The Beginning
First published in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein (or, The Modern Prometheus) has influenced filmmakers since the Thomas A. Edison produced 16 minute short from 1910, Frankenstein. Beyond this first tentative journey into mystery are filmmakers from Paul Wegener to James Whale to Kenneth Branagh. The creature has been created, burned, and reincarnated numerous times.
After the Edison version, there were a number of other silent films either based or loosely based on Shelly’s novel: Der Golem, Deutsch Bioscop, 1914 (Germany) directed by Henrick Galeen and Paul Wegener and featuring Paul Wegener and Lyda Salmonova, Life Without a Soul, Ocean Film Corporation, 1915 (USA) 70 Minutes, directed by Joseph W Smiley and featuring Percy Darrell Standing and Lucy Cotton, and again,
The Golem, Pagu/UFA, 1920 (Germany) directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese and featuring Paul Wegener and Lyda Salmonova, in a longer version, and finally, Il Mostro di Frankenstein, Albertini Film/UCI, 1920 (Italy) 39 minutes, featuring: Albertini Linda as Elizabeth, Luciano Albertini as Baron Frankenstein and Umberto Guarracino as The Monster.
It was eleven more years before James Whale’s classic Frankenstein starring the astonishingly intuitive acting of Boris Karloff would illuminate movie screens around the world. It would take talking pictures to bring the monster to his full glory even though Boris Karloff insisted that the monster should not speak and proved his point with a performance that once seen is not easily forgotten.
NEXT TO COME: The Universal Years – James Whale
