Tag Archives: Film

Actor Clement Von Franckenstein Dies

Clement von Franckenstein Actor HeadshotA sad headline. Clement von Franckenstein was a British character actor who appeared in a number of movies in smaller roles, and guest spots in television. His most notable recent appearance was as the French President in The American President with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. He also had parts in Lionheart with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Death Becomes Her with Meryl Streep, and in Hail Caesar! with George Clooney, playing Sestimus Amydias. He played George R.R. Martin the author of the Game of Thrones source books in the Bizardvaark TV series, and noted himself his connection to Frankenstein lore for his role as an extra in Young Frankenstein in his early days as “Villager Screaming through Bars”. For most of his acting days he went by the name Clement St George. He was listed in People Magazine in 2001 as one of “America’s Top 50 Bachelors” and he remained so.

I’m not writing this as an obituary, but because I had met him only just recently at a social event and we had a discussion about his name and its connection to Mary Shelley. In his family legend he liked to say that she borrowed the name for her book and had to change the spelling for legal reasons, or perhaps he had just heard that from somewhere. The name connection appears as a note in most of the bios being written about him. He was a charming fellow and often played urbane diplomatic types in later films.

His full name was Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein, and he was the son of Sir George Franckenstein, an Austrian diplomat who served as Ambassador to the Court of St James until the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938, when he moved permanently to Britain. He apparently did not know his family all that well. His father and mother died in plane crash near Frankfurt, Germany in 1953 when he was nine years old and he was raised by family friends. He attended Eton College and served as a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys in the Middle East and Germany. He was a singer with a baritone voice and studied opera before focusing on acting.

The question of Mary Shelley’s taking the name for her book and main character from knowledge of a German/Austrian noble family and having to change the spelling is probably unlikely, but there is a connection. In her lifetime Mary Shelley never told where the name of Frankenstein came from. It is most likely to have come from the castle along the Rhine River from her elopement trip with Percy and Claire in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein Castle Tower in Darmstadt

The Franckenstein (Frankenstein) family began as von Breuberg in 1200 when Konrad I built Breuberg Castle in the Odenwald forest between Darmstadt and Aschaffenburg, when they were called Breubergs. His son Konrad II, built another castle on the other side of Darmstadt around 1245, the one which still stands as a ruin, called Frankenstein. There likely was an earlier medieval fortification there with the name, as it means “stone fort of the Franks” and quite literally, any stone redoubt in the region along the Rhine from the dark ages where the Franks held sway may have been called a “frankenstein”, but the family took the name from it as Freiherr Von and Zu Frankenstein.

The Free Lordship of Frankenstein was a designation in Germany meaning it was an independent land only under the jurisdiction of the German Holy Roman Emperor. The family had land holdings in Nieder-Beerbach, Darmstadt, Ockstadt, Wetterau and Hesse. German Emperor Frederick II died in 1250 and the German kingdom fell into division. Two hundred years later, during the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther in the 16th Century, the Frankenstein family sided with the Catholic Habsburg emperors and fought with the Protestant Landgrave of Hesse in the wars of the Schmalkaldic League.

The family sold their land holdings in Hesse to the Landgrave in 1662 and abandoned the castle. The title of Freiherr (Baron of the Empire) was formally granted to the family in 1670 by the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I. The family retired to lands in Franconia, distant from Hesse, and bought the Austrian Lordship of Thalheim Bei Wels just across the current German border in the 1800s. Family lines continue in Germany, Austria and England and those that came to America, including Clement.

Could the family have complained about the connection of the name to the horrific events in Mary Shelley’s novel? Is that why Mary never said the name came from a castle on the Rhine? The libel laws in England relating to a foreign family in 1818 would be limited and the changing of one letter would not be much of a disguise. Variation in spelling of names, especially German ones was very common.

See Castles of Germany

The Von and Zu Franckensteins of Austria did not make an appearance in England until 1920, so only the European branch of the family could have heard of it, once it gained international notoriety. In the novel the family is Swiss and Italian in origin, so no formal connection to Germany or Austria. Was this a deliberate shift, or just that the main story details came from her visits to Switzerland.

Could she have known the family origin of the castle name? She might have been told of it on a visit, but more likely interested in another Konrad, its later owner, who dabbled in alchemy, Konrad Dippel, who manufactured a product called Dippel’s Oil, made from boiled animal bones and who promised the Landrave of Hesse he could find the Elixir of Eternal Life and ultimately died from apparently trying it out on himself.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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All is True. I’m not so sure.

All is True Poster ImageKenneth Branagh stars in and directs an English movie about the later days in the life of William Shakespeare, from a screenplay by Ben Elton. The title is taken from an alternate title, or perhaps more an advertising slogan, for a production of the Life of Henry VIII offered at the Globe Theater, during which, according to the pre-titles a prop canon set the Thames bankside theatre ablaze, burning it to the ground, and with it the creative life of Shakespeare. The film begins with him galloping home to Stratford-Upon-Avon, to settle back into a quiet country life, haunted by the memory of his son, Hamnet, who reportedly died of plague in 1596 at the age of eleven.

The title of “all is true” seems to suggest that the film is making the argument against the controversies surrounding the authorship of the plays and poetry William Shakespeare. The film presents an engaging enough but fairly dramatically limited picture of the domestic home life of the renowned author, taking some sparse public records of his activities in Stratford and drawing a picture of life at home, with a Puritan son-in-law hoping for his fortune and wife long abandoned for his busy days in the London.

If this was the intent, I am unconvinced. The film does make a very clever argument for the oddity of bequeathing his “second best bed” in his will to his wife Anne Hathaway, but not all that much else. The film furthers an authorship controversy theme by postulating that Shakespeare doted on some poetry verses he believed written by his dead son, when his daughter eventually claims that she came up with them and her brother only wrote then down, because boys were taught to write.

This curiously intersects with some of the controversy or at least mystery, surrounding the anonymous publishing of Frankenstein, leading to questions of its authorship over the centuries, and thematically at the center of the recent biopic version of “Mary Shelley”. Kenneth Branagh directed “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” the movie that intended to hear closer to the novel than previous film versions, so that Branagh will be forever connected in search algorithms to Mary Shelley. Perhaps even how you found this article.

The arguments against the man from Stratford, son of a middle-class glove maker, who left a limited education to write of kings and foreign lands with such convincing authenticity, to return to life of middle-class modesty, has always been about where does writing inspiration come from. Some have argued that it was about class, but I have always held it is about experience. The writer of “All is True” was born in Australia, but he writes about Shakespeare because he went to a college in Stratford, and so was steeped in the lore of the town.

If you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, signs in the famed tourist town will warn you that only seven sites in town are officially connected to an historic William Shakespeare. What it doesn’t say is that none of them point to a creator of a library of plays and poems that have defined the English speaking world. The film posits that after the Globe burned down, Shakespeare decided he would never write again and spent his days in solitude digging a garden to honor is dead son, named Hamnet, so close to Hamlet it seems a misspelling by a grave marker mason. In seeming to attempt to answer where the inspiration and knowledge to produce his body of work came from, in the form a question asked by a young writer hopeful, like many a Comicon convention attendee might ask at an autograph signing, “how he did it”, Branagh as Shakespeare, answers dismissively of the earnest seeker of wisdom, that it was all from his imagination.

Mark Twain, who notoriously offered his opinion on many things, especially authorship, a subject he felt close to, was a non-believer in the man from Stratford. Twain complained of his friend and companion author, Bret Harte, that the dialogue of his pioneer west characters had the ring of an author who wrote of people he observed, rather than a life he lived, though the writing did come from his travels in the worlds of his stories. Twain traveled and wrote of his travels, but his most genius books came from his earliest days of personal experience and drawn on people he knew well.

In the present worlds of film and television, aspiring writers are told to “write what you know”. An entire system of hiring writers to work in writers rooms, based not on the alien worlds they can imagine but the authenticity of the lives they’ve experienced are what counts. Writing a courtroom show, hire a former lawyer, a spy show, a former spy. Maybe add some imagination.

Does this relate to the teeming theatre world of the Elizabethan Age of the late 16th Century? Could a young man of 19 from a small provincial town, seeking a stage acting career, sit down in some inexpensive hovel in London and invent entirely from his own imagination the accurate lives of royal households, details of foreign lands and indeed what was important to foreigners, setting his stories in Italy as mere convention, and produce accurate descriptions of the landscapes of Burgundy, France, cited from Lear by the Shelleys in their travels in the very landscape in the Secret Memoirs on Mary Shelley?

The puzzling question of Shakespeare has always redounded to idea that one man of ultimate genius created that incredible oeuvre of work of vast understanding of the wider world and laser grasp of the human heart and behavior. Whether candidate for authorship be the man from Stratford, DeVere or others, to dismiss the fact of the breadth of Shakespeare’s work as “I imagined it all”, seems at best a hopeful, yet hopelessly hollow, belief in miracles. And then to set it all aside in later life to retire with never a look back, beyond a casual visit with an old theater pal, entirely unsatisfying.

Mary Shelley didn’t just imagine a monster from a waking dream. She took the sum of experiences from her youthful life, her many travels and the complex people she knew and lived with and formed them with some research into one rich and imaginative enduring work. Mark Twain wrote often and the best from his experiences growing up on the Mississippi River in frontier Missouri.

Shakespearian scholars point to historic events which they site to attempt to place the date of his 37 or so credited plays. They count on public notices at the time which seem to indicate an upstart playwright, but relating as much to an actor, but almost no identifiable element that can point to an author’s inspiration or interest from the life of a provincial glove maker’s son who found his way to London, while swaths of elements in the plays and characters can be tied to the lives and experiences lived by others. Maybe Shakespeare was a really good listener and someone offered him visiting privileges to their private library, but to accept that all the Shakespearian canonical lore is true, requires an even broader imagination.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Mary Shelley gets to theaters in the U.S.

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the film version of the Frankenstein author’s story, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley arrives at theaters in America on May 25th, 2018, from IFC Films. The film which we’ve been following from its inception a few years ago under the title “A Storm in the Stars”, to its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival has taken the long road of an independent film production to the big screen,  released in the UK in 2017.

The movie, an Irish production, filmed on location in Dublin standing in for London, and in Luxemburg for the Geneva Villa Diodati scenes tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing, finding inspiration when she meets the dreamy Percy Shelley. Mary soon becomes pregnant with his child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and visit Lord Byron and John Polidori at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva, where the stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein monster story. Then, Mary struggles to find a publisher and to get the credit for her creation.

The film also stars Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane. The original script was by Emma Jenson with Al Mansour as additional writing. Ruth Coad and Amy Baer produced.

Reviews for the film have been mixed. To sample a few – Fanning gives an earnest performance, though perhaps a little miscast, while Tom Sturrage as Byron chews the furniture, and Booth as Shelley pouts and broods, a traditional period biopic flavor trying hard to be modern. The film does make a mark for inclusion, written by a woman, directed by a woman, and produced by women, and adds a decided feminist cant to the story around whether Mary would get the credit for writing her story. Shelley comes off as a bit of a cad, not revealing he’s married until after they get involved, but in fact Mary went into the relationship with her eyes open and she had already met his wife. Though, he does arrive at a saving bit of honor in the perfunctory, tied-in-a-bow ending. Beautifully photographed by David Ungaro, with moody atmospheric production design by Paki Smith, the film is a little more intent on stating its theme, than illuminating the complex characters and relationships which make up this world. Still room for more.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

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Did Mary Shelley and Jane Austen ever meet?

Jane Austen and Mary ShelleyAn interesting question, as these two most prominent women authors who have survived in popularity to today were being published as contemporaries. There is no known record or mention of one another in their writings and they were not in the same public circles. But it is a tantalizing question anyway.

Mary Shelley recorded most of what she read in her diaries, and there is nothing regarding anything of Austen. She occasionally lists “read novel” without further comment, either having no effect on her, or not taking them seriously. Shelley’s recorded interest in reading tended much more to the classical and philosophical, than the popular. And they were almost polar opposites in life experience and artistic sensibility. Austen came from a country life and wrote of themes of obtaining a good marriage and keeping a good name, in a comedic tone. Mary Shelley spent her formative life in a city environment surrounded by radical philosophers and her work was intellectual and dark, with tragedy at its core.

Yet, there are intersections of commonalities. Mary Shelley wrote her famous work when she was eighteen years old and revised it over years. Jane Austen wrote the first drafts of her most prominent works when she was twenty to twenty-two and revised them over years.

Austen began her first novels in the form of a series of letters. Shelley begins Frankenstein as a series of letters. Austen’s parents were from Bath and environs, and she lived there for several years. Mary Shelley’s parents were from Bath and she lived there for several months.

Okay, these are curious intersections, more having to do with the nature of women authors in their times. Could they ever have been in the same society? Austen lived in Bath from 1800 to 1809; Shelley wasn’t a resident until 1816.

Austen was being published in her lifetime beginning in 1811 until 1816. The first publishing of Frankenstein was in March 1818, several months after Austen had died on July 18, 1817. But yet, there are some connections where, if not encountering in person, they could have been aware of one another. Beginning with that summer trip of 1814 to France and Switzerland, Mary’s diaries made a fairly precise record of what she read daily, even in the circumstances of the greatest tragedies, but what she was reading before that is not detailed, and she was an ardent reader.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility first appeared in October 1811, published by Thomas Egerton. It had favorable reviews and the novel became fashionable among the young aristocratic class and the first edition sold out. And like Mary Shelley, it was first published anonymously. Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813, was widely advertised, and sold well. Mary Shelley was the daughter of publishers and surrounded by writers. She was beginning her early attempts at writing at least by 1812. Surely she must have been aware of a successful authoress, though her peers may have looked down on work like Austen’s. The kind of societal focus on marriage central to her stories was the philosophical opposite of Mary’s father’s ideas. Even Austen’s most formative works included a satirical sendup of the kind of historical biography William Godwin was writing, though he would not have seen it. While William Godwin himself did read an Austen work, mentioned by him well after her death.

After Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park came out in May of 1814, at about the time Mary and Percy Shelley were becoming involved and her step-sister Jane (Claire) was taking an avid interest in the fashions of the time. Austen’s third novel was not-so-well reviewed but sold out. Austen’s writings became popular enough that the Prince Regent was counted as a fan and reportedly kept a set of her novels at his residences. In mid-1815, Jane Austen changed publishers from Thomas Egerton to John Murray for her anticipated new novel Emma.

Austen had occasion to come to London in November of 1815, when the prince’s librarian, the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, invited her to visit Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence, and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming novel Emma to the Prince. Austen resided at 23 Hans Place in Knightsbridge while in London corresponding with Murray regarding a special limited edition of Emma dedicated to His Royal Highness, to be issued before public distribution of the novel.

Whether she visited the publisher while in London is not recorded, but Murray was well known for his salons of prominent writers gathering for meetings at his 50 Albemarle Street address in Mayfair. It was nearly the epicenter of the London publishing world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friend of the Godwins and the Shelleys, was also being published by John Murray II, and William Godwin had many dealings with him as a writer and publishing competitor.

John Murray was the publisher of Lord Byron. The Shelleys became good friends with Bryon the summer of 1816 and on their return to England from Switzerland, Shelley took on the task of supervising the publishing of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Third Canto with Murray. Austen had completed a draft of Persuasion (The Elliots) in July of 1816 with the intention of publishing with Murray but was having financial difficulties with the failure of her brother Henry’s bank in March of 1816.

Austen was dealing with John Murray by correspondence while her brother may have been the conduit of manuscripts, though she very likely did meet the publisher in person, at least enough to write in a letter to her sister Cassandra in October of 1816, “He is a rogue of course, but a civil one.” This was at the same time Shelley was complaining to Murray that he had not been dealing appropriately with the proofs of Childe Harold which Byron had entrusted to him and may have visited Murray that October in London while he was staying in Marlow and meeting with Leigh Hunt.

In 1818, Bryon needed money. His library was valued at £450 and included in the inventory was a 1st edition of Emma, probably given to him by Murray, their common publisher. He was permanently traveling away from England by that time, but published in December of 1815, Bryon would possibly have been aware of it when spending time with the Shelleys in Geneva. And even though it was published with no author name, Murray would possibly have commented privately on the author’s identity to his other client. So, would Lord Byron have discussed the work of a female author with Mary Godwin when she was aspiring to write, especially an author who’s themes on marriage were so antithetical to Mary’s family influences, while she herself was risking her reputation in an unmarried relationship with Shelley?

Austen’s health was failing in 1816. She completed two revision drafts of Persuasion by August of 1816. She began another work, Sanditon, but stopped writing in March of 1817. She died on July 18, 1817 in Winchester. Percy Shelley began submitting the draft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in note book form to publishers beginning in May of 1817, first offering it to Murray, then to Charles Ollier, both of whom declined to publish. Percy Shelley did not reveal at the time who the author was, only saying it was the work of a friend. It was finally accepted by George Lackington of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, printed in November of 1817 and formally published with anonymous author in March of 1818.

So, did Mary Shelley meet Jane Austen? It’s hard to prove a negative. Could she have been encouraged or inspired by the success of a woman author of her day like Jane Austen? She never mentioned it. Was Jane Austen familiar with Mary’s mother’s writing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, when Austen was 17? She never mentioned it.

William Godwin published his memoir about Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, when Jane Austen was at the height of her creative energy, writing about the fear of loss of reputation when one of the pre-eminent woman authors of the day found her reputation sent her into the dustbin by the resulting scandal of the baring of her affair with Gilbert Imlay and illegitimate birth of her daughter. There is some suggestion that an acquaintance of Jane Austen’s father was a friend of the Wollstonecraft family, and the salacious scandal of the daughter of the eminent author and radical philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a friend of the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron could not have escaped her. But she never mentioned it. After all, it was far from Austen’s country world of polite manners, and probably best not to mention it.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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200th Shelley Anniversary Film Fest at Wellesley College

In the past few years, mashups—like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, currently gobbling theaters—have meant classic works have undergone radical pop transformations at the hands of Hollywood. Wellesley College in Massachusetts is taking a decidedly more unique approach in its celluloid celebration of the 200th anniversary of one classic text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For the prestigious all-women’s college, Shelley embodies an artist who, despite a literary world hostile to women writers, produced one of our most enduring stories, one that continues to be re-interpreted by every generation.

The College’s popular movie series, Cinephile Sundays, is honoring Shelley herself, and by extension the iconic horror story of science gone awry, by screening several films on campus. Some films allude to Shelley’s life; others reflect on, in often invitingly oblique ways, her famous monster and the issues brought up by her novel. The films being screened are stitched together under a theme of “Exquisite Combinations,” bringing to life the ways Shelley and her work have gone on to inspire filmmakers. In this series of five very different films, Shelley’s Gothic 19th-century literary vision plays out in a 20th-century artform, creating new conversations and foregrounding the long shadow of her influence and life.

One of the most iconic offerings is a screening of the silent film Metropolis, on Sunday, Feb. 28th, accompanied by a rare live musical soundtrack. Not specifically taken from Frankenstein, but clearly inspired by it. This triumph of Weimar Germany filmmaking is about Maria, an artificial woman created in the lab in Metropolis, with music for the silent film performed by Alloy Orchestra.

The first film in the series is perhaps the most explicit in its connection to Shelley’s story. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) screens Sunday, Feb. 14. It is the sequel to the 1931 hit Frankenstein. It is widely seen as director James Whale’s masterpiece and is viewed as an icon in the genre of classic horror, delving closer to the themes of the actually novel than the original, with a cinematic appearance by Shelley herself, with Elsa Lancaster in dual roles.

The remaining films reflect widely different styles, take place around the globe, and have very different connections to Shelley and her work. The films include one on the persistent theme of man and machine (Paprika), another about the haunting effect the film Frankenstein has a little girl (El espiratu de la colmena), and lastly a film featuring another woman pioneer, Ada Lovelace, who calculated the first computer algorithm (Conceiving Ada). All films are screened in Wellesley’s Collins Cinema. Times and Dates.

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Victor Frankenstein Movie – Sewn of Borrowed Parts

It’s Alive – The Monster Arrives and Quickly Dies

victor_frankenstein_mcavoy_radcliffeReview – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.

There’s something about the opening with its rip off of the “movie” Sherlock Holmes style of stopping the action for a graphic representation of what the characters are sensing, with the music and graphic tone that almost immediate says “hey, I’ve seen this before”, from which it never quite recovers, like a patient with a fatal flaw that will ultimately kill it. The effect is abandoned for most of the movie until the end, when it reappears and you’re head is saying, “oh that’s what that was for”. The film story certainly has some inventive turns and tricks, but staggers unevenly between clever solemnity and buddy comedy. For purists, it has as much in common with the literary “Frankenstein” of Mary Shelley as did “Frankenstein’s Army” but the director, Paul McGuigan, stated on the publicity trail that the book of Frankenstein was boring, so might as well have at it. Victor Frankenstein offers at least one reference to his sewn together creature as “The Modern Prometheus”, so there, but all the rest is pretty much movie iconography references including one lame mispronunciation of the name as Fronkensteen, so you presumably get the Mel Brooks crowd. In fact, the whole Igor as hunchback assistant, mostly comes from the “Young Frankenstein” take. The club scene could have added a tap dance of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, but that was an opportunity missed.

Victor Frankenstein, neither a doctor, nor a baron, but a bright medical student gathering animal parts from zoos and in this case the circus, where he has cut of a lion’s paw, from some lion we have not seen, witness the circus hunchback perform a medical miracle to save the beautiful trapeze artist performing (without a net), who falls, breaking a collar bone. Frankenstein rescues the hunchback from a cage and in the escape through a clever bit with a mirror, a pursuer is killed. The two are sought for murder by an oh too clever police detective on his own crusade of God verses science.

Victor Frankenstein transforms the hunchback into a fine upstanding young man by draining the puss from a cyst on his back that has somehow also bent his body, straightening his posture with the brace, that also manages to transform a young man who has never left the circus since he was a small child him into an erudite charmer, given the name of Igor, who can now enter London society with the slightest notice, whose medical genius has come from some medical anatomy books, while a London hospital can’t seem to manage to properly medicate a patient with a broken bone.

Victor Frankenstein, who seems to have the skills of the most masterful surgeon of his age while still a student ignoring his studies, and a chiropractor to boot, claims his purpose is to improve mankind but has built a horrid animal monster from decaying flesh in the form of a sort of monstrous monkey that attacks the college theater when shocked into life with his special “Lazarus Fork”, which presumably a wealthy young toff is impressed enough by to be willing to murder to corner the technology market of bringing dead flesh to life.

The God thumping cop closes in on Victor Frankenstein’s London mansion laboratory, without a warrant, mind you, and the whole operation moves, rather like the second super expensive device from Contact, to another location, a remote castle in Scotland belonging to the rich kid, where the creation of a giant man with a heart to spare and extra lungs, turns into an epic failure, when Frankenstein finally realizes he can’t bring back his brother, whose death he feels responsible for in a childhood accident, to the living.

Frankenstein says he wants to create a sentient, intelligent being, but doesn’t seem to take the least precaution, when his animal experiment goes viciously wrong, but decides to proceed on Igor’s suggestion to build a powerful giant, without any thought at all to its mind and that it might have a bad temper being shocked to sudden life by a lightning bolt. The brain consideration only seems to come with some thought of a sequel (I doubt we will ever see). The creature when it comes to life, however briefly, seems to have an uncanny similarity to the monster as drawn for the Mr. Magoo cartoon version of the Frankenstein story, but where in the cartoon, the horrible creature spoke with the intelligence Frankenstein intended, here the monster just pretty muck breaks things before its two hearts become a pin cushion with anatomical directions. And the last line, “this is not life”, a slant riff on the old Colin Clive line “it’s alive” from the 1931 version, as Victor Frankenstein looks in the dead eyes of the botched monster he’s created, discovering that he has not made what he intended,  seems oddly apt for the effort as a whole.

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FRANKENSTEIN – FACES OF THE MONSTER

The 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s creation and publishing of her novel “Frankenstein, or, The New Prometheus” is soon upon us, both the origination in that summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva and the first publishing of the novel in 1818. In the book, the creation of a living being from the parts of the dead, brought back to life had a description of a gangly oversized being of horrid visage, which Victor Frankenstein said he intended to be beautiful, but somehow, didn’t come out right.

“How can I describe … the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! … His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips …” From this brief outline of horror has come a stream of imaginings in film and art to represent the horror of Mary Shelley’s idea.

Today, the image of the Frankenstein Monster is indelibly etched in our consciousness, but that image of a square, flat-topped head with scars and bolts in the neck have mostly come to us from the 1931 movie version make-up of Boris Karloff, created by Hollywood make-up artist, Jack Pierce. But there have been many iterations of what the creature of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments with life and death would look like. Here are a collection of some of the many faces of the monster…

Boris Karloff Frankenstein 1931

Frankenstein Charles Ogle 1910 Edison Silent Film

Robert DeNiro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994

The Famous Adventures of Mr Magoo 1965

Christopher Lee  Hammer Films 1957

The Munsters Fred Gwynne 1965

Young Frankenstein Peter Boyle 1974

1831 Book Edition Illustration

I Frankenstein Aaron Eckhart 2014

Benedict Cumberbatch Filmed Stage Production 2011

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A STORM IN THE STARS – A TEMPEST BY THE LAKE

Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley Film with Elle Fanning

“A Storm in the Stars” is an independent film in development for 2016.  Elle Fanning has been long announced to play Mary Shelley in the project, with Bel Powley to play step-sister Claire Clairmont. The project has been on development boards for about a year and gained traction with director Haifaa Al-Mansour signing on to direct the period re-telling of the love affair between poet Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, (then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) which resulted in the writing of Frankenstein. The script is by Regency Romance novelist Emma Jensen scripting her first full-length film, depicting the relationship between Mary and Percy when Claire moves in with them, and the drama surrounding the writing of the novel, said to be “a fresh take on the unconventional life of 18 year-old Mary Shelley and her tempestuous love affair with charismatic poet Percy Shelley, the notorious trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and the rocky road that made her into an icon”. No casting of Byron or others has yet been mentioned.

See A Storm In The Stars Film Shoots in Ireland Update

Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female director, who came on the scene with her critically acclaimed debut film about a girl trying to win a bicycle “Wadjda”, outed the project when she announced her attachment on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The film seems now firmly underway after getting a boost at the 2015 Cannes Film Market with England’s HanWay Films handling foreign sales and the addition of Douglas Booth to play Percy Bysshe Shelley. Booth played the son in the Paramount version of “Noah”. Production is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2015. There is no US distributor announced yet. UTA Independent Film Group put the project together for Gidden Media and Parallel Film, and will be representing North American rights to the film. Joanne Burstein and Rebecca Miller serve as Executive Producers. Douglas Booth, Al-Mansour, and Bel Powley are all represented by UTA, while Elle Fanning is repped by WME. UK Distributor Artificial Eye picked up the as yet to be made film at Cannes. In a competition between versions of monstrous inspiration, this project seems to be gaining traction over a competing film project “Mary Shelley’s Monster” with “Game of Thrones’ ” Sophie Turner announced .

Reports suggest this film story takes place in the period starting a year before the summer of 1816 until the publishing of the novel two years later in 1818, with the events surrounding the “Gothic” summer at Villa Diodati in Geneva, the well-known scary story competition, and the relationships before and following, when the Shelleys (they weren’t yet married until the end of 1816), were hounded by scandal and Claire joined them as a near permanent third-wheel. This is the period following the elopement of 1814 and some of the same relationships related in “Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics – The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelly” which depicts these characters as this extraordinary relationship was in its formation, and would appear in later volumes.

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VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN – THE MOVIE

Igor Finally Gets his Story Told!

Daniel Radcliffe James McAvoy Victor Frankenstein Movie

Daniel Radcliffe as Igor and James McAvoy as Victor Frankenstein on set

A big budget retelling of the Frankenstein story has finished shooting and will be showing in theaters  November 25th (in the US) from 20th Century Fox. The release date was recently pushed back from Halloween to Thanksgiving, switched with a Ridley Scott film, “Martian”. The project originated in 2011 and began filming at the end of 2013. The film stars James McAvoy as the titular Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Daniel Radcliffe as his assistant Igor, with Jessica Browne Findley from Downton Abbey as Lorelei. This version of the story from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus” takes a revisionist twist, telling the tale of obsession and hubris from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstein’s friend and assistant, there to observe his downfall. The movie was originally titled just “Frankenstein”, but in a crowded field of like projects in advance of the 200th Anniversary of the publishing in the novel in 1818, they went with a more specific Victor Frankenstein.

The story, (20th Century-Fox official synopsis) tells “when Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his trusted assistant Igor go too far in their noble attempts to aid humanity, Victor’s obsession turns to madness. He then unleashes his final creation — a monstrous figure that holds unimaginable terror for anyone its path”. Some photo images from the production have been released of the actors on the set, but the monster creation has yet to make an appearance. See Trailer

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel did not have an assistant character named Igor, and Victor Frankenstein was not really a doctor, but a student at Ingolstadt University. The idea of an Igor assistant first appeared in Universal’s “Son of Frankenstein” movie, with Bela Lugosi playing a character name Ygor, with a hunched back. Universal needed something for their other horror star to do in the Frankenstein series, and Bela went on to play the monster as well, later. Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” riffed off the assistant, now named “Igor” as a hunchback with a shifting hump, played hilariously by Marty Feldman, with his shifting eye to go with it.

I doubt there was any idea to give Daniel Radcliffe a humped back, and all images suggest a more urbane young gentleman, rather than an accented flunky, with the intent to give the age old, oft-told horror story the more recent “Sherlock Holmes” treatment, as a buddy movie of young idealistic scientist gone mad. Filming locations were all in the UK, and the characters suggest the heroes spend a good deal of time in the social club and theatrical world, between carousing and body parts hunting, so the German and Swiss settings of the novel appear changed to early 19th Century England. The filming locations included the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Manchester Town Hall and Albert Square in Manchester, Dunnottar Castle in Aberdeen and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire

The script for Victor Frankenstein was written by Max Landis who came to the fore with the high budget “found footage” effect film “Chronicle” and is directed by Scottish director Paul McGuigan, known for “Lucky Number Sleven” and “Wicker Park” but has mostly been directing television, notably the “Sherlock” series and “Devious Maids”. The Victor Frankenstein film also features actors Andrew Scott and Mark Gatiss from the “Sherlock” tv series, with Callum Turner, Freddie Fox and Louise Brealey in a large cast.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankensteiniana in 2015-2016

Frankenstein in books, movies and TV for 2015 and 2016 (Reprinted from Travelmode)

It is arguably the most famous single name in literature and in the cultural psyche of fantasy, representing the dark side of humanity, chills and horrors of many a kind. Frankenstein. And it is about get more familiar with a whole rash of new media projects in the works based, whether directly or very loosely on the name, characters and book written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley emerging in 2015 and 2016, in advance of the 200th Anniversary(s). Upcoming projects encompass the themes and plot of the Frankenstein story as well as the lives of the creator and her relationship circle.

Here are some of the new iterations to come.

Daniael Radcliffe on Set of Victor Frankenstein“Victor Frankenstein” a film in production due in 0ct. of 2015  This is a Hollywood film with Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy in a reimagining of the original Mary Shelley novel story, told from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant Igor, played by Radcliffe, who switches from wizard with a scar to sideman to the mad scientist. Except there was no Igor in the book – he came from the movie versions, and with more notoriety from Mel Brook’s comedy spoof of “Young Frankenstein” as a bug-eyed hunchback. Igor wasn’t really in the cannon at all until Universal wanted something for Bela Lugosi to do and put him in “Son of Frankenstein” and needed a creepy character with an accent, spelled with a “Y”. This Igor dresses much better.

“Frankenstein” an independent movie due out in 2015  This is a modern retelling of the story set in Los Angeles by writer/director Bernard Rose, the director of “Candyman” about a present day married couple of scientists who create a monster with dire consequences, told from the point of view of the “monster”.

“Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics – The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” book due out in summer 2015  A novel of Mary Shelley’s life and love story with Percy Bysshe Shelley and their elopement to Paris in 1814 with Claire Clairmont, with additional secrets revealed in an historically reverent illumination of their intimate motivations and the inspiration for the novel.

“Romantic Outlaws: The Extrordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley” a “dual biography” of the author of Frankenstein and her mother by Charlotte Gordon out on April of 2015.

“Frankenstein Code” TV series from Fox due out in 2015  This is a rip of the name for a modern cop drama series according to Fox “taking inspiration from the basic Mary Shelley mythology of a man brought back to life by scientists playing God” centers on a morally corrupt retired cop who is given a second chance at life when he is brought back from the dead.

“Frankenstein Chronicles” a UK television limited series from ITV  When mutilated stitched bodies float up the Thames River, detectives in Regency period London know that something dark is afoot. The series is shooting in Belfast with Sean Bean, who lost his head in “Game of Thrones”, here playing a detective discovering other severed body parts and tracking down Dr. Frankenstein as a serial killer. “Ripper Street” 60 years sooner.

“A Storm in the Stars” an independent film in development for 2016  Announced with Elle Fanning to play Mary Shelley to be directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour in a period drama telling of the Mary Shelley story according to IMDB, “The love affair between poet Percy Shelley and 18 years old Mary Wollstonecraft, which resulted in Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein”. Recently got a boost at the 2015 Cannes Film Market with Hanway Films signing on for sales, with production hoped for in fall of 2015.

“Mary Shelley’s Monster” a film in pre-production for 2016   This is said by producers to be a modern(ish) telling of the Mary Shelley story, focused on the creation of the book and later, according to IMDB  “Mary Shelley strikes a Faustian bargain with her alter ego as she works on her seminal novel”. Sophie Turner, “Sansa Stark” from “Game of Thrones” has been announced to play Mary.

Already here “Frankenstein M.D.” a web series from PBS  A modern young focused web series which reimagines the title character as Victoria Frankenstein, an obsessive prodigy determined to prove herself in the male-dominated fields of science and medicine.

There are probably a few others out there as well. Universal badly wants to revitalize its library  for a new audience. Maybe they can bring James Whale back from the dead and stitch him together with J.J. Abrams. Or maybe Abraham Lincoln will go monster hunting now, if somebody finds his body and sews him up.

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