BY FRED BLOSSER
As
movie censorship relaxed in the early 1970s, Mel Welles’ horror film “Lady
Frankenstein†added sex and nudity to the familiar Frankenstein formula of the
single-minded and arguably demented scientist who creates a monster and lives
to regret it. In the 1971 production,
now available in a handsome, fully loaded Blu-ray edition from Nucleus Films
encoded for Region B, Dr. Tanya Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri) returns home to the
family estate after completing medical school. Having inherited the family obsession, she is determined to help her
father (Joseph Cotten) realize his long-frustrated ambition of creating human
life in his laboratory. When Baron
Frankenstein and his associate Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) balk at including the
refined young woman in their gory experiments, she fiercely overrides their
objections: “Stop treating me like a
child! I’m a doctor and a surgeon.†Frankenstein and Marshall successfully
reanimate a creature that they’ve stitched together from plundered cadavers,
but events take a turn for the worse, and soon a suspicious police officer,
Inspector Harris (Mickey Hargitay), begins nosing around the Frankenstein
castle.
“Lady
Frankenstein†was filmed in Italy and independently marketed in Europe, where
Rosalba Neri, Mickey Hargitay, and Paul Muller were popular actors in genre
movies. In the U.S., it was distributed
by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Inexplicably, New World billed Rosalba Neri as “Sara Bay†in the
American credits and promotional materials, and depicted the exotically
beautiful brunette actress as a blonde in the poster art. Like many other exploitation films from the
same period, notably New World’s own series of Women-in-Prison productions like
“The Big Bird Cage,†it professes to have a feminist message while at the same
time including a fair amount of female nudity to meet the expectations of the
grindhouse audiences to which it was pitched, here and abroad.
The
feminist aspect is clear when Tanya discusses the resistance she faced in the
conservative halls of higher learning. “Was it difficult, very difficult, being my daughter?†her father asks sympathetically. “Sometimes,†Tanya responds, “but mainly
because I was a woman. The professors
still have a lot of old-fashioned ideas about a woman’s place.†In the wake of recent news events, many of us
will sympathize with Tanya’s dilemma and reflect that things haven’t changed a
lot in the male-dominated corridors of power, either in the two hundred years
since the early-1800s setting of “Lady Frankenstein,†or indeed in the
forty-seven years since the film was made.
However,
as the story progresses and Tanya takes center stage, she begins to employ sex,
seduction, and murder to achieve her ends. You may start to wonder: do her
ruthless and increasingly cruel methods invalidate the movie’s claim to advance
a feminist theme . . . or underscore it? When one character is murdered in cold blood at her suggestion while she
has sex with him to distract his attention, does the film idealize -- or
objectify -- Rosalba Neri’s bare breasts and ecstatic facial expressions? When the infatuated, middle-aged Marshall
professes his love for her, does Tanya practice gender bias in reverse by
suggesting that she respects his intellect, but she’d respect it more if
Marshall were also young and handsome? The answers, I suppose, depend on your
interpretation of female empowerment.