In the 1931 film, as in the 1818 novel by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein was the aristocratic scientist – “the modern Prometheus” – who stole lightning from the heavens to give life to a creature he’d assembled from parts of dead bodies. But there is a sense in which this milestone of the horror genre and indelible fixture in Western culture uncannily took on a life of its own – perhaps even, to an extent, created itself.Ĭonsider the thoroughness with which “Frankenstein” entered popular consciousness as a misapprehension. Not that anyone would dispute director James Whale’s status as “auteur” and an inimitable stylist whose signature is all over Frankenstein‘s decor, staging, lighting, composition, editing, and characterizations. In the case of Frankenstein, the imperfections include half-baked sequences, tedious subsidiary or comic-relief characters, mannerisms and structural faults all but mandated by the conventions of the day, and abrupt lacunae traceable to censorship or to front-office insistence on a shorter running time. But movies are a messy business, and the irksome (glorious?) truth is that some landmark films have become utterly indispensable and culturally pervasive despite being created by committee and riddled with imperfections.

It’s all very well to talk about aesthetically unified masterpieces and posit them as the definition of film art. As it happened, it would be James Whale, not Florey, who directed Frankenstein, and Henry Frankenstein would set up shop in “an abandoned watchtower.” But that windmill got lodged in the collective brain of the filmmaking team (also in one line of dialogue absentmindedly retained from an early script draft), and finally made it on screen as an opportunistic but aptly crazed-Gothic setting for the film’s fiery climax. to direct a production of Frankenstein for Universal, and as he mused on a possible look for the film, he found himself considering a windmill as a key location – perhaps the site of the scientist’s secret laboratory. Florey had just been assigned by Carl Laemmle Jr. In 1931, the director Robert Florey lived in a Los Angeles apartment with a view of a Dutch-style bakery and its logo, a windmill complete with turning vanes.

Frankenstein by Robert Horton