Great Reviews in History: Frankenstein (1931)

I like to think that newspaper ads from the first half of the 20th century were all about as unhinged as modern political ads. Hyperbole, extravagance, and strange language abounds.

But that’s not what we’re here to review today. No, today we’re reviewing newsprint reviews for 1931’s famed creature feature Frankenstein, the retelling of Mary Shelley’s novel published over 100 years before.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes kraut and weinies of this post, let’s take some time to reflect on the legacy of Frankenstein, and also - if you’re shockingly not a listener of the podcast - I should explain what we at Review Party Dot Com consider a “Great Review in History.”

Generally, we revel in unearthing historically bad takes, but we also enjoy a glowing review of something we now know wasn’t so great (shoutout to the old Hindenburg).

Look, you know Frankenstein. Or do you? I don’t need to be tell you that Frankenstein is the doctor and the monster is his monster. You know THAT MUCH, right? Right. Good.

Well that’s good- gold star for you! You get another gold star if you’ve also read the book and know what the Monster really looked like and how he learned to speak and read. No hunchbacked assistant, no little girl thrown in a lake (he actually saves a girl from drowning in the book).

But Hollywood is Hollywood, so they had to change some stuff up. Instead of getting a monster with stretched yellow skin barely covering his blood vessels, black lips, black hair, and yellow eyes, we got this:

He may not dress as neatly as Count Orlok, but that guy has had a lot longer to work on his style.

Now, as you likely know, Universal Studios built up a full arsenal of movie monsters during this time. Though Nosferatu beat it by 9 years, Universal had its first horror hit when Dracula burst onto the scene in February 1931. Half a year later, lightning struck again with Frankenstein, cementing horror as a bankable movie staple, and Universal as a key player in the game.

While it might be tame by today’s standards, and short at 71 minutes, Frankenstein is 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with Elliot Stein from the Village Voice writing in 2009:

The most influential horror film ever made, this stark and stylish work has a weird fairytale beauty. Boris Karloff gives one of the most indelible performances in American cinema as the monster, misjudged by the society that created him, at once terrifying and pathetic, a moving study of alienation and primitive anger.

For a reviewer to look back at something created close to a century before, when style, sentiments, and the systems for filmmaking were so different, and to heap praise on the performances and cinematography speaks to the great quality therein.

But why rely on modern reviewers? We’ve got newspaper archives here! We’ve got GREAT REVIEWS IN HISTORY!

See, now you know where that kraut and weinie joke came from. This is an excerpt from The Fairfield Auxiliary, in which a dandy Nebraskan recounts his travels to distant California, seeing many things, Frankenstein included. He’s a bit weird in the rest of his letters (he IS from Nebraska, after all), so please enjoy the snippets.

These will all be snippets, actually. But since we heard modern praise for star Boris Karloff, let’s see what his contemporaries had to say.

Honestly, praise to the writer of this piece; to be that meta with your medium, to call out how many “ibles” you’ve used, and make a joke of it? In 1932, in the Cushing Daily Citizen.

As a hint at what film was like at the time, well- did you catch that phrase “talky-movie” in that first snippet? That should make it clear that the writer had to be specific, that both silent and speaking films were commonplace. The highest grossing film of 1931 was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, which while having some commentary to be sure, was also generally light, whimsical fare. There were war films, noir and gangster films, but “horror” was new.

How’d the audiences take to it?

Moberly Monitor-Index, 1/9/1932

Cushing Daily Citizen, 1/23/1932

The daddy of all thrill-films! Women trembling, men exhausted. But what of children?

So glad you asked.

TOO GHASTLY, YOU HEAR ME?!

This little morsel is from The Waukegan News-Sun, some lovely local flavor for those of us in Review Party Dot Com.

But you know what? All of this was nice flavor. Like going to grandma’s house and her cooking the same thing your mom cooks, but in a slightly different way. A way that isn’t really done anymore. Like putting sugar on your grapefruit, it seems a bit odd, but hey, it ain’t bad. That’s what these old-time reviews are.

Now you know, so don’t be afraid to dig in.