The Universal horror franchise receives an affectionate homage with Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” (1974), which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present Oct. 26 in a bonus screening after “Bride of Frankenstein.” Filmed in black and white, and stocked with some of the original props of “Frankenstein” series, the movie is steeped in Brooks’ trademark comic anarchy. In his original review, published in December 1974, film critic Roger Ebert calls the movie “a send-up of a style and not just of the material. It looks right, which makes it funnier. Paradoxically, it works on a couple of levels: first as comedy, and then as a weirdly touching story in its own right.”


The moment, when it comes, has the inevitability of comic genius. Young Frederick Frankenstein, grandson of the count who started it all, returns by rail to his ancestral home. As the train pulls into the station, he spots a kid on the platform, lowers the window and asks, “Pardon me, boy; is this the Transylvania Station?”

It is, and Mel Brooks is home with “Young Frankenstein,” his most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny). Frederick is a professor at a New York medical school, trying to live down the family name and giving hilarious demonstrations of the difference between voluntary and involuntary reflexes. He stabs himself in the process, dismisses the class and is visited by an ancient family retainer with his grandfather’s will.





There are set pieces in the movie that deserve comparison with the most famous scenes in “The Producers” (1968). Demonstrating that he has civilized his monster, for example, Frankenstein and the creature do a soft-shoe number in black tie and tails. Wandering in the woods, the Monster comes across a poor, blind monk (Gene Hackman, very good) who offers hospitality and winds up scalding, burning and frightening the poor creature half to death.

There are also the obligatory town meetings, lynch mobs, police investigations, laboratory experiments, love scenes and a cheerfully ribald preoccupation with a key area of the Monster’s stitched-together anatomy. From its opening title credits (which manages to satirize “Frankenstein” and “Citizen Kane” at the same time) to its closing, uh, refrain, “Young Frankenstein” is not only a Mel Brooks movie but also a loving commentary on our love-hate affairs with monsters. This time, the monster even gets to have a little love-hate affair of his own.

Reprinted with permission from the Ebert Co. Ltd. 

TOP: Teri Garr, Peter Boyle, Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman in “Young Frankenstein” (1974).