The film career of producer-director Roger Corman is legendary. Summed up most pithily in the title of his own 1990 memoir, HOW I MADE A HUNDRED MOVIES IN HOLLYWOOD AND NEVER LOST A DIME (Random House, New York), it tells the tale of a notorious pennypincher who made his way into the production system of the fifties through the back way, first as a scenarist, then producer, then producer-director of such low-budget drive-in fare as Apache Woman and Bucket of Blood for such independent studios as Allied Artists and American International Pictures. After a decade in the covered theaters of the sixties with his larger-scale Poe adaptations and action features frequently made now for the majors, Corman then surprised everyone by retiring from directing in 1970. Heading back into the open air with his own New World exploitation empire, his operation became the focal point for a generation of young, ambitious filmmakers from Joe Dante to Martin Scorsese and beyond, while also lending opportunities to woman directors such as Stephanie Rothman, Amy Jones and Barbara Peeters – three of the few working behind the camera throughout that decade – and offering wider distribution possibilities to such foreign filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Then, early in the eighties, with the drive-in business giving way to the exploitation opportunities of home video, he sold his interest in New World Pictures and started another company, Concorde/Millennium, focusing mainly on knockoffs and cheapies ushered into only as many theaters and for only as long as it took to get them a halfway credible video release. Then, from out of a twenty-year retirement, he returned to direct what many had anticipated would be his masterpiece, an adaptation of Brian W. Aldiss’s 1973 take on the Mary Shelley saga, FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (the title a reference to husband Percy Shelley’s "Prometheus Unbound" via Mary’s subtitle, A Modern Prometheus, both regarding the god who raised Zeus’s ire by giving the secret of fire to humans; the name, not inappropriately, means Forethinker). Even if it didn’t live up to expectations – even if it really didn’t – it may still be the ultimate Corman movie and an interesting, self-reflexive chronicle of the filmmaker himself by one of his own harshest critics.

Which makes a lot of sense, given that the original Shelley may have been a commentary, itself, on the literary milieu from which it sprang, composed of Mary, Percy, and their flamboyant host throughout the "haunted summer" in which her novel germinated, George Gordon, Lord Byron. Talk was rife in those days on the nature of the artist as creator and the responsibility of that artist to improve the world not just through art but through active, revolutionary participation, the kind that got Byron himself killed fighting alongside the Greeks in 1824. Victor Frankenstein’s desire to unlock the mysteries of life and nature was analogous to the Romantic poets’ visionary ideal, he practically a cautionary version of Percy and his own ambition, his Monster a Byronic hero forever on the outside whose wanderings reflected the poet’s "Childe Harold" and "Manfred" characters’ eternal longing for self-determination or self-obliviation, their mutual club feet inspiring connections with that other famous "Swell-foot," Oedipus.

All this was clear to the makers of 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein, to the extent that they even saw fit to include the three geniuses in their prologue and to feature Elsa Lanchester in the roles of both Mary and her monster’s mate, Pretorius and "Henry" Frankenstein filling out the Byron and Shelley roles, respectively. It may be the first example of literary criticism on celluloid. Aldiss also recognized the interplay between the real and imaginary and incorporated both creators and created into his fiction as well, bringing together in the Geneva to which its hero Joseph Bodenland (Buchanan, in the Corman) finds himself relocated not only his putative primogenitor, Frankenstein, but also his creatrix, the much-revered Mary. This confluence of personal truth and fantasy suggests

Corman’s own intimate relation to the material as well, the traditional popular confusion between Monster and Maker’s name again blurring the line between the author and his work.

Shot at about the same time his autobiography was being written, Corman’s film is as self-referential as all these texts, folding in his own legend as well as that of his mythic literary antecedents’. Like his self-abrading (and -upbraiding) narrator, Corman is remarkably honest and often downright cruel in his telling; all the myth-making and breaks he had given himself in the bio he spares himself here,

filmmaker, sadly unachieved, though this failure was foretold in the material from its very beginning.

Aldiss’s book was published in the heyday of the second wave of Women’s Liberation and is filled with the kind of penitential self-deprecations one used to find in men’s journals such as WINGSPAN and the writings of Sam Keen and John Bradshaw. It’s an excoriation of the unnatural creations of obsessed and obsessive men, whose clear reference point is the Bomb which (at the time of the novel, 2032) had been ripping holes in the time-space

Corman’s major innovation in the early features – besides a clear, countercultural moral thinking that set him aside from his low- as well as most big-budget contemporaries – was the employment of such women as heroes, or at least their films’ focal point, as in his distaff Western, The Gunslinger, and Calder Willingham adaptation (from that author’s END AS A MAN, filmed the same year by Jack Garfein as The Strange One), Sorority Girl. The obvious benefit of this was that at the same time as he could elevate women to a more powerful and significant role in the

cinema, he could also reap untold exploitation points by putting them in titillating situations. As he simultaneously entered both psychoanalysis and a more mature phase of filmmaking – begun, primarily, with the cycle of Poe films kicked off in 1960 with House of Usher – he began confronting his own mother-centered issues resolved, possibly, with the release of Bloody Mama in 1969, shortly before his retirement from directing. Later, in his incarnation as New World honcho, he could pat himself on the back for employing directors such as Peeters and Jones as long as the end product contained the requisite amount of action and female nudity he

felt necessary for a saleable attraction, which he on at least one occasion had added to the director’s work to bring it up to snuff. By the time of Frankenstein Unbound – its title prefaced with a statement of ownership, making it "Roger Corman’s FU," possibly a "fuck you" to the majors he had insisted handle his film instead of the distribution arm of his own company, suggesting a hoped-for triumphant return to the big leagues that had previously ostracized him – Corman, with two daughters of his own, may possibly have felt he had something to answer for.

JOE BUCHANAN UNBORN
In the womb, creator and created are one, just as in dreams reality and fiction are indistinguishable – symbiotic. In Corman’s film, Mary (née Godwin), is discovered in the middle of writing her novel – being, in a sense, "with child." (In the Aldiss, she is caring for her and Percy’s actual, illegitimate child, William.) As such, she is figurative mother of just about everyone involved, and Victor, having just given life to his monster, cruel, unloving father, God,

How he arrives at this new beginning had in Aldiss’s novel occurred as the result of a plague of ephemeral shifts through which one could inexplicably find oneself suddenly walking in a different country and

Buchanan’s lab, as Corman’s New World studios, is full of male admirers, his lone detractors a huffy, aged fed (read: moneyman) and accusatory journalist (read: critic, or conscience) who just happens to be a woman, recalling again the self-critical milieu of Shelley and her writings. Just before the first timeslip whisks him off to his comeuppance Magnificent Ambersons style, a local kid is heard chanting over the grave of an old bicycle, "What goes around comes around."

In the Sophocles play which tends to serve as a primary source for our modern-day reading of the myth in which "returning to the womb" takes on a whole new, literal interpretation, it befell the new king Oedipus to launch an

Buchanan’s introduction to Mary occurs at the trial of Justine Moritz, maid to the house of Frankenstein and accused witch-murderer of Victor’s younger brother, also named William, who was probably in fact done in by his brother’s

Frankenstein man-to-man. In his role as not-the-brother, however, appearing at the approximate moment of William’s death, as a replacement, Buchanan’s identity blurs with both that other William – the baby in Mary’s womb – and with the boy’s killer, the similarly un-born Monster, suggesting the scientist as the agent of his own destruction. With this system of associations in place, then, his own process of self-implosion – creator equaling created, once again – may begin.

Such self-negation is typical of Corman. In film after film, the visionary realizes what he has done or become and responds with a similar, Byronic abnegation: the scientist in It Conquered the World, who brings the menace to earth and kills himself trying to destroy it; the nebbish killer-sculptor of Bucket of Blood, driven crazy by the Black Cat in his wall until he casts himself as his own final masterwork; his cousin, the sadsack florist of Little Shop of Horrors, consumed by his own man-eating plant in the finale, and the title Doctor Xavier, whose efforts to widen the scope of man’s vision lead him to "plucking out" his own eyes in a revival-tent epiphany. That self-destructive will to create is no doubt what drove Corman himself to make – his own record – seven films in 1956 alone and to take on such bets to top himself on speed and efficiency as led to the principal filming of Little Shop in just two days; it’s also the central theme of Usher, as Attack of the Crab Monsters, both of whose maelstrom-survivors suggest the eternally collapsing and reconstructing career of the director himself. It happens again at the end of Unbound.

FRANKENSTEIN UNWOUND
"Time narrows," the commanding alien head in Mr. Johnson’s teleportation closet intones in the ’57 Corman Not of This Earth as his own world dissolves in nuclear self-annihilation; in Unbound, the similarly computer-voiced car advises Buchanan that "Time is unbound," indicating the sort of chaos theory dominating much modern cinema, from

such diverse sources as Jurassic Park to Mike Leigh’s Naked and the German Run Lola Run. It suggests a world out of whack (or World Gone Wrong, to quote the title of a recent Dylan album) but tottering on the edge of a major innovation, the definition of "chaos" itself from the Greek for Before the creation and after the destruction of each recurrent universe. In the earlier film, the message comes as a signal of urgency to the interplanetary traveler, whose comparison of Earth today to his own world centuries before suggests him also as a timeskipper like Buchanan. Its rephrasing in this film suggests another such warning as well as a message of

opportunity, a chance to right wrongs perpetrated in the immemorial past as well as inconceivable future.

In a story partways concerning man’s attempts to harness and control the independent, evanescent forces of nature, the car’s further message is that these forces cannot ever be tamed or brought to bear; they are without the laws of unimaginative man. It’s also a reminder of the witch-trial whose outcome Buchanan also could not alter, Moritz herself a similarly inimical force to ever-futilely "conquering" men. For the frequently envelope-pushing Corman, the message comes as a warning also of the responsibilities inherent in living beyond the laws constricting everyday expression and behavior, a recognition of the possible consequences of opening such a Pandora’s box as time, adultery, exploitation – or directing, after a 20-year hiatus. When the Monster falsely proclaims that it too is unbound

and that Buchanan can never kill it, it suggests Buchanan, who loves children but is himself childless (his experiments his only tangible offspring) as the appointed end of the cycle of violence and exploitation; the tradition begun with Frankenstein and continued through with Buchanan and his invention must die with him.

The free-living, poetic community Buchanan finds among the vacationing Britishers recalls the very creative spirit which inspired him in the first place, their mobile, independent, youthful nature also evoking the commedia-style troupe Corman led and reused

This happens when Buchanan, trapped into aiding the doctor’s recreation of his own dead wife Elizabeth to provide his monster with a bride using his souped-up car as power source, deliberately overloads the system in order to cause another timeslip, this one taking them all into an indefinite period in the nuclear-winter future. It’s at this point that the film becomes most tentative, unraveling in near-total silence but for the howl of an ever-present wind. Here Buchanan becomes little more than an observer as Frankenstein, his monster, and their common bride jockey for

dominance, Victor, surprisingly, delivering a fatal gunshot to his once-Elizabeth before meeting his own fate at the hands of his creation. It’s as if the mind of the movie were itself imploding, like a dream that’s run out of material and yet slogs onward, dismantling itself while reaching toward a conclusion.

The director must have known, at some point, that the triumphant return he’d maybe been anticipating wasn’t turning out that way; thus the self-immolation in the scene between Victor and his offspring becomes its own subject, the creator taking his creation down with

The film’s icon, a pitiably scarred eye, signifies the skewed vision of so many Corman anti-heroes, and suggests a body of influences besides the various texts and versions likewise cobbled together to create the film. When Buchanan arrives in Geneva, he sells a ring in order to obtain the currency, as did David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell to Earth; when later asked where he came from, he gestures into the distance – again à la Bowie – and replies,

Yet that "vision" itself, both forward and inwardly directed, is of a piece with so many Corman characters, from the aforementioned Dr

As noted by Gary Morris in his book on ROGER CORMAN (1985, Twayne Publishers, Boston; p.113), the director regularly featured a so-called "agent of destruction" in his films who arrives at an "insular, decadent world [teetering] on the brink" in order to hasten its decline. That, basically, was Corman’s mission in infiltrating Hollywood, which system he takes frequent jabs at in his autobiography for its lethargy, inefficiency, and, one infers, conventional (i.e., hypocritical) morality. From his first screenwriting and producing success with Highway Dragnet in 1954,

originally titled The House by the Sea (read: Hollywood), which its lead character arrives at to discover is overrun with water and unlivable, Corman has consistently documented his own journey in and out of this realm, frequently abandoned in the end but with no sense of genuine triumph – the built-in guilt of the maverick mentality, where everything one believes is contested by the received wisdom of the mass of society.

As Byronic wanderer and Oedipal Satan-figure similarly cast out of heaven, I think Corman, Monster, and Buchanan all berate

themselves too much, however; the actual offspring produced in his various "labs" also included the likes of Jack Nicholson, Paul Bartel, Dick Miller, Claudia Jennings, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Stephanie Rothman and Gale Ann Hurd – some of the most significant names in ’70s and ’80s film culture. If not many or enough of these names included women’s, and if they were often used for exploitative purposes at the same time, at least they were there and in positions of power during some highly conservative decades. Corman absolves himself in his fiction via Mary Shelley, but if he can’t proceed to save all women, at least he does resolve to address the source of their exploitation in the power-culture and its own perverted ideologies.

It’s a little bit sad to read the producer, in his autobiography, tick off all the franchises he’s got going under his new banner – usually incorporating all the drive-in tricks of the trade he’d perfected in his ambiguous New World – especially as the now-septuagenarian has always regarded time as his own worst enemy, but what the hell?

It’s still early in the Millennium.