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ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE SCENES IN JAMES WHALE'S 1935 FILM BRIDE of Frankenstein has the injured and angry creature wandering through a forest and then with trepidation approaching an isolated cabin, attracted not so much by the warmth of a hearth or the smell of food as by the strains of Gounod's "Ave Maria" played by a blind hermit on his humble violin. In Rowland V. Lee's 1939 Son of Frankenstein, and again in Earle C. Kenton's 1942 The Ghost of Frankenstein, the creature is in the thrall of a villain who issues murderous commands by means of signals sounded on what one of the villagers aptly labels "Ygor's weird horn." Both images-the creature whose apparently savage breast is soothed by music in general, the creature controlled almost hypnotically by music of a special sort-are lovingly parodied in Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein, a comedy that pays homage to virtually all of Universal Studios' Frankenstein films;1 in addition, Young Frankenstein features a scene during which the just-animated creature not only ceases his rages in response to music played on a violin but attempts to grab the "floating" musical sounds and press them to his ears.
In Kevin Connor's 2004 made-for-television Frankenstein, the creature weepingly tells the blind man that no one had ever previously been so kind to him, but before he speaks his tears are provoked by the blind man's solo violin performance not of the Gounod "Ave Maria" but, rather, of the chaconne from Bach's Partita in D Minor. In Kenneth Branagh's 1994 Mar) Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature steals a recorder from the cottage whose residents he has been secretly observing; he learns to play the instrument quite well, and subsequently he queries Victor Frankenstein as to the source of his musical abilities: does it spring from his nimble fingers, he asks, or does it somehow originate in his mind? In Jack Smight's 1973 made-for television Frankenstein: The True Story, the eponymous scientist takes his by no means monstrouslooking progeny to a concert hall where they hear a program that includes a soprano aria from Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro; the creature obvi- ously enjoys the music and, after his body starts to deteriorate, pleads with Frankenstein to allow him to...