This Time Get It Right
Sep. 15th, 2016 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowOver at tor.com, there's a wonderful review of the classic Young Frankenstein, in a memorial of the career of Gene Wilder. One of the commenters pointed out something I had never noticed before.
The tragedy of Frankenstein was the scientist's refusal to take responsibility for what he had done: rejecting his "child", causing the creature to become the monster we all remember. The creature was good-hearted, incredibly smart, and lonely; that it became a mass murderer can be laid at its creator's feet. In Young Frankenstein, Frederick gets it right. He approaches the creature (admittedly under duress and after several false starts) with love, and eventually makes it what the original monster should have been.
I never thought of that before. That film, incredibly enough, has just gone further up in my esteem.
(Oh, by the way, Mel Brooks wanted to cut the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene! Fortunately, Wilder talked him out of it. Good grief, Mel!)
The tragedy of Frankenstein was the scientist's refusal to take responsibility for what he had done: rejecting his "child", causing the creature to become the monster we all remember. The creature was good-hearted, incredibly smart, and lonely; that it became a mass murderer can be laid at its creator's feet. In Young Frankenstein, Frederick gets it right. He approaches the creature (admittedly under duress and after several false starts) with love, and eventually makes it what the original monster should have been.
I never thought of that before. That film, incredibly enough, has just gone further up in my esteem.
(Oh, by the way, Mel Brooks wanted to cut the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene! Fortunately, Wilder talked him out of it. Good grief, Mel!)
