THE SCREEN
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
THE MONSTER MASH THE SCREEN The Frankenstein story, as we all know, is about a creature made up entirely of misappropriated and mismatched parts. That's pretty much the way Mel Brooks has made his...
...Even Frederick remarks on it...
...Frederick inquires when his train first arrives after his journey from the States...
...That's pretty much the way Mel Brooks has made his new film, Young Frankenstein, too...
...Warm milk...
...In vowel shifts that occur in a single one-liner, as in the execution of entire sequences, movie conventions fly through the air in this film in a mad jugglery that never lets us get down to earth for a moment...
...He realizes that the culture on which his insanity really feeds is not Mary Shelley's England nor Transylvania nor even America at large, but just Hollywood...
...The effect of all this on the monster, as on the whole Frankenstein myth, is to domesticate it...
...At other times, as when Brooks' monster (Peter Boyle) clomps his way through a Fred Astaire number of about the same vintage as the hairdo, Brooks is purposely letting all the sutures show...
...Later that night at the castle Frau Blucher archly offers Frederick brandy before he retires...
...Besides having stolen the whole idea for this movie from James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), Brooks has, for instance, stolen the hairdo for one of his stars, Madeline Kahn, from Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935...
...In a couple of parallel scenes, these detachable digits are each lit on fire in the attempt to light a cigar, a happenstance which leaves the monster howling but doesn't even make the chief flinch...
...Eventually Frederick and the monster even trade a few parts...
...she asks, archly...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...A very even trade...
...By the end of the film the monster is propped up in bed reading The Wall Street Journal at his home up in Westchester County somewhere...
...At first Frederick insistently pronounces his name with a short a and a long e for the dipthong, but after awhile he pronounces it just as insistently the other way round, with the short and long vowels reversed...
...Many of the film's parts which Brooks has not stolen from other movies his characters have stolen from each other...
...Then there's the hump on Igor's back...
...she asks in her heavy German accent...
...The whole movie has been thrown together from spare parts of other movies as if it were a bin full of out-takes, a face off the cutting-room floors where Hollywood's campiest films were made...
...A good deal of Brooks' energies in Young Frankenstein have been devoted to keeping up our awareness of his movie as a movie...
...Obaltine...
...But Frederick's fiancee (Miss Kahn), who is early in the film too cold a fish to kiss Frederick for fear of mussing her make-up, ends up being raped by the monster, and loving it...
...The migration of Igor's hump and the switch-hitting the chief does with his prosthesis look like the mental lapses of some script girl who should be maintaining continuity in such details, but isn't quite up to her job...
...It leads the characters here to entire exchanges of identity...
...Once you start permitting parts to circulate this way, there's no telling where it will lead...
...This results, first and foremost, from the need to outfit the monster, a need which sends Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) off to the cemetery while his assistant, Igor (Marty Feldman), is dispatched to the brain repository...
...At times, as when Miss Lanchester's streak job is set atop Miss Kahn's head, the stolen parts hardly look out of place at all...
...Just as contemporary racism finds a home in the old West in Brooks' Blazing Saddles, and Nazism plays on Broadway in The Producers, so Frankenstein and his monster are made a part of modern American kitsch in his film...
...Like the phonemes in his employer's name, the hump keeps shifting from one side to the other...
...The offer refused, she begins to turn away but then has a second thought...
...As this suggests, it is really the chief, not the monster, who is the unfeeling brute...
...Most of the parts he has misappropriated come out of other people's movies...
...Before the monster comes into being, Frederick is caught one night with a coffin from which an arm is protruding, so to disguise his grave-robbing, Frederick passes the arm through an armhole of his cloak as if it were his own...
...For the most part, however, the people in Brooks' story prove to be of higher moral character than he is, and restrict themselves merely to swapping parts rather than swiping them...
...The wholesale exchange begins innocently enough with the name Frankenstein itself, in which a couple of vowels show a tendency to trade places...
...Yeah," says a smart-aleck shineboy in lederhosen, "Track 29...
...And the unruly prosthesis worn by the local police chief does the same thing, switching from his right arm to his left and back again...
...For this reason Young Frankenstein is, from its overall composition to its isolated details, a comedy of production errors...
...Refused again, she starts to turn away but then has a third thought...
...Is this Transylvania station...
...Later on, when the monster falls victim to yet another of those misappropriated, mismatched parts—the abnormal brain Igor has procured for him—Frederick does a little transmutation, swapping part of his own brain for part of the monster's private parts...
...In like manner, Frau Blucher (Cloris Leachman), at whose name horses start and stamp, reveals herself to be a sentimental old sweetie in the end...
...For example, another part of those interchangeable parts in the film is the police chief's right forefinger and the monster's thumb...
...Since all comedy has to be based on some sort of incongruity, this approach works out pretty well for Brooks...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 15
