Walking along Trott Lake the other day I was thinking, if Frankenstein was filmed here this would be a good location for monster to throw the little girl into the lake. We had just watched Guillermo del Toro’s version. We were disappointed by the first half and could only make it through an hour and a half. The generated sets felt overblown, the interplay overwrought and it was hard to feel anything for the characters. But on the second night, starting with the section, told from the monster’s viewpoint, we got comfortable. We watched the 1931 version with Boris Karloff the next night and loved it! Peggi has two versions of Mary Shelley’s book and started reading it that night.
The following night we watched Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version. We had seen that when it came out and it has not improved with age. I found Branagh too much of a dandy in the role of Victor and as a director he didn’t help De Niro portray the monster by having him mouth what should have been portrayed in storytelling through film. I suspect he would have been more comfortable portraying the whole thing as a love story, he in the lead.
In a review of the new version the New Yorker’s Justin Chang referenced Víctor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) as “the stealthiest of all Frankenstein films.” And when we learned it was set in Spain we added it to last night’s Criterion calendar. We were blown away by this one! Set during Franco’s reign in a remote village on the Castilian plateau it was astoundingly beautiful. The 1931 Frankenstein film was shown in their community building. We see just a few scenes through a young girl’s eyes and a magical, poetic story unfolds in her head.