Young Frankenstein (film)

Identification American comic film

Date Released in 1974

Director Mel Brooks

A spoof on American horror films, Young Frankenstein became known as one of the best exercises in genre satire in world cinema.

Key Figures

• Mel Brooks (1926-    ), film director

Produced and directed by Mel Brooks from a screenplay he wrote with his star, Gene Wilder, who plays Dr. Frankenstein, this affectionate parody of the Frankenstein films released by Universal Studios during the 1930’s and 1940’s was a major hit in the early 1970’s. Brooks lovingly and painstakingly recreates the look of James Whale’s classic films Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) by using carefully reconstructed, near-identical sets and employing a number of actual props from the original films. Brooks’s cinematographer, Gerald Hirschfeld, earned an Academy Award nomination for his use of vintage-looking, black-and-white film and 1930’s-style, expressionist camera angles.

The plot follows closely those of Whale’s films, and a number of scenes—the creation of the monster and his encounters with a little girl, a blind hermit, and the inevitable throng of hysterical villagers—mirror scenes in the earlier films, though Brooks’s versions are suffused with slapstick and sight gags. Much of the film’s humor foregrounds the sexual tensions implicit in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and the studio adaptations of it; for example, references to the monster’s large male organ as a “schvanstucker” and scenes in which the monster or his creator demonstrate their sexual prowess by causing their partners to burst into arias from operettas during intercourse.

Beyond bawdy humor, however, most of the film’s funniest moments come from other traditional comic devices such as wordplay and unexpected turns of events. Some of Young Frankenstein’s biggest laughs come from characters bickering about how to pronounce “Frankenstein” and “Igor.” When the assistant nervously moans “Werewolf!” upon hearing a distant lupine howl, Frankenstein points and announces, “There wolf.” When the housekeeper, played by Cloris Leachman, explains that she had been involved romantically with the original Dr. Frankenstein, the dramatic buildup of the dialogue cues the audience to expect blunt language in her ultimate admission, but instead the woman spits out the banal “He vass my boyfriend!” When scientist and his creation appear at a scholarly conference, they present not a dry lecture but a song-and-dance number, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Finally, when the monster meets a little girl (whose counterpart is drowned in the Universal original), the scene ends not in death but in a ridiculous sight gag: The child flies through the air into her bedroom after being bounced off a seesaw.

Impact

With its likable characters, coherent plot, and excellent cast, which includes Peter Boyle as the monster, Teri Garr and Marty Feldman as lab assistants, and Madeline Kahn as the scientist’s haughty fiancé, Young Frankenstein avoids the pitfalls that weaken many satires of film genres, which often degenerate into a disjunct series of poorly developed comic sketches. One of the best comic films of the 1970’s, it demonstrates the decade’s ability to reflect fondly on the past without necessarily descending into sentiment and extreme nostalgia.

Bibliography

Sinyard, Neil. The Films of Mel Brooks. New York: Bookthrift, 1988.

Svehla, Gary J., and Susan Svehla. We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film. Baltimore: Midnight Marquee Press, 1997.