywood Made a