Frankenstein (1931) on Netflix
Henry Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz assemble a human body in a village in the Bavarian Alps, taking parts from freshly buried corpses and hanged criminals. The work still lacks a brain.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.7/1088,716 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
In a village in the Bavarian Alps, Henry Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz assemble a human body from parts taken from freshly buried corpses and recently hanged criminals. Henry intends to give the body life through electrical devices, but he still needs a brain. Waldman, Henry's former teacher, displays a healthy brain and a corrupted criminal brain to his class. Henry has Fritz steal the brain, but the assistant damages it and returns with the criminal one instead. Henry's fiancée Elizabeth, worried by his seclusion, asks their friend Victor and Waldman for help, and the three arrive at his laboratory as he makes his final preparations.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Frankenstein (1931)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The scene in which Frankenstein's assistant Fritz swaps a healthy brain for an abnormal one is believed to be based on the real fate of poet Walt Whitman's brain: after he donated it to the American Anthropometric Society, a careless assistant dropped the jar it was stored in and destroyed it.
- Kenneth Strickfaden designed the electrical gear for the creation scene, and it worked so well that such effects became essential to later Universal Frankenstein films; fans call the equipment "Strickfadens", and Strickfaden secured at least one Tesla coil built by Nikola Tesla himself.
- Kansas censors requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which would have removed half of the film; Joseph Breen of the Studio Relations Committee was sent to urge them to reconsider, and an edited version was eventually released in Kansas.
- Under the film's initial director, Robert Florey, the Monster was re-characterized as a simple killing machine with no human pathos, which reportedly led Bela Lugosi to complain, "I was a star in my country and I will not be a scarecrow over here!"
SPOILER
The scene of the girl being thrown into the lake was cut from the original camera negative and long considered lost, but it was rediscovered during the early 1980s in the collection of the British National Film Archive and restored to modern prints.
