Profile- Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)

By the time he made Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks was already one of the leading creators of parody in the world. Brooks understood how audiences came to parodies with numerous expectations, which some of his most successful gags would purposely go against to achieve their success.


Mel Brooks is perhaps the most prolific filmmaker-parodist of the Twentieth Century, exploring various subjects like the Old West (Blazing Saddles, 1974), silent film (Silent Movie, 1976), Alfred Hitchcock thrillers (High Anxiety, 1977), world history (History of the World: Part I, 1981), science fiction (Spaceballs, 1987), the Middle Ages (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993), and vampires (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995).  Brooks was at his peak in 1974, releasing two of the most popular and critically acclaimed parodies, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.  Brooks feels that Young Frankenstein is his best film, but he gives all the credit to the power of Mary Shelley’s novel. With Young Frankenstein, Brooks achieved a new level of sophistication for parody.  


Few films are as fine a parody as this one.  It lampoons the conventions of previous, dramatic film adaptations of Shelley’s novel—and yet at the same time, it approaches her novel in a reverent way.  His film reveals the necessity of the borrowing of the conventions of tragedy in order for comedy to succeed.  Many scholars argue that Brook’s comedy is far closer to the spirit and themes of Shelley’s original work than the earlier, “serious” pictures.  In an unintentionally backwards way, I viewed this film years before James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which resulted in me feeling horribly underwhelmed when I finally saw the latter film.  I can say in all honesty that Young Frankenstein is truly a superior film, for it simply has a tighter narrative, more carefully crafted tension and release, and is a more genuine portrayal of Shelley’s characters, particularly The Creature.   The plot points and character motivations of Young Frankenstein are clear and succinct, no matter how absurd they may be.  On the contrary, Frankenstein (1931), just ends with Henry Frankenstein’s father celebrating with young women after the monster is apparently gone forever. It presents the denouement necessary to a non-comic film, yet it feels tacked on—almost an attempt to distract the viewer from the real tragedy of The Creature.  Though not necessary to a comedy, Young Frankenstein does present a resolution for The Creature, as he becomes the intellectual of Shelley’s novel—however, the primal instincts that The Creature had displayed now seem to have been brought out in Victor—perhaps arguing that those instincts were always within him, but repressed.


I find the creation scene of Young Frankenstein as much of an aesthetic experience as when Sir Laurence Olivier recites a Shakespearean soliloquy.  It is here in the film that the line between the conventions of comedy and the borrowed ones of drama blurs the most.  The platform slowly raises as Frederick’s enormous shadow covers the wall.  As I stated above, Young Frankenstein comes closest to the intellectual Creature of Shelley that reads frequently and is quite eloquent.  Brooks presents a bourgeois Creature that reads the Wall Street Journal, while Karloff’s portrayal presents a stiff-limbed mute who merely stumbles around.

Brooks’ film is as much another, equally valid, interpretation of Shelley’s novel, as it is a parody of past interpretations.  It not only explores the themes of Shelley, but the role of comedy as a direct foil to drama.  Comedy reveals the painful truth of The Creature’s longings beneath the surface of his actions more readily than tragedy can.  Young Frankenstein works exactly because it gives us better access to Shelley—a direct approach that only the genre of comedy allows.  


The seminal idea for Young Frankenstein came from the mind of Gene Wilder while he was working with Brooks on Blazing Saddles (1974). Wilder agreed to play the role of the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles if their next collaboration could be his idea about Frankenstein’s grandson.

 
Much of the techniques used in the making of this film actually came from the Universal horror series that it parodies, including the use of green makeup for the creature, and the original sets and laboratory equipment. Brooks took care to remain true to the original films, making his parody work so much better by copying the original conventions so precisely—causing the viewer to realize how one takes the conventions for granted in the original source.


The preview audiences hated it, and it appeared to Brooks and company that it was a failure.  Wilder and Brooks got together and cut the film down considerably.  Both felt that the final cut was far superior to the original cut.  The experience of the test audience reminds the reader of the communal nature of comedy.  The live feedback of the test audience is the same phenomenon of spectator participation in the Medieval Carnival, the audience reactions to live Vaudeville acts, and the Marx Brothers’ road shows.  Brooks’ discussion of the running time of the picture alludes to the episodic nature of comedy—shown so well through Vaudeville.  The shorter (than drama) runtime of a feature comedy seems to be an audience expectation, related to the aforementioned audience feedback.

Reception

Young Frankenstein was highly profitable.  With a budget of $2.8 million (about $13 million today), it ended up grossing $86 million (nearly $400 million today).  It reassured the public and film executives of Brooks’ box office appeal that he had established with The Producers (1968) and Blazing Saddles (1974).  The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Sound and Best Writing (Adaption), but did not win either.  Tim Dirks of American Movie Classics Filmsite remarks that it was odd that Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder were not nominated for their performances and that Gerald Hirschfield was not nominated for his cinematography.  If we consider the cinematography of the opening sequence, for example, we see that it serves as a running visual gag that continually mocks the cinematic conventions of dramatic presentation.  It is for this reason, I surmise, that no reviewers thought to recognize Hirschfield’s contribution, as critics only saw his work as a parody of cinematographer Gregg Toland’s style .  

At the time of its release, the reviews were overwhelmingly favorable.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that “it works on a couple of levels: first as comedy, and then as a weirdly touching story in its own right”, alluding to its unique interpretation of Shelley’s work.  Box Office Magazine gave the film a positive review and noted that Brooks “takes on horror movies, a field that has sometimes been funny when the films were done too seriously”, raising the point of how daring Brooks had to be in order to parody a series of pictures that elicit laughter in their own right.  Both reviewers talk about the necessity of an original, non-comic source for parody to work.  Jay Cocks of Time Magazine liked the film, especially the dance hall sequence, which he called “some sort of deranged high point in contemporary film comedy”.  The sequence curiously stands out because of its furthest departure from the novel.  The one negative review that I found comes from Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic.  In it, he mostly complained about the running time, which he thought was too long, “Brooks is a funny joke-and-gag man, but not 104- minutes funny”.  Vincent Canby of the New York Times, focused on the gags as well, “Mel Brooks’s funniest, most cohesive comedy to date…. Some of the gags don’t work, but fewer than in any previous Brooks film that I’ve seen, and when the jokes are meant to be bad, they are riotously poor. What more can one ask of Mel Brooks?”  Notice how Canby addresses the narrative structure through the term “cohesive” and describes the gags as “riotous” and also implies that one should not expect more from a comic filmmaker than a few funny gags.  I find it interesting that only two of these five reviewers acknowledge the necessity of the conventions of the established Frankenstein lore for the parody to succeed.

Quite a few of the more recent reviews of the film have been negative, much more so than when it premiered.  I attribute this partly to the fact that so many later comedies, like The Naked Gun series, The Scary Movie series, and even some television comedies, have copied Brook’s manner of parody so closely, that the humor of Young Frankenstein does not seem to be as fresh and original as it genuinely is.  As for the less than favorable reviews, in 1999, Donald Liebenson of the Chicago Tribune said, “Viewed from a Marxist (as in Brothers) perspective, Young Frankenstein is Brooks’ Night at the Opera.  It is not his purest, funniest film, but it is his most sustained, satisfying, and accessible”.  His terms “pure” and “funny” describe the gags, while “sustained”, “satisfying”, and “accessible” describe the narrative—ignoring the necessary balance between them.  In 2007, Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews complained that “Most of the gags were juvenile and bombed”, adding that “The best parody of Frankenstein is Whale’s own followup of The Bride of Frankenstein”, echoing early statements of the source series’ (unintended) laughable quality.  


The majority of reviews are still positive.  Unlike the earlier reviewers, almost every Twenty First Century reviewer focuses on the necessity of Shelley’s novel and Whale’s interpretation to the success of Brook’s comedy.  In 2006, Ryan Keefer of DVD Verdict said, “If James Whale’s films are the gold standard, then Brooks’ interpretation of the Mary Shelley characters is a more unspoken, yet outstanding sequel to the original”.  In 2009, independent critic Cole Smithey, stated that “Mel Brooks caught comic lightning in a bottle” and added that it contains “an atmosphere of reverent delight beneath its bawdy puns and outrageous physical humor”.  Bill Gibron of Filmcritic.com, loved the film stating, “No one could have expected the abject brilliance that was his take on the terror genre” adding that there is “something so satisfying about this movie, so likeable and loving that it’s hard to look at the rest of Brooks’s canon in a similar light”.  Adam Smith of Empire Magazine called it “a marvelously crafted, beautifully shot comedic homage to James Whale’s 1931 classic”, adding that it is “a perfect example of early Brooks firing on all comic cylinders, and what it demonstrates is that for spoof to work, the spoofers must have deep affection for the material” that they parody.  The statements of these reviewers reinforce my argument that Young Frankenstein is one of the finest examples of parody, for they not only acknowledge his faithfulness to Shelley’s novel, but his superior filmmaking sense over that of Whale.  Parody’s closeness to its source allows reviewers to clearly evaluate it against the source material.  With these few reviews, we see a faint comic blip on the radar of film criticism, in that these critics directly praise a comic filmmaker as having created a work more significant than that of a “serious” filmmaker.  The film was an indisputable triumph for Brooks and he took great pride in his work on Young Frankenstein.