Young Frankenstein

Respectable neurosurgeon Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) has spent his entire life trying to live down his grandfather Victor's unnatural, unsanctioned, and unbelievable experiments in the reanimation of the dead. While teaching a class one day he learns he has been willed the Frankenstein family's ancestral castle in Transylvania, and, traveling there, he discovers the secret journal in which his grandfather described how he successfully brought a corpse to life (a handsomely bound volume titled "How I Did It"). Reading the incredible narrative, Frederick realized with a shock: it ... could ... work! Newly infected with the zeal of Victor Frankenstein, Frederick and his faithful assistant Igor (Marty Feldman) recreate the infamous experiment with a body salvaged from a graveyard and a brain stolen from a laboratory. One hitch, though: When Igor accidentally destroys the brain he's come for, he simply grabs the next one off the shelf -- a brain marked "Abnormal"...

Fresh from the success of the spoof western Blazing Saddles, director Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein, an affectionate sendup of the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s that many consider his best film. Shot in black and white from a script by Brooks and Wilder, the film's pitch-perfect recreation of the classic horror-movie atmosphere that enthralled audiences of a different time is at times closer to homage than parody, and much of its success is due to Brooks' decision to embody the cinematic sensibilities of that earlier era, rather than to either go overboard exaggerating them (a persistent problem in his later, mediocre work) or to insert modern characters into the classic setting. Transylvania in the 1970s, it seems, is little different from Transylvania in the 1930s, and either way it doesn't much seem like an inviting place to visit.

It usually helps to be familiar with the source of a parody, but in the case of Young Frankenstein it's not at all necessary to have read Mary Shelley's novel or seen James Whale's classic films Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), because Universal's version of the Frankenstein story is so deeply ingrained in our mass subconscious that we already know everything we need to know about it. Victor Frankenstein's spooky, neo-Gothic laboratory from the earlier films, the classic visual representation of the Mad Scientist in popular culture, has been faithfully replicated here; indeed, Brooks uses many of the props from those films in his own laboratory. As Frederick Frankenstein's monster, Peter Boyle has neither a flat head nor bolts in his neck, but he evokes Boris Karloff's hulking creature in every other way. Not to be forgotten are Young Frankenstein's trio of comic actresses: Madeline Kahn as Frederick's slightly ditsy fiancée Elizabeth, Teri Garr as Teutonic stereotype Inga, and Chloris Leachman as the fearsome Frau Blücher.

Points to ponder:

• Most of the lines Frederick quotes from his grandfather's diary are actually from Mary W. Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or A Modern Prometheus.
• Count the number of times the clock bell tolls during the opening scene.