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| Peter Cushing and Francis Matthews in THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958). |
Spent Saturday afternoon enjoying the Steve Haberman/Constantine Nasr commentary on Mill Creek Entertainment’s THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN - part of their new 20-film HAMMER ULTIMATE COLLECTION. I have strong feelings for this film, which may not be the most important Frankenstein film ever made, though I feel there are none better.
The audio commentary is another outstanding job; I was particularly interested in its line of thought regarding Terence Fisher's portrayal of humanity in the film's Dickensian world as clueless at its best and really horrible at its worst, with personal style used as a kind of badge of superiority and as a social mask for decadence. Which, in turn, prevents genuinely good but unpresentable characters like Oskar Quitak's Karl (rudely shrugged off as "Dwarf" in the end titles) from being appreciated by even themselves for what they are in their God-given form.
Over the years, I’ve tended to think the film looks at the world through Frankenstein’s (Peter Cushing) eyes; everyone else hovers between insuffiency and carrion, it seems. Frankenstein needs assistants because he needs even more constant adulation and someone close by to take his blame for his failures. Seeing the film again, and with the commentators’ guidance, I am coming around it seeing it through the eyes of the Baron’s intern Hans Cleve (Francis Matthews), who has similar ambitions to his mentor but follows his example from a different perspective. He wants to see the Baron’s dream of creating or restoring life realized because he genuinely wants to serve others; on the other hand, Frankenstein feels superior to everyone else, including God (if he even believes in Him), who in both this film and its predecessor CURSE, thwarts his intentions with random accidents. It occurred to me afterwards, as I continued ruminating on the film and the commentary, that - just before performing the climactic operation, Cleve actually says something like “God grant me the skill to do this” - it’s a prayer, in effect - so the text would support the idea that his operation succeeded because it wasn’t performed in flagrant denial of God as his mentor's were. I do wish there had been a direct sequel made to this, as it leaves the viewer in an uncomfortably ambivalent yet tantalizing place.
The Mill Creek presentation isn't bad at all, but it's a bit dated-looking - identical, I would imagine, to their September 2016 Blu-ray release of the title, which was, then as now, doubled up with Michael Carreras' THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1965). There is an updated, superior-looking presentation of REVENGE available - the 4K restoration included with the fourth Indicator Hammer box release in the UK. This is just one of those movies that the most discerning collectors and historians need to own in duplicate.
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