Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Bert Batt
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was the fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and it shows in both the maturity as well as in a little bit of Frankenstein fatigue.
I am hard pressed to think of a less sympathetic version of Frankenstein than this one. Grand Moff Tarkin is a sane gentleman compared to the sadistic bastard baron here.
The film opens with Frankenstein stalking and killing geniuses so that he can lop off their heads and experiment on transplanting their brains. (That old gag.) He’s like some bizarre Jack the Ripper. And if it wasn't for a petty criminal who attempts to burgle him (I love that verb) he would have gotten away with it too. But Frankenstein has to dispense with his lab and head out on the lam. With the police on his trail he cheeses it and finds another German burg to haunt. Then he takes up lodging and proceeds to blackmail his landlady Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson) and her fiancé Karl (Simon Ward) into helping him recreate his lab and begin experimentation again.
His goal? To extricate a certain Dr. Frederick Brandt (George Pravda) who had been in correspondence with Dr. Frankenstein and who separately arrived at the secret of life. Frankenstein’s experiment went awry (as we all know) and Brandt’s discovery drove him mad. Fortunately for Frankenstein Dr. Brandt is incarcerated in the same asylum that Karl works at (The Ingolstadt Institute for the Mentally Dishevelled.) Also, Karl is stealing cocaine from the hospital to sell on the black market to use the money to take care of Anna’s severely ill mother, which is the dirt that Frankenstein uses to blackmail the young couple.
Frankenstein takes Karl on his expeditions to steal medical supplies and Karl is forced to kill a hapless security guard, thus enmeshing Karl (and, by implication, Anna) further into Frankenstein’s evil crimes. Blackmail, murder, unethical science—as if these weren’t enough, Baron Frankenstein actually rapes Anna in a brutal and disturbing scene made more so by his request for 2 basted eggs for breakfast later. It really leaves me with a lack of desire to ever order basted eggs, that’s for sure. Apparently the scene itself was a late addition to the film and Peter Cushing objected to it strenuously, but the fact of the matter is that it’s really not a far cry from anything else this incarnation of Frankenstein does. Frankenstein really MUST be destroyed.
But while the completely irredeemable nature of Frankenstein here is somewhat off-putting there are several reasons why this film is actually quite worth the time.
1. Peter Cushing as an evil bastard. You keep expecting him to ask Anna where the location of the rebel base is.
2. Karl’s hair. I think Karl’s hair escaped from Mick Jagger’s head and made its way to Hammer productions. It makes his already goofy looking face look even more like that of a 12 year old schoolboy escaped from a road-show production of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
3. Veronica Carlson. She is quite pretty as a damsel in almost constant distress. The best part is when they’ve buried Brandt’s body in the garden and a water main breaks exposing the body forcing Anna to pull the body out and hide it elsewhere while keeping the municipal workmen from seeing what she’s got hidden.
4. The world’s funniest undertaker. There’s a scene with the befuddled inspector interviewing the darkly humorous fellow and it's worth a couple of good chuckles.
5. Funny cop, funnier cop. The scene with the undertaker is really great because of the hilarious duo of Inspector Frisch (Thorley Walters) and The Police Doctor (Geoffrey Bayldon). Walters is a puffed up inspector who refuses to listen to anyone and then comes to the same conclusions and the long-suffering gestures from Bayldon make the film. I only wish that this duo had been teamed up for their own film at some point. It would have been like Without a Clue only years earlier.
6. Freddie Jones. He plays Dr. Richter, who is killed for his body and Frankenstein puts Brandt’s brain in his head. Which now, as an acting challenge, means that he’s playing Dr. Brandt in the body of Dr. Richter. It’s not just that he brings a real humanity to a complex role, especially in the scene near the end where Brandt goes to see his wife Ella (Maxine Audley) and tries to explain the situation to her—as if that wasn’t enough, it’s that he’s Freddie Jones, which means that forever in my mind he will be the mentat Thufir Hawat from David Lynch’s Dune which just adds a whole level of sympathy for him. And it’s thus gratifying when Brandt/Richter gets the drop on Frankenstein at the end.
"I fancy that I am the spider and you are the fly, Frankenstein."
It's a line that could have come from Dune, frankly.
Freddie Jones' captures real human anguish. His own experiments have led to this moment when his brain has been put into someone else's body, so that his own wife rejects him--not even because he is ugly, but because of the invisible monstrosity of the crime. Frankenstein really must be destroyed, and it is Brandt/Richter who takes him down and chooses to perish with him rather than allow the perversion of nature to continue.
“You must choose between the flames and the police, Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein chooses the flames (lured by the desire to find Brandt’s papers) and the “monster” dies in the flames, having been revenged upon the Baron for his unnatural creation.
The ethical dilemma posed by Frankenstein here is especially convoluted, because he keeps talking about finding the secret of life and keeping geniuses at the height of their abilities alive forever, but functionally his whole project consists of merely transplanting one living brain into another perfectly good body. He isn’t even really reanimating anyone here so much as keeping the animated going by switching vessels or by piecing together new vessels. Maybe I’ve seen too many Frankenstein films, but by Frankensteinian standards this isn’t a very groundbreaking line of inquiry.
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was better than I expected even if the ending still felt abrupt. Karl survives (if you want to call it that) but Anna is stabbed and killed by Frankenstein when he discovers she has not only let Brandt/Richter escape but stabbed him out of fright. (I won’t even go into the misogyny inherent in killing off the “stained” woman but letting the sullied man live.) There’s no denouement to speak of as the film just ends with the sound of crackling flames and the credits rolling over the fire.
Again, a Frankenstein film with some flaws, but in many ways a rich experience.
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