Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! by Loren D. Estleman Page B

Whale’s Frankenstein, part of the Film Classics Library line issued by Universe Books in 1974. The titles were aimed at the hard-core film buff who was accustomed to setting his alarm clock for some wee hour in order to catch a cherished classic on the Late Late Show, back when cable and satellite were in their infancy and round-the-clock movie channels a dream. The books featured frames from great vintage motion pictures blown up and presented in sequence, with the actors’ lines captioned below in a photo-graphic novel effect, the next best thing to watching the films. Included in the line were The Maltese Falcon, Ninotchka, Casablanca, Psycho, and a host of other cinema legends, which had sold briskly for a few years until the first reasonably priced videocassette players appeared in stores. For the first time, amateur aficionados were free to screen any movie or TV show they wanted anytime. The Film Classics Library paled in comparison and was discontinued.
    However, scholars like Valentino found it valuable for confirming a spoken line or a visible bit of business without having to fast-forward or backtrack through a tape or disc like a dog chasing an agile rabbit. But after turning a few pages, the movie lover in Valentino kicked in, whetting his appetite to see Frankenstein as it was intended to be seen, hearing the voices of the stage-trained cast and catching himself up in the illusion of the moving image. He closed the book, shifted the stack to the floor, and got up to rummage through the essentials of his DVD collection, spared from separate storage and arranged alphabetically by title on the built-in shelves that in The Oracle’s glory days had supported big flat cans containing reels of silver-nitrate stock. Those same shelves had yielded a complete print of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, the multiple-hour silent masterpiece that had sucked Valentino into the vortex of property ownership and architectural restoration.
    He came up with the 75th Anniversary Edition of Frankenstein, digitally remastered from the original negative, including scenes censored from 1931 showings and issued in 2006. After inspecting the disc for dust and scratches, he fed it into his DVR, which was connected to the DLP projector mounted on the ceiling and pointed through the aperture of the booth onto the poly screen he’d had installed at the front of the auditorium below. The time would come when in order to maintain the theater he would show real films via the big Bell & Howell to paying audiences, but he’d gone house-hunting to begin with to find a place to live and screen movies in all formats to aid him in research.
    For the next seventy minutes, Valentino was a boy again, holed up in his bedroom in front of a grainy TV set with his dog resting comfortably in his lap. At times the production values were creaky, and now and then a hole appeared in the plot (How did the Monster find his way back to his creator on Frankenstein’s wedding day? How did Ludwig know his daughter had been murdered and not drowned by accident? Why did Frankenstein lock his bride in her room, trapping her, with the Monster on the rampage?); but the buzz and crackle of weird electric gizmos in the brooding laboratory, the plummy vocal tones of theater actors projecting to the last row, and the dramatic, lumbering entrance of Karloff in full makeup and rig thundered over nit-picking details like a juggernaut hurtling downhill, obliterating everything in its path.
    When the windmill containing the haunted, hunted creature collapsed in flames and the end credits came on, in a single shot under the heading A GOOD CAST IS WORTH REPEATING, he realized he’d watched the entire picture without once looking for an indication of Craig Hunter’s sudden interest in it. And so he watched it again all the way through, this time with the commentary track turned on so he could hear what the experts had to say.
    James Whale’s direction held up, but at this remove