Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (DVD, 1998, Closed Captioned)

During the Romantic Period of writing, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were leading writers. During the earlier women's rights movement, of the 1800's, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the famous, "A Vindication for the Rights of Women." She was married to Godwin, a writer in his own right.

Mary Shelly was Wollstonecraft's daughter, who survived her mother at childbirth. Godwin raised her to be a writer. Mary Godwin contemplated her ideas while laying on her mother's grave.

She fell in love with P.B. Shelley and they were married. Shortly thereafter she lost their first child. One October in Germany, P.B. Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley entered into a bet: who could compose the best ghost story?

Guess who won? The 19 yo Mary. "Frankenstein" is all hers. Do we even know what theirs were? I don't.

Among literary critics Mary's has been read in numerous ways: as a personal grief story of loss and death; of feeling herself to be some sort of unspeakable, unsociable creature; and as a scathing social critique of the god-complexes men had in hers and her mother's times. I will go with the latter god-complexes of men thesis.

Making Mary's horror story "Frankenstein" into a film with De Niro playing the "monster" and Branagh playing Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist is a stroke of genius. But it cannot touch the ingenuity and courage it took for Mary Shelley to compete with and win writing the timeless classic horror story that rivaled with two of the greatest Romantic era writers of her time. How intimidating that might have been for a 19yo young woman, who had never been published!

We can only imagine what was on Mary's mind, even though she tells us frankly in the foreword of the text. When I think that a 19yo young woman invented "Frankenstein," and all of the renditions that have captured producers and directors minds, and actors have attempted to portray, I am finally pleased with this screen version, and to know it is preserved now on DVD. It is well worth reading Mary Shelley's book in order to understand the social contexts of the screen versions, and why this one is the one I prefer as truest to the text.