The output of the Edison movie studio was for the most part pretty mundane, but with occasional flashes of intuitive brilliance, as in The Great Train Robbery, for instance. Their 1910 adaptation of Frankenstein was one of those flashes, a truly remarkable film for its time. The one-reeler covers Frankenstein's creation of a misshapen monster who subsequently haunts him and his fiancée. Unlike later films, this monster is formed out of a huge vat of primordial goo in a scene that must have been incredible in its day. It is achieved by filming a wax figure melting into the pot, and then reversing the action. But the movie's real stroke of genius is its very modern psychological approach to the spiritual link between the monster and its creator. Probably inspired by Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the movie uses some very carefully staged scenes with a full-length dressing mirror to suggest that the man and the monster are two aspects of the same person. The scariest thing about the movie, though, is how close we came to never being able to see it at all. For decades the only surviving copy was in the hands of a nutty film collector with a grossly exaggerated view of his property's financial, as opposed to historical, value. He sat on his print while it deteriorated, too paranoid to allow it to be seen by the public or preserved by any responsible film archive, for fear that "bootleg" copies would diminish the value of his unique possession. Only quite recently did more rational minds convince him to allow a professional preservation back-up to be made of the film and to authorize a DVD release for public viewing.
Review of Frankenstein
