The Big Whatsit

Given the choice between Hammer’s two giant franchises - Dracula and Frankenstein - it’s the ‘good’ Baron who gets my vote. No disrespect to Christopher Lee’s Count. He’s still my favourite incarnation of the chalk-faced Transylvanian. But in the case of Frankenstein, Hammer appear to have mined a richer vein of storytelling. These movies, invariably starring Peter Cushing, produce the same basic yarn with each release, but it’s how they get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ that never fails to entertain. The Revenge of Frankenstein, the sequel to Hammer’s box office smash original, could have been a rehash of familiar material. The Curse of Franksentein loosely followed Universal’s 1931 classic, Frankenstein, and nobody would have blamed the studio for simply taking James Whales’s follow-up, The Bride, as its inspiration. Instead, writer Jimmy Sangster comes up with something entirely original, leading the plot in an unexpected direction.

Perhaps it’s the Cush’s playing of the Baron that makes the production hang together so well. This site has made no secret of its admiration for the Hammer veteran, and he’s clearly in his element with this meatiest of roles. What makes it so good is that Frankenstein is broadly portrayed as a villain, a body-snatching wrong ‘un who tampers with the stuff of life at the cost of others, yet in Cushing’s hands things aren’t so simple. His Baron is capable of showing great kindness to others, not least with his physically disabled assistant, Karl, to whom he offers a new, working body as a favour for saving his neck from the guillotine. He runs a clinic for the poor, yet it becomes clear this is a front for his favoured work and his patients are in fact the unwitting donors of the body parts he needs. That said, his aim is to cure the afflicted, albeit via a grotesque transplant of the brain into new quarters. However you choose to read him, what’s clear is that Cushing’s protagonist is a morally ambiguous character, and it’s to the actor’s credit that he slips neither into outright evil or pure goodness.

As usual, The Revenge was filmed at  Hammer’s Bray Studios, and for fans the movie can become a case of spotting the sets as they appeared in many other productions. The graveyard in which the Baron is supposedly buried has served as a cemetery on numerous occasions. Frankenstein’s cellar-based laboratory doubled as Dracula’s crypt. The latter, the centrepiece to any good offering about life made from dead flesh, is a riot of flashing lights and electricity sound effects. In an early scene, Frankenstein reveals an experiment to his new assistant, Dr Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews). It’s a pair of eyes and a disembodied arm, both of which are attached to an artificial brain powered by electricity. The Baron wishes to prove how complicated the human brain is by demonstrating the reactions of the arm and eyes to fire, and sure enough both get excited as he approaches with a lit bunsen burner. Played for dark laughs it may be, but Cushing and director, Terence Fisher, wear straight faces. They realise all this is ridiculous fare, but never make the mistake of being too knowing about it.

Once the business of Frankenstein’s latest escape from justice is dealt with, we’re into a familiar groove. Renaming himself Dr Stein (he later pops up in London’s Harley Street as Dr Franck), the Baron is up to his old tricks in Carlsbruck, Germany, getting up the noses of the medical establishment by making a success of his little practice whilst working on Karl’s new body. With the help of Kleve, his transplant is an apparent success. Karl wakes up in a fresh body, that of jobbing actor Michael Gwynne (best known perhaps as the duplicitous Lord Melbury in Fawlty Towers, but in ownership of a lengthy CV containing appearances in the likes of Cleopatra and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). As Karl recovers, the doctors toast their success. But there are warning signs. An earlier experiment carried out on a chimpanzee caused it to turn cannibalistic and eat its mate, but Stein believes he has overcome that obstacle.

Soon enough, Karl starts going wrong. He’s impressed initially with his handsome new face and fully functioning body, but he then begins to show psychotic tendencies, as well as the physical limitations of his old self manifesting themselves once again. As his face collapses alongside his mind, Karl turns to mindless murder. He then unwittingly reveals who Dr Stein really is, putting the Baron’s life in jeapordy. As the guillotine looms again, Frankenstein is reminded that he’s suddenly a long way from a moment earlier in the film where he treated his medical peers with utter scorn by making them wait for him in his ward, next to all those grubby, working class patients.

The Revenge really is good stuff. These were the days of Hammer’s early forays into horror, back when it was young, thrusting and in demand. The budgetary limitations only extend as far as some familiar shooting locations. Elsewhere, it’s a lavish affair, featuring great effects, make-up and costumes, all of which add up to the dark fairytale territory that Hammer aimed for. At its heart is Cushing, still some years away from the sense of repetition that came with making another schlock Frankenstein caper (though I have a soft spot for the 1967 offering, Frankenstein Created Woman) and enjoying himself thoroughly. The film may be over fifty years old, but it’s sprightly for its age and gives every impression of coming from a studio that was at its creative peak.