Frankenstein (1931) (MRA)

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Main Menu Audio & Animation Biographies-Crew-James Whale (Director) Gallery-Photo-8 Notes-History of Frankenstein
Rating
Year Of Production	1931
Running Time	71
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	James Whale
Studio Distributor	MRA Entertainment	Starring	Colin Clive Mae Clarke John Boles Boris Karloff Edward Van Sloan Frederick Kerr Dwight Frye Lionel Belmore Marilyn Harris
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	?	Music	Bernhard Kaun

    The tale of Frankenstein's monster is such a well known classic that it is almost pointless to explain it. Doctor Frankenstein is convinced he has discovered a way to give life to the dead and sets about experimenting on bits of dead people. Finally he succeeds in bringing his ultimate creation to life, but with the brain of a criminal murderer. The monster experiences a very brief moment of freedom before being hounded and burned to death by a parade of torch-wielding villagers. Doctor Frankenstein marries his sweetheart and no one ever mentions his little foray into the art of grave robbing ever again.

    This first film version does differ slightly from later ones in a few ways. Firstly, Doctor Frankenstein's lab assistant is called Fritz in this version, not Igor as is often the case in later ones. (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) The scene where the monster meets the little village girl is actually more shocking in this version as the monster ends up throwing her into a river and unintentionally drowning her. Later films try to play up the monster's humanity by including the meeting with the girl, but without the drowning part.

Video

    First off I should say that our usual practice of providing exact times for the appearance of glitches and problems cannot be followed with this title as there is no time coding on this disc and no way to advise of the exact moment of events.

    Frankenstein was filmed in 1931, before the advent of widescreen cinema formats, in a ratio of 1.37:1 which has been converted to the standard TV ratio of 1.33:1 for this transfer.

    As you would expect with source material this old, the image quality is far from perfect. There is a significant amount of grain in the image which blurs the detail, especially in the shadows and during the darker scenes. There is also one major analogue tape tracking glitch during the opening graveyard scene which gives away the fact that this transfer was taken from a video master and not film stock. I would assume then that the grainy appearance of the transfer probably comes more from the old video master than the original film.

    This is a black and white film, and unfortunately due to the previously mentioned levels of grain, the sharpness and clarity of the image leaves much to be desired. Director Whale was one of the best working in Holly wood at the time and it is a shame that the original quality of his work has been lost.

    Frankenstein suffers from the constant appearance of film artefacts such as scratches and vertical black lines and it seems that a lot more could have been done to clean up the final transfer, if the distributor's budget had allowed for it. Most of these are quite minor, however, and don't really get in the way of the enjoyment of watching the film.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is only one audio format provided, a Linear PCM 2.0 track transfered at 48/16 KHz. Unfortunately the noise levels are significant during some sections of the film and give the impression that you are listening to an old cassette tape from the seventies. More effort could have been made to clean up these sections as this sort of hissing white noise is not that difficult to remove. On the plus side, there are no dropouts, clicks or other audio glitches to speak of. There is one strange glitch during the scene where the good doctor and his faithful assistant procure their first corpse which sounds like some kind of digital distortion - this should have been removed.

    The dialogue is clear enough and the sync is fine. Actors in this era were all taught how to enunciate with the best of them, so it is easy to understand what everyone is saying.

    The incidental music is a bit scratchy and thin, more due to the limitations of audio recording in the early 30's than because of the DVD transfer, but does its job nicely.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Biographies-Crew

    The extras on this disc are all text affairs with the first being a short bio of director James Whale. Whale was one of the more highly regarded directors working in Hollywood between the wars and directed classics such as Showboat featuring the famous Paul Robeson version of Old Man River, and the original The Man In The Iron Mask. (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) We find out that Whale was a survivor of the Battle of the Somme in WWI and began his creative life in a German POW camp putting on shows for his fellow prisoners. Later Whale actually lost favour in Hollywood for offending the Nazis (yes, the Jewish moguls in Hollywood actually shunned him in 1937 for making a film which offended the Nazi regime!) The film was called The Road Back and was made as a sequel to the anti-war classic All Quiet On the Western Front. Oddly enough, when America finally went to war with the Nazis, Whale's fortunes did not turn around and in fact became even worse, apparently due to his unabashed homosexuality. The latter years of his life were dramatised in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters.

Gallery-Photo

    The photo gallery consists of only eight images from the making of the film, one poster shot, one of Whale in his director's chair and that sort of thing.

Notes

    A History of Frankenstein makes up the last of the text-based extras and has one really interesting tidbit of information about the Makeup artist Jack Pierce.

    The R4 version of this release seems to be the better one as the R1 version is listed as having a mono soundtrack, whereas the R4 is stereo.

    While not really a classic film in its own right, Frankenstein is a bit of movie, and cultural, history and a must for old time horror fans. This DVD version could have had better treatment from its restorers but it is still a much better example of the film than you would ever find on VHS and so is the best available.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall