In the wake of Hammer Films' sudden stratospheric success on the silver screen with the sanguineous and stylish The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), executive producer Michael Carreras turned his eye towards the Stateside small screen for continuing Creature-creating capers. The genesis of the Bray studio's Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Hazel Court (oh be still my pulsating heart, floating in your tank of formaldehyde) starring feature film had been as arduous as the Promethean act of bringing life to the gut-stitched golem itself: the initial screenplay penned by future Amicus founders Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg (with the somewhat underwhelmingly prosaic title of Frankenstein and the Monster) had been received with more apathy than excitement, and the initial idea of filming it in black and white (like Hammer's breakout hit of 1955, Val Guest's The Quatermass Xperiment) with ageing maven of the macabre Boris Karloff in the role of the creator - rather than the Creature, this time - brought rumblings and mumblings from the legal department of US studio Universal. Faced with the threat of legal repercussions if any element of their film should resemble the monochrome 1931 James Whale Frankenstein or its sequels, Carreras cut his losses by paying off Subotsky and Rosenberg for $5000, binning their pedestrian and derivative script and commissioning a new take from Jimmy Sangster in a new and different style to be filming in glorious Eastmancolour with lashings of Kensington Gore - establishing sex and grue Hammer Gothic style with which the studio would become forever and indelibly associated.
With a certifiable epoch-making hit on their hands - a position entrenched and solidified even further with the success of another adaptation of 19th century literature with Terence Fisher's Dracula (aka: Horror of Dracula [which looks like a pretty neat Jessica Jones episode title]) the following year - Carreras and Hammer soon planned sequels in what would these days be viewed as the planning of the establishment of a franchise. Signing a distribution deal with Columbia Pictures, Hammer announced forthcoming releases including The Camp on Blood Island (Val Guest, 1958), The Snorkel (Guy Green, 1958) and the then-titled Frankensteinian follow-up The Blood of Frankenstein - soon to become The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1958) - Carreras answering the question of how a sequel could be possible after the antagonistic protagonist's long walk to the sharpened blade of the guillotine at the climax of Curse with a flippant "Oh, we sew the head back on".
Before Frankenstein would return to wreak his revenging upon the big screen, however, Hammer would channel their creative spark into the television channel - embarking with the Screen Gems division of their new partner Columbia upon the fraught journey to television pilot stage for a proposed series of 26 half-hour episodes of small screen shivers. After a pilot script by Hammer's own Jimmy Sangster (entitled 'The Single-Minded Blackmailer') was rejected among several others, Columbia opted for a scenario from Universal legend Curt Siodmak, writer of classic Creature Features such as The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Roy W. Neill, 1943), I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) and The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) and author of the three-times-filmed 1943 transplantation terror tome Donovan's Brain. With Siodmak as storyliner (adapted by husband and wife writing team Henry and Catherine Kuttner - who, under the pen name C. L. Moore, had been one of the early pioneering women to write in the fields of pulp science fiction and fantasy for publications such as Weird Tales) as well as director and associate producer, this Hammer project would accrue many of the stylistic trappings of the older Universal cycle - an aspect encouraged by Columbia who had acquired the rights to the Universal Horror back catalogue with their syndicated Shock Theater television package of 52 of Universal's 1930s and 1940s films.
The influence is clear from the very opening: a black and while chiaroscuro montage of recycled footage (perhaps recycling is an appropriate theme when considering a story about a man who would rather use the parts of the dead to create new things rather than the wastage of throwing them away to rot with the worms of the earth: the Baron was ahead of his time in pioneering the art of upcycling!), including the drifting spectral brides filing past the tomb - alone in a darkened room - from Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, and the eerie swirling features of David Hoffman entrapped in a crystal ball from the opening prologues of the Inner Sanctum mysteries with his voice overdubbed by the stentorian tones of former radio Sherlock Holmes Ben Wright introducing us to this new eerie twilit hinterland 'twixt Universal Monsterland and Hammer Eurogoth:
"From the beginning of time, many men have sought the unknown - delving into dark legions where lie those tombs which are destined to destroy. Of all these eerie adventurers into darkness, none was more driven by insatiable curiosity nor went further into the unknown than the unforgettable Baron Frankenstein. So infamous were his exploits that his name stands forever as a symbol of all that is shocking... unspeakable... forbidden. Thus in our day any story which chills the soul and freezes the blood is truly a Tale of Frankenstein!"
The renowned resurrectionist of revenants is played here by professional Teuton and Wimbledon fan Anton Diffring (of many a Nazi war film, and also Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death [1959], Francois Truffaut's classic Fahrenheit 451 [1966] and most famous in our house as Pavel in Paul Annett's The Beast Must Die [1974] and Herr De Flores in Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis [Chris Clough, 1988]), his casting one of the few concessions by Columbia to Hammer. He plays the role of the perfidious Baron very much in the icy patrician mold established by Peter Cushing in The Curse of Frankenstein and his literally stepped into Cushing's
Furthering the iconic Universal imagery is the sequence of husband and wife couple Paul Halpert (prolific and veteran television actor Richard Bull) and Christine Halpert (Helen Westcott, who had played Rosamund in Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre earlier in 1958 and would go on to add to her previous genre credit of beautiful Karloff-bait Vicky Edwards in 1953's Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde also in '58 with roles in Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus and James Wong Howe's Invisible Avenger) arriving in this benighted and rain-swept Bavarian mountain village, leaving the train station with drenched umbrellas assailed by the weather just like Basil Rathbone and Josephine Hutchinson's Baron and Baroness in Rowland V. Lee's 1939 Son of Frankenstein.
The Halperts have come to seek the help of the Baron, known throughout the land for his radical and pioneering surgical techniques, due to Paul's ailing health. They make the usual outsider mistake of mentioning the Frankenstein name while sitting in the village inn, causing the stock reaction of stunned and suspicious silence from the locals in this Alpine Slaughtered Lamb - doubtless a local tavern for local people. Heading through the storm they reach the Castle and plead their case to Frankenstein himself, asking if their is anything that he can do to cure the degenerative disease that is killing Paul and cutting their marital bliss short. Noticing that Paul's shaking hands are of an elegant design, Frankenstein enquires as to his occupation and gets a gleam in his eye upon hearing that he is a sculptor ("The brain of an artist!" - his rapture akin to Cushing's upon the hands of Bardello falling into his own). Determining to have such a brain for his Monster to replace the killer's mind that has made the creation so erratic and violent, Frankenstein declares that there is nothing that he can do and bids them a terse adieu before waiting patiently for the very few days that it will take Halpert to succumb so that the drunken gravedigger in his pay (Peter Brocco) can aid him in accessing the precious cerebrum that he so craves.
Alas, after the funeral but before departing from town Christine decides to pay a last visit to Paul's grave - discovering not only the disturbed earth but also the medallion that she had placed around his neck upon his death for him to be interred with. Her suspicions and hopes aflame, she heads straight to Chateau Frankenstein elated with the idea that the Baron has somehow revived her beloved husband. Timing is everything in scientific experiments, and the timing here is most definitely off as Christine stumbles onto the scene just as the Monster with Paul's brain has awoken and triggering adverse reactions to his new reflection in the mirror and their recognition of each other. Breaking his chains and pulling the wires from the wall, the confused Creature bundles his erstwhile life partner up in his arms in traditional fashion to carry her off, pausing only to break the mirror showing him his new and hideous visage, but the Baron's decision to terminate this failing experiment by emptying his pistol into it (as opposed to Udo Kier's Baron emptying himself into his creation's pistil, in Paul Morrissey's 1974 Flesh for Frankenstein) distracts and distresses the daemon to the point of distraction, hurling his creator through the French windows (Megowan framed in the shattered window is quite reminiscent of a shot of Lon Chaney's Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein [Kenton, 1942]) before the wounded beast lumbers off into the night. The dying fiend finds his way back to the graveyard and falls into Paul's own little acre - the grave from which Frankenstein wrenched him the previous night As Frankenstein frantically grabs a shovel and heaps the earth back into the hole and upon the body (a reversal of his usual activity - a body snatcher turned dispatcher as the inhumane inhumes the inhuman) the local gendarmerie arrive to arrest him for grave robbing.
"You have your job to do, and i have mine", says the Baron to Sydney Mason's chief of police "and i don't think either of us would let anything get in the way of us fulfilling our respective destinies. Time is of small matter. You see - there's always tomorrow..."
Clearly in the spirit of Professor Bernard Quatermass' vow of "I'm going to start again!" at the climax of The Quatermass Xperiment, unlike that occasion the sequel-bait would remain unfulfilled as Carreras headed back to England disappointed with the one-sided nature of the Columbia coalition meaning that there would be no more entries in the annals of the Tales of Frankenstein.
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