Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

FRANKENSTEIN (1914):
You've almost certainly seen a still from this one - most likely the one famous still I and tons of other people saw and knew this film for, through the 20th century. IIRC that still was all that was known to survive for many years, and then at some point some amount of this film was recovered. Maybe what I watched (14 minutes) was all of it, but it's hard to tell as the story feels pretty truncated (more or less "complete", but highly simplified) and the famous, haunting, indelible aforementioned still doesn't actually appear in the movie.

That famous still is fuh-ire and the Monster never looks as cool or scary in the extant 14 minutes - actually it looks kinda' lame much of the time........ but there are a couple cool things about this FRANKENSTEIN. One is the creation scene, which is unlike any I've seen in another Frank movie. It's clearly reversed footage of the upper-half of a puppet of the Monster burning up - and it looks quite "metal" (to quote a Letterboxd user). The other cool thing is how the director (J. Searle Dowley) uses a mirror in the film's final sequence. It's highly effective and it's not immediately clear how it was pulled off - which I appreciate in a primitive genre film!    3.5/5    Thomas Edison produced it.