Faces of Frankenstein: The House of Hammer
By Brian Keiper
Previous ⬅ Faces of Frankenstein | The Universal Years
In the 1950s, cobwebs and castles were out, and aliens, atomic monsters, robots, and giant bugs were in as horror made a decisive shift toward its closest cousin, science fiction. Frankenstein movies were rare in this period, though the influence of the Universal films was often strongly felt (e.g., James Arness’s makeup in The Thing from Another World, 1951). Born of a partnership between theater owners Enrique Carreras and Will Hinds (later Will Hammer) in 1932, Hammer would achieve greatness under the leadership of their sons James Carreras and Anthony Hinds. Before 1957, Hammer Studios was primarily known for low-budget comedies and dramas. In the indispensable reference Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography (1996), authors Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio describe it this way:
“Hammer’s ‘own product’ [as opposed to that which it distributed] consisted mostly of adaptations of BBC radio programs, the most successful of which was the Dick Barton series (1946–1951). The use of pre-sold titles would become a company staple. The association with Lippert [Robert Lippert Productions, a small American film company] made available fading but popular American stars. This gave Hammer films an appeal outside Britain, but most of them were routine, grade B productions.”
Hammer began to resemble the studio that history remembers in 1954 with the release of its first science fiction/horror film The Quatermass Xperiment (released in the U.S. as The Creeping Unknown) based on a popular six-episode BBC television production written by Nigel Kneale. The film was a huge international success, prompting Hammer to follow it up with the similarly horror-infused science fiction fare X-The Unknown (1956) and Quatermass 2 (1957, aka Enemy from Space). Quatermass also paved the way for a deal with Warner Brothers with the promise of more horror from Hammer for the major American studio to distribute internationally. For their first film under this deal, they chose to resurrect not only Frankenstein but the entire gothic horror subgenre.
The Creature Created by Man and Forgotten by Nature!
Christopher Lee was indignant. Had he really clawed his way through nearly twenty years of bit parts for this? He stormed into a dressing room and declared to the man he saw sitting in it, “I haven’t got any lines!” Without skipping a beat, the man answered, “You’re lucky, I’ve read the script.” Lee was immediately disarmed by the man’s quick-witted response and the two broke into smiles and laughter. Lee surely recognized the man, he was after all the BBC’s biggest television star at that time, Peter Cushing, but in that moment, one of horror cinema’s greatest on-screen partnerships and off-screen friendships was born.
Both men had surprising coincidences in their pasts that made their involvement in the first important Frankenstein film in nearly a decade seem something akin to destiny. Lee had met Boris Karloff on the set of a BBC television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1954–1956) when the younger man was a struggling novice and Karloff had long been a Master of the Macabre. “I liked him from the first and in the last years of his life, when we were neighbors in a London square, became deeply attached to him,” Lee later wrote. Cushing’s first job during a brief stay in Hollywood had been as Louis Hayward’s double in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) for Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) director James Whale. Cushing’s performance is not in the film as he was tasked to play opposite Hayward in his double role, but Whale was so impressed by his work that he gave Cushing a small role as an officer, his first screen credit.
It is unlikely that Peter Cushing (always a rather harsh critic of screenwriter Jimmy Sangster) would have preferred the original version of the script, Frankenstein and the Monster. Hammer certainly didn’t. Written by Milton Subotsky and brought to Hammer executive producer Michael Carreras (son of James Carreras) by his future Amicus Productions (eventually Hammer’s greatest rival) co-founder Max Rosenberg, this script was in many ways a reworking of memorable sequences from Universal’s first two Frankenstein films. When Hammer announced in the trades their plans to produce a new Frankenstein film, Universal was the first to respond, making it clear that any similarities would be met with litigation. This gave Hammer permission to throw out this script, which they did not seem to care much for in the first place.
Hammer had been pursuing Cushing for several years. James Carreras’s philosophy was quite different from most studio heads of the time who shunned anything and anyone that had to do with cinema’s great new rival, television. In Peter Cushing: An Autobiography, the actor wrote about Carreras and Hammer’s philosophy.
“James (later Sir James) Carreras was the driving force behind that venturesome organisation, and reasoned sagaciously that if someone well known and popular on the rival medium was starred in a film, that name could lure people back to those empty seats. He had been in constant touch with John [Redway, both Cushing and Lee’s agent], inviting me to work for them, but my commitments elsewhere prevented my accepting until 1957.”*
In fact, Cushing sought out Hammer when he heard they were making a new color version of the James Whale film he was so taken by in the early 1930s, urging his agent to suggest him for the part of Baron Viktor Frankenstein, no doubt complete with Cushing’s trademark pronunciation “Frankenshtein.”
X-The Unknown screenwriter Jimmy Sangster was immediately engaged to write a new screenplay. His first order of business was to shift the focus away from the Creature and onto Baron Viktor Frankenstein, a focus that would continue throughout the run of Hammer’s Frankenstein films, giving them a far different flavor from the Universal films. In those films, Colin Clive’s Frankenstein is driven by single-minded obsession, which often misguides him, but is rarely truly villainous. As the series went on, the various Doctor Frankensteins were often the heroes. Cushing’s Baron is not only clearly a villain, but a psychopath, willing to achieve his goals by any means necessary including graverobbing, mutilation of bodies, theft, bribery, and of course murder.
At one point, his tutor, and later assistant, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), describes Frankenstein as “neither wicked nor insane, just so dedicated to his work that he can’t see the natural consequences of it.” I do not believe this to be true, and even Krempe seems to no longer believe it by the film’s ending. His quote describes Colin Clive’s Frankenstein, who returns to a state of measured nobility when away from his laboratory. This is not true of Cushing’s Baron as demonstrated by his cold and immoral treatment of people such as the maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt), Elizabeth (Hazel Court), Paul, and even the Creature. Though he rarely murders by his own hands, he does create the circumstances for the death of Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth), whose brain he desires for the creature. He orchestrates the murder of Justine, with whom he has been carrying on an affair behind his fiancée Elizabeth’s back, at the hands of the Creature knowing full well that she is carrying his child. Even acts that could be interpreted as heroic are purely in the interest of self-preservation. His lack of concern or remorse is only amplified in the subsequent films.
One of Universal’s key concerns that it made very clear to Hammer was that the iconic Jack Pierce makeup was protected by copyright, and the Creature must under no circumstances share any distinguishing features with the “Karloff makeup.” After Christopher Lee was cast, he and make-up artist Phil Leaky experimented with various ideas which Lee said, “didn’t work. I wound up looking like a madman’s picture of a circus freak, or Elephant Man or Pig Man.” Finally, in desperation, Lee suggested, “I ought to look more like a human being, but a mess.” The result over time would become the second most recognizable Frankenstein makeup after the Pierce design, but at the time it was derided as looking “like a road accident.”
Lee, though greatly influenced by his friend Boris Karloff, sought to play the Creature as differently from him as he possibly could. Reflecting years later on playing the character, Lee wrote:
“Playing the Creature taught me to appreciate just how great the skill was that Boris had used in creating his Monster. And perhaps, in a way, it helped me to adjust to the very notion of working in the horror genre. It was a case of inventing a being who was neither oneself nor anybody else, but a composite of pieces of other people, mostly dead.[…] I decided that my hands must have an independent life, and that my movements must be spastic and unbalanced.”
Lee’s Creature is at turns pitiful and maniacal with its emotions and manner turning on a dime. His brain, damaged deliberately by Paul, seems to recognize Frankenstein as the man who murdered its former host, Professor Bernstein, and instantly attacks. On the other hand, he also has the curiosity and awkwardness of a child newly discovering its world.
Other key, and even revolutionary, aspects of The Curse of Frankenstein include a number of elements that would come to be known as the Hammer House Style. Curse, along with many Hammer films, was made at Bray Studios which was quite literally a large manor house on the Thames River. Production Designer Bernard Robinson made the best use of the spaces possible, creating lush, colorful environments, redressing them in ingenious ways, and often reusing sets for multiple films. Robinson purposefully designed the lab, for example, to be in stark contrast to what had come before. Instead of sparking electrical apparatuses as in the Universal films, Frankenstein’s laboratory in Curse is primarily chemical, featuring bubbling liquids of various colors in elaborate glass vessels. Rather than being fabricated on an inclining medical table, the Creature is preserved and imbued with life in a large glass tank filled with saline solution similar to what would later feature in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Curse was shot using the recently developed single-strip (one piece of film) Eastman Color process which was far cheaper, less complex, and shot with less cumbersome cameras than the three-strip (three pieces of film put together through an emulsion process) Technicolor process. Cinematographer Jack Asher lit the sets as though shooting in black and white, rather than flooding the sets with light as in the Technicolor process. This allowed for the deep shadows and a moody gothic feel of a classic horror film while also being one of the first full-color gothic horror films.** Asher would refine this process throughout the remainder of the 50s and into the 60s with Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), and others. All this under the keen direction of the great Terence Fisher whose name would become practically synonymous with Hammer along with Cushing and Lee.
The Curse of Frankenstein is also far more lurid than previous Frankenstein films, bordering on exploitation at times. There is a notable increase in violence and gore including closeups of severed body parts and blood. One shot, a closeup of an eyeball under a magnifying glass, was considered so shocking that it was removed from the film for decades before finally being restored in the recent Warner Brothers restoration and Blu-ray release. The film also features costumes that, shall we say, accentuate the natural assets of the female stars, making for rather titillating viewing in the relatively chaste 1950s. These were the first hints of the attitudes Hammer would take toward sexuality in its productions specifically in the casting of young, beautiful women that would rival James Bond and Playboy for their sexual iconography throughout the sixties and into the seventies.
The Face in the Tombstone Mirror
Hammer was so confident of the success of The Curse of Frankenstein that they began planning a sequel two months before the film was even released, registering the proposed film under the title The Blood of Frankenstein. Once again, Jimmy Sangster was commissioned to write a script as Hammer began production on The Abominable Snowman (1957) starring Peter Cushing, The Camp on Blood Island (1958), The Snorkel (1958), and Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula — 1958), which would unite Cushing and Lee once again. The continuing success of Hammer during this period, specifically the record-breaking revenues brought in by The Camp on Blood Island, paved the way for a deal with Columbia Pictures, giving the American studio 49% ownership of Bray Studios and the right to distribute Hammer’s product in the U.S. This led to a great inflow of cash for the small company, allowing them to expand their facilities a great deal, including building a soundstage on the Bray property which was first used when filming Dracula.
As the writing was underway, James and Michael Carreras flew to New York to meet with Columbia Pictures executives about the production of a television series to be made under Columbia’s television banner, Screen Gems. Directed by Curt Siodmak, writer of The Wolf Man (1941), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and more, with a teleplay by the premiere husband/wife science-fiction writing team of the era C.L. Moore (credited as Catherine Kuttner) and Henry Kuttner from a story by Siodmak, the Tales of Frankenstein pilot titled “The Face in the Tombstone Mirror” (1958) should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, it seems that Screen Gems wanted only the Hammer name, not the Hammer ideas, and went with its own production. The pilot, which is readily available online, is clunky, poorly acted, and highly derivative. Screen Gems held the rights to show the Universal films on television and blatantly ripped off several elements from them, including the Pierce makeup and lab equipment. Even some of the musical cues are lifted wholesale from the Universal films. Though Anthony Hinds got along well with director Curt Siodmak, Screen Gems rejected the pilot, and it was never aired.
Had Hammer had more input, the pilot and subsequent show might have been very different. Jimmy Sangster, at Michael Carreras’s request, produced a list of ideas that might be put to use in a Frankenstein series. Each episode would have followed the Baron through various locales and even time periods, a bit like a diabolical and gothic Doctor Who, facing various creatures both of his own creation and not. Some of the ideas included zombies, dabblings in voodoo, black magic and summoning the Devil, mutations, cryogenics, testing the limits of human pain, and more. According to author John LeMay, Sangster mapped out ideas for three seasons of the show offering specifics for various character and situational arcs that would overarch its more anthological “monster of the week” format.
We Dare You to See It! We Double-Dare You to Forget It!
Luckily, Hammer had an ace up its sleeve as production went forward on the now-retitled The Revenge of Frankenstein in early 1958. When asked how the presumably dead Baron, who was being ushered to the guillotine when last seen, would return for a sequel, James Carreras joked “Oh, we sew his head back on again.” The reality in the film is not quite so simple as that. Instead, Baron Frankenstein, played once again by Peter Cushing, makes an arrangement with the disabled jailer, Karl (Oscar Quitak), to transplant his brain into a strong body. With the help of the executioner, Karl helps Frankenstein escape by wrestling the priest who accompanies the Baron in his “final” moments into the guillotine to take his place. The world believes Frankenstein is dead, and so he and Karl go into hiding to continue his dastardly work.
The Revenge of Frankenstein is a rather ingenious continuation of the story and carries almost nothing, besides the character of Dr. Frankenstein, from Shelley’s novel or from previous iterations of the story into its new territory. Having set up practice in a new town, Cushing’s Frankenstein, hiding under the name Dr. Stein, uses his work at a hospital for impoverished townspeople as a means to continue his experiments. He builds a new body for Karl in an old wine cellar that he has repurposed into a lab. Karl serves as his assistant, tending to the animals that Frankenstein uses in his experiments including a chimpanzee named Otto into which he has transplanted the brain of an orangutan. Animal experimentation is touched upon in Curse but taken to new levels here. As a result of the operation, Otto has become a cannibal, foreshadowing trouble ahead for Karl and his new body.
There are several unique elements to The Revenge of Frankenstein both for Hammer and for any Frankenstein film. Cushing’s Baron is still villainous in this film but not on a level as in the other movies in the cycle. He uses his experiments for the benefit of others, particularly for Karl, and also draws a fair amount of sympathy at the end when he is beaten to death by the patients of the hospital who have discovered his true identity. In the end, Frankenstein’s brain is transferred by his apprentice, Dr. Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews), into the body of another creature the Baron has built, essentially rendering Frankenstein immortal for many sequels to come. Far more unique to the film is the Creature, played by Michael Gwynn, who is handsome and well-spoken at first, with the good nature of Karl driving him. As the film goes on, his mind and body deteriorate as the brain and body begin to reject one another. A similar trajectory would appear in the television film Frankenstein: The True Story in 1973, a version that claimed great adherence to the source novel.
The Revenge of Frankenstein brought together most of the key players behind the scenes as the original film. In addition to Sangster, producer Anthony Hinds, cinematographer Jack Asher, production designer Bernard Robinson, and Hammer’s greatest director Terence Fisher all returned for (or were assigned to) the sequel. The only major player to not fulfill the same role for Revenge was composer James Bernard who was more than likely too busy with other films like Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles. He would return to the series for Frankenstein Created Woman in 1967 after a great deal of work on other projects for Hammer and Amicus. Leonard Salzedo ably took up scoring duties for Revenge, which is by far his best-known score.
This proved to be the last Hammer Frankenstein film to fully embrace the Hammer House Style. This is largely due to the dismissal of Jack Asher who was released by Hammer after 1960’s The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll flopped supposedly because he worked too slow for them. According to Richard Klemensen, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Little Shoppe of Horrors, a magazine devoted to Hammer and British horror, no film that Asher worked on went over schedule or over budget because of him. Regardless of the reasoning, the look of Hammer horror was never quite the same after.
Revenge was a solid hit for Hammer though it did not quite reach the heights of Curse. Hammer would continue to produce both original horror and sequels in the meantime, many of them starring Peter Cushing. But the Baron himself would lay dormant for six years before returning to unleash his evil upon the world. 🩸
Footnotes
*The British spellings of organization, etc. appear in the original text.
**I might even go so far as to call it the first. The Warner Brothers films Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) were also in color but used the two-strip Technicolor process so not technically full color. Both these films are well worth seeing. 1943’s Phantom of the Opera starring Claude Raines is perhaps the first major full-color horror film, though it only nominally qualifies as belonging to the genre.
Sources
Classic Monsters Unmade: The Lost Films of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and Other Monsters, Vol. 2 1956–2000 by John LeMay
English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema by Jonathan Rigby
Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio
Peter Cushing: The Complete Memoirs by Peter Cushing
Tall, Dark and Gruesome by Christopher Lee
About
Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Instagram @brianwaves42.
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