Mel Brooks’s outrageously broad and deliriously silly black-and-white comedy, co-written with its neurotically bequiffed star Gene Wilder, is re-released for its 50th anniversary. Their lovingly observed 1974 movie is closer in time to the 1931 James Whale/Boris Karloff classic – whose lab equipment props Brooks actually re-used – than we are now to this film. In some ways it can now be considered not as satire or spoof, but a continuation of the Frankenstein genre, a connoisseur development or theme-variation not so far removed from the Hammer or Warhol riffs, and a whole lot more successful and intuitive than Kenneth Branagh’s deadly serious, deadly dull treatment from 1994 with Robert De Niro as the creature. Interestingly, though Wilder said that Young Frankenstein is based on the Karloff classic and its three sequels, the opening credits resoundingly declare that it is based on the Mary Shelley novel. A tongue-in-cheek joke, of course, but true in its way.
We begin the action in the present day where Wilder plays Dr Frederick Frankenstein, a distinguished neurophysiologist, deeply embarrassed by the crazy theories of his grandfather Victor Frankenstein, so much so that he insists on pronouncing his own name “Fronk–en–steen” to distinguish himself from his evil ancestor. But then he receives a legal package containing documents conferring on him the title to Castle Frankenstein in Transylvania (evidently a German-speaking area of Hungary). After bidding farewell to his alluring yet sex-averse fiancee Elizabeth (a wonderfully wisecracking Madeline Kahn), Frederick arrives in the heart of Old Europe, via train from New York, to be greeted at the station by Igor (pronounced “Eye-gor”), the grandson of his grandfather’s old manservant, played by Marty Feldman, in colossal Groucho Marx mode. Also present is Inga (Teri Garr), who is to be his assistant.
