Boris Karloff, Where Are You?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The exterior of the Frankenstein house, as it is presented in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is well proportioned and nicely balanced; the mansion appears to be an entirely suitable residence for a prosperous, rational 18th century doctor and his cheerful, loving family. But the interior is something else again. It includes a vast, vaulting staircase that couldn't possibly fit inside the house we have seen from the outside and that seems completely at odds with the family's sensibility. The house is rather too obviously meant to act as a metaphor for the character of the Frankensteins' son Victor, played by Kenneth Branagh, who also directed. On the surface he seems to be quite a reasonable fellow, a medical student eager to follow in his father's footsteps. On the inside, though, it turns out he's as loopy and out of scale as that staircase. Chap wants to play God, create life in his laboratory. Mortality, which took away his beloved mother, seems to him a dirty trick he must do something about.

But you know all that, don't you? Even if you haven't actually read Frankenstein, you have seen the classic horror movies based on the novel. From these sources you will have gathered that no good can possibly come of messing around with the secrets of life and death. You probably don't need half an hour of talky, tedious back story, as you get in this screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, explaining why Victor is driven to reanimate a corpse. They used to dispense with his hubris in half a dozen lines of hysterical dialogue, the better to get on to the good stuff.

Unfortunately, the good stuff here isn't so good. Branagh doesn't evoke terror, only repulsion. Frankenstein's laboratory is a mess, with amniotic fluid sloshing all over the place (never mind why). Even lovely Helena Bonham Carter, playing the doctor's wife, is not spared hideous disfigurement. The most authentically bizarre thing about the film is that John Cleese appears as a heavy and does a very nice job.

As the monster, Robert De Niro looks like an aging Marlon Brando with his head stitched together. And De Niro acts like Brando too -- fake intellectual mumblings and unsuccessfully suppressed rage. His creature is somewhere between Shelley's monster, who quoted Milton and Goethe, and Boris Karloff's, who was a preliterate child. There is much to be said for the latter conception. The fact that his depredations stemmed from clumsy innocence made ^ the monster sympathetic in a way.

This is not to suggest that a bunch of 1930s scenarists were better writers than Mary Shelley, only that they had a clearer sense of their medium's imperatives than her present servants do. James Whale, who made the 1931 version and its even stronger sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, certainly was a better director than Branagh. The latter has just created isolated sensations that aren't even frightening. Whale had real style. He understood that if it was too late to take this tale completely seriously, it was too soon to camp it up or make it an exercise in empty disgust. Delicately poising irony, dark sentiment and terror, he drew you into his web. Branagh never weaves one. He's too busy serving his own expansive ego.