FRANKENSTEIN

 It's not perfect; Colin Clive was a terrible leading man and Mae Clarke was never much of an actress and the sequel surpassed it in many ways but it's magnificent nevertheless and people who claim that James Whale's "Frankenstein" was the first masterpiece in Universal's horror cycle are not far wrong. It may not be the 'Frankenstein' of Mary Shelley's book, (it leaves out a lot of the novel), but visually it's extraordinary and in Boris Karloff it has a 'monster' unsurpassed to this day. Karloff may have been a dumb hulk prone to chucking obnoxious little girls into lakes but he imbued 'the creature' with a real humanity and with only a few small gestures. The film made him a star though unfortunately he was typecast for the rest of his career. It also should have made Whale one of the hottest directors in Hollywood but perhaps he, too, was typecast. He did make the magnificent sequel a couple of years later and the best screen version of "Showboat" but after that, really not much else of note. Still, these were enough to earn him his place in movie legend and this is seventy of the finest minutes in Hollywood history.