On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision MALIGNING A MONSTER BY MARVIN KITMAN A RUMOR is making the rounds that President Nixon plans to order a ban on the production of all Frankenstein movies to conserve electricity....
...But then something goes wrong and the experimental man develops the classic kink...
...Frankenstein works on the project in his room on his own time, Ms...
...It was successful, if revenge against Shaw is what was sought...
...on January 16 and 17, as the main attraction of The Wide World of Entertainment...
...He is different from the other Swiss...
...Frankenstein is about to infuse life into the girl of his monster's dreams, the doctor balks...
...Frankenstein: The True Story began with an unusual device...
...We know what to expect from a program about Frankenstein...
...After being forsaken by his creator, the creature tries to make his way alone in society, but finds that he doesn't fit in...
...Frankenstein's man needed a woman really bad, and with the new permissiveness I had high hopes for a television first: Prima facie, as the act of sexual relations between monsters is technically known...
...Frankenstein and upbraids him for his irresponsibleness in having brought a monster into the world— and then abandoning him to his miserable fate...
...There are no nuts, bolts or other hardware sticking out of him, a la Boris Karloff...
...True to what...
...Why are they doing this," I found myself asking, "why don't they just get on with the story...
...ABC's two-part three-hour presentation, for instance, is being shown at a terrible time, 11:30 p.m...
...Basically, the book tells the story of a homemade man...
...Still, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, whose poems have never been adapted by TV twice in a single season, undoubtedly contributed some of the ideas to Ms...
...Surely they all had read the novel and knew they were not performing the true story...
...The two hours were a kind of My Fair Monster, with Frankenstein teaching Prima everything she has to know to pass as a regular person at a coming-out ball...
...Shelley's story—man's inhumanity to monster...
...Well, why not...
...But then you would miss the commercials...
...And true as well to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the adapters...
...In a dazzling display of old-fashioned British ingenuity and know-how, Dr...
...Have they no pride, no respect for their own literature...
...The monster appeals to his creator to at least make him a mate, so he can settle down and live a normal bourgeois existence...
...it included a host of prestigious British names an American TV viewer would recognize as class: Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, James Mason, Michael Wilding, Margaret Leigh-ton, Nicola Pagett, Clarissa Kaye, Agnes Moorehead...
...The NBC version, televised on November 30 and December 1 as a pair of two-hour World Premiere Movies, was offered at the more popular 9 p.m., when older viewers like myself are still awake...
...The novel, which I read while the commercials of the NBC version were on, was composed during a summer vacation, much like the games people play these days when they holiday in the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard...
...Little is heard about the men's offerings...
...The one touching scene takes place when the gruesome twosome finally meet...
...Ultimately, he tracks down Dr...
...Indeed, the first word he utters is "beautiful," although not, despite the Fruit of the Loom shorts, in Howard Cosell's voice...
...Instead, he takes her head in his hands—and suddenly yanks it off...
...I would like to have divided Mason into three parts...
...Telling the true story of Frankenstein is especially relevant these days, since many young viewers think the name refers to the monster, a projection, perhaps, of their feelings toward doctors...
...At least no fuel was wasted...
...He then attacks Hollywood for how it played fast and loose with her story...
...It is a very sad story that Ms...
...Now that's something you don't see every day in prime time...
...True to Hunt Stromberg Jr...
...Shelley clearly indicates, without supervision by the faculty or use of Federal research funds...
...Frankenstein was her contribution to the game...
...It certainly was not true, however, to Mary Shelley's little Gothic tale, one of the more promising first novels to appear during the 1818 publishing season...
...The doctor teaches his companion how to put his napkin on his lap and use a knife and fork, how to take a good book out of the bookcase, how to order clothes from the tailor and go to the opera—all the basics a monster needs to know...
...The cast for this $400,000 production was impressive...
...The adaptation was just about as abominable as the creature...
...The opening installment dealt with the making of the male monster —in Regency England, incidentally, and not in the mountains of Switzerland, possibly because the sets for NBC's adaptation of Wuthering Heights hadn't been used recently...
...Shelley wrote...
...Of course, you can read the book in less than six or even four hours...
...I supposed it was for people who might not want to watch the second night—or the first night...
...It's not a musical or Frank Sinatra...
...The four-hour drama ends quite tragically, with everybody dying...
...Frankenstein and his "friend" settle down in their flat, living like two wholesome boys in Chelsea...
...After all, NBC featured a professional football game every Sunday afternoon last fall, and ABC broadcast one every Monday evening...
...NBC's telecast was distinguished also by the unusual title it gave the old classic—Frankenstein: The True Story...
...Fortunately, television has gotten in under the wire with two renditions—by ABC and NBC—of the Mary Shelley novel...
...THE SECOND episode features the making of the female monster (Jane Seymour), a perfect woman named Prima, as in Louie Prima...
...If it was there, I'm sure it was too subtle for most of the young viewers...
...But for the rest of us, who had specifically set aside two evenings to see the show, it was a waste of a perfectly good 360 seconds...
...The second part, though, was definitely an attempt to retell the Pygmalion story, perhaps as Isherwood's revenge against George Bernard Shaw...
...Isherwood & Co...
...Polidori, who wasn't even in the book (he was actually Lord Byron's physician), Mason takes us to the real grave of Mary Shelley...
...Mason, especially, comes across as a scoundrel in this tawdry production...
...For a moment it looks as if she is going to kiss him and, who knows, turn him into a frog...
...That would have been true television...
...Not that the two versions aren't different...
...He's not interested in banking, chocolate, or working as a ski instructor at a resort...
...As Dr...
...This is an example of the sort of thing that used to go on at colleges before students discovered panty raids and pot parties...
...The conflict in the novel derives from people misunderstanding the monster...
...merely combined the two movies, to give us the Frankenstein monster and his bride—as they say in the ads—"together again...
...I asked a top NBC executive...
...The actual construction of the monster was not described in great detail by Ms...
...No Swiss girl will have him...
...Some will say they saw a homosexual fantasy in the opening installment of Christopher Isherwood's adaptation...
...Regrettably, Stromberg and Isherwood's meeting with Frankenstein does as much for the truth as Abbott and Costello's a few decades earlier...
...The monster (Michael Sarrazin) is a beautiful man...
...Similarly, the making of the monster's dream girl took only a few paragraphs...
...Yet at the last moment, when Dr...
...Victor Frankenstein is a medical student who decides to make the fellow as a kind of extracurricular project at a college in Switzerland...
...It rained a lot the summer of 1816, and Mary Shelley, her husband the poet, and Lord Byron agreed to pass the time by dreaming up ghost stories...
...Like the cheapest Vincent Price horror flick, they stressed the mumbo-jumbo scientific shticks, completely disregarding the core of Ms...
...Prince Charming, the male monster in his terminal stage, hovers over Prima at the fancy ball...
...the producer]," he explained...
...These relatively minor incidents in the book were enlarged upon by Hollywood in the 1930s, and resulted in two of the best horror films of all time, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein...
...The embellishments on the original tale by the Stromberg-Isherwood team show a surprising lack of respect for great literature and utterly destroy the value of presenting a literary masterpiece on TV...
...By the end of the first show, he looks like a Bowery bum with a few carbuncles and open sores that need attending to...
...If only the body of Mary Shelley had risen, like yeast, and done the job for me...
...But the affair between these two beautiful people winds up unhappily...
...The school had no responsibility for the prank...
...If nothing else, they could have gone to a British court and gotten out an injunction against the title...
...For the first six minutes, the audience was bombarded with coming attractions for the movie itself...
...This monster is a truly beautiful fellow...
...Shelley, probably because she didn't quite know how it was done, not having seen the Boris Karloff movie...
...Shelley's bestseller...
...By the way, NBC's creature is the only Adam ever created who takes his first steps wearing jockey-style shorts...
...How could there be two Franken-steins in a single season...
...Frankenstein (Leonard Whiting) brings his monster to life with a machine that harnesses the sun's energy...
...Not since Shakespeare was presented on television have American audiences seen so many die so quickly for so little...
Vol. 57 • January 1974 • No. 1
