By Oliver Longden
26th May 2013 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Peter Cushing. Perhaps best known to modern audiences as the skeletally thin Grand Moff Tarkin from the first Star Wars film, Cushing was a versatile and immensely dedicated actor. He achieved worldwide recognition for his many roles in Hammer horror films, particularly his role as the heroic Doctor Van Helsing opposite his great friend Christopher Lee as Dracula. Before he starred in Dracula, Cushing also brought another great horror character to life: the Baron Victor Frankenstein, who he played in six films inspired by the Mary Shelley character between 1957 and 1973.
For complex copyright reasons Hammer were required to make their opening film The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) completely distinct from the Universal films of the thirties, which had provided cinema with its most enduring image of the monster as a lurching colossus played with tremendous pathos by the great Boris Karloff. In order to deal with this issue Hammer opted to move the focus away from the monster and onto Frankenstein himself. This change of emphasis turned out to be a move of genius and the film stands out today as arguably the best Frankenstein film ever made. The Curse of Frankenstein is more concerned with the kind of man that makes monsters than with the monster itself. It plays out as a battle of morality between Frankenstein and his associate Paul (Robert Urquhart), who originally supports his friend’s research but gradually becomes overwhelmed with misgivings as Frankenstein moves from animal experiments to grave-robbing in his endless quest to master the mysteries of life and death.
It is Peter Cushing who was able to bring this complex and driven anti-hero to life. Gifted with a natural charisma, a mellifluous voice and a gentlemanly demeanour, Cushing played Frankenstein as a man of high moral ambition whose undoing is his complete fixation on his work to the exclusion of all else. He gives us a man driven to the extremes of hubris, yet still remains an attractive and sympathetic character, despite his flaws. As a doctor and a man of science he is completely convincing. Cushing was a master of detail work and fine body acting, his meticulous, confident movements in the surgical sequences clearly showing the value of his extensive preparation for the role. Director Terence Fisher, who directed the majority of the Frankenstein sequels, made full use of Cushing’s natural skills as a heroic protagonist to evoke a conflicted and ambiguous protagonist. Cushing plays Frankenstein as a genius whose greatest failing is that the ends always justifies the means, a man who cannot see his monstrous creations as others see them because his eyes are always fixed on the next stage of his work. He is a man in which humanity and scientific callousness are constantly at war.
This tension is explored to greater or lesser effect in all the Hammer Frankenstein movies, and it’s a testament to Cushing’s charisma that they all remain so watchable despite being more or less iterations of the same story. As soon as a Hammer Frankenstein film starts you know that this will be a film about a man pushing the limits of medical science in gruesome ways and that it will all unravel in an orgy of violence when his experiments go horribly wrong. In The Revenge of Frankenstein (1959) the Baron is exploring transplanting brains from one body to another in order to give a new lease of life to his disfigured servant. This is the only Frankenstein movie to be a direct sequel to Curse of Frankenstein; in the four films which follow the continuity is rebooted with each successive film, which leads to the slightly odd scenario of the same actor playing different versions of the same character. It’s a decent enough film, although it suffers from not having a central character who acts as Frankenstein’s absent conscience.
In The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) Hammer sought to take advantage of being able to have their creature appear more like the Karloff creature, complete with flattened forehead and neck bolts. This actually serves to weaken the film, as does the somewhat camper tone and incoherent plotting. Whereas previously Frankenstein has been shown as impatient with stupidity and the limited visions of those around him, in Evil of Frankenstein he is more generally impatient and consequently appears less of a genius. There is a subplot about a stage hypnotist using the monster to perform thefts and settle old scores which is hammed up to the hilt, and there’s a general sense that this isn’t a film that has a clear sense of identity.
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) shares the same camp tone and the same identity crisis as Evil of Frankenstein. Cushing is at his most humane in this adaptation; we see much less of the man willing to do anything to see his vision realised. There are some intriguing elements to Frankenstein Created Woman, as the creature is the body of disfigured woman made whole by the surgeon’s art and given the brain her recently deceased lover. This pairing of a male brain and female body gives the film an unusual transgender spin, but perhaps unsurprisingly the issues of body dysphoria that might be expected to result from such as body swap are never really explored. Cushing’s almost paternal delivery of his role in this film perhaps owes something to the feminine nature of the monster, and also something to the fact that Frankenstein is more a supporting character than the central protagonist in the drama.
Thankfully things take a turn for the genuinely horrific with Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), which sees the Baron back attempting to save the life of a slowly expiring former colleague by transplanting his brain into the body of a dead man. Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed showcases Frankenstein at his most callous, ruthlessly blackmailing his landlady’s fiancé into assisting him in his own macabre work and happy to commit murder if it furthers his research. Cushing brings all his driven intensity to the role and succeeds in producing the most villainous portrayal of the character so far, a dark depiction of a man of science who has little of the humanitarian streak seen in other entries in the franchise. Aside from an ill judged rape sequence (inserted at the behest of the distributors) this is probably the strongest of the Frankenstein films after The Curse of Frankenstein. The series continued without Cushing in 1970 with The Horror of Frankenstein; a tongue in cheek remake of Curse of Frankenstein starring Ralph Bates as the Baron, it was a self conscious attempt to take the franchise in a new, blackly comic direction. It didn’t really come off and in 1974 Peter Cushing returned to the role that he had made his own in a more traditional gothic horror.
By the time Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell was shot, Cushing was 59 and looked much more frail than in previous instalments. He exudes the cadaverous glow of a man who has been burnt out by his obsessions, driven by his fixations to a fragile state of health. The action takes place in a lunatic asylum where a young man, inspired by the Baron’s work, is committed when he found conducting forbidden experiments. He finds Frankenstein has installed himself as the asylum doctor by blackmailing the corrupt director of the facility. Together the young man and Frankenstein create a new monster, the first for many films to be stitched together from the remains of different bodies. Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell feels strangely nostalgic, partly because it was director Terence Fisher’s last film, and partly because by 1974 the Hammer style of gothic horror was on the wane with less mannered, more explicit films beginning to move in from America. Cushing delivers a strong performance in his last appearance as the Baron, once again portraying the character as indefatigable in his search for scientific perfection but blind to the truth that, as a resident in a lunatic asylum, Baron Frankenstein is exactly where he belongs.
Frankenstein is in many ways Peter Cushing’s greatest performance. There’s no other character who allowed him to show off his range to the same extent as the mercurial and fanatical Baron. The mixture of geniality and coldness that Frankenstein possesses perfectly suited Cushing’s skills, and he was able to turn in a characterisation that was often chilling, sometimes strangely warm and always extremely watchable, even when the scripts were less than strong and the rest of the cast were frantically chewing the scenery. With the gentleman of horror turning 100 this week there’s no better way to mark the occasion than to sit down with a bottle of wine and enjoy The Curse of Frankenstein, one of the best Hammer films which contains one of the truly great performances from their most engaging star. Peter Cushing, 100 and still sadly missed.
Look out for more Peter Cushing Centenary tributes here at Brutal As Hell in the week ahead.