By ROB CRAIG

Any self-respecting fan of drive-in movies of the 1950's is no doubt familiar with the Richard Cuhna cult film classic, Frankenstein’s Daughter (1959). A singularly bizarre and engaging Grade-Z horror, Frankenstein’s Daughter is notable (and notorious) for many reasons. One of these is the standout performance of Donald Murphy as Dr. Oliver Frank (aka Dr. Frankenstein!). Murphy’s take on the mad doctor mythos is unique, seductive and entirely compelling, and turns this lurid melodrama into true classic theatre of the old school.

We were lucky enough to speak with Mr. Murphy recently from his long-time home in New Mexico, and he shared many thoughts about his career.

HORROR-WOOD: How did you get into acting?

DONALD MURPHY: My family was in the hotel business, but it seems like I was always interested in acting. I studied it in high school, I studied later under Lee Strasberg. I did many plays on Broadway. I've had so many wonderful directors.

DM: During the 1950's, you acted as a guest star on many TV Westerns, such as Lawman, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Shotgun Slade.

DM: Oh, I loved the Westerns! I was a trained rider and roper back in New Mexico, so I really thought they were the most fun!

HW: Of all your work, your role as the evil doctor in Frankenstein’s Daughter (1959) is what has made you a cult film icon. Do you find this ironic?

DM: Yes, it's so odd, sometimes its the little roles that come back to haunt you!

HW: Well, Dr. Oliver Frank is an unusual villain, not the typical Frankenstein, and you play the character against type. Frank is a cold and arrogant man, yet he is also charismatic, and somewhat of a seducer. In fact, he may be the most dashing mad scientist ever caught on film!

DM: Thank you! I just studied the script, and said, "This is the way to do it, be honest, be yourself."

HW: So, what was shooting like? Did you have ample time to prepare?

DM: Oh, no! Is the pope Catholic? My god, you couldn't prepare! I'd love to make a movie about the making of Frankenstein’s Daughter! That's a story in itself! You know, we shot the whole thing in about seven days! This was low budget!

Oh my, and we kept waiting for the girl (Sandra Knight), and she hadn't done any movies before! She was in her dressing room, making up, and the make-up man came in (renowned make-up man Harry Thomas), and started slapping mud on her face, and she said, "What the hell are you doing?" and he said, "Haven't you read the script, dear?" and she yelled, 'Hell, no!" and slammed the door in his face! We all had to sit around waiting for an hour while she regained her temper!

HW: What was director Richard Cuhna like to work with?

DM: Cuhna was a dear man. Very professional. Ironically, we both had houses in New Mexico! Now the producers... didn't seem all that capable. They were worried, because the film didn't have any "names." Cuhna told them, 'Not only that, but Murphy's the only one who can act!" But the producers insisted, so the big "star" of the movie has virtually no lines! Harold Lloyd, Jr., says something like, "I'm going to a party!" and that’s it! But, as they say in Hollywood, "I ain't got no billing!"

HW: You have a terrific, passionate kissing scene with Sally Todd.

DM: Oh, Sally, the blonde I ran over, now she was a real actor, so those scenes were fun.

HW: How about the climax, where you get acid tossed on your face?

DM: That look of surprise on my face was real! Cuhna had some guy standing next to me on a stepladder, and when he yelled "Action!" the guy tossed this water onto my face! Just like that! No retakes, but that's the way it was then: "Hurry Onward!"

HW: So, what did you think when you finally saw Frankenstein’s Daughter?

DM: When I first saw Frankenstein’s Daughter, I walked out on it! I'd been touring with Helen Hayes and Grace Kelly and Barbara BelGeddes at the time, so I thought this was really a comedown. How could I know that years later, it would become a legend!

HW: A legend indeed! Frankenstein’s Daughter is considered one of the classics of the drive-in movies, and has an impressive fan following. One of our other favorite films of yours is Lord Love A Duck (1966).

DM: Oh, I just saw Lord Love A Duck again last month. They showed it at my birthday party; 50 people showed up!

HW: Well, a belated Happy Birthday to you, and thanks so much for taking the time to share your memories with us!

DM: And thank you! This was so much fun!

* * *

Frankenstein’s Daughter is an extraordinary find, a true gem of the 1950’s B-movie canon, and a damn fine example of rock-bottom, fragmented, absurdist 50s drive-in filler. Like many films before and after, it grabs the symbols of a genre in vogue, and runs with them to create a wildly new creature.

Essentially a micro-budget drive-in throwaway, Frankenstein’s Daughter is inarguably director Richard Cuhna’s masterpiece (with She Demons a close second). Painting a vibrantly lurid and knowingly absurd sketch of its intended genre, one wonders if Cuhna originally intended Frankenstein’s Daughter as a parody. Indeed, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen and Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Frankenstein’s Daughter is a film which lampoons its intended genre mercilessly, yet ends up ironically standing as an exemplary example of same genre.

Cashing in on the current "Teenagers vs. Monsters" craze started by American International Pictures with their dreary, formulaic films I Was A Teenage Frankenstein and I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Cuhna’s Frankenstein’s Daughter takes the already-tired formula, mixes it with gothic horror, and for the genius stroke, adds a steamy overlay of tawdry soap opera.

The result is a wide-eyed Freudian nightmare with myriad horrific and sexual themes abounding. Necrophilia, schizophrenia, rape, incest and megalomania all get their moment in the sun in this most unusual bit of cultural ephemera.

Ironically, the strictly "teenage" scenes, with dancing and swimming and music by Page Cavanaugh and his Trio, are the most boring and predictable in the whole film. The monster movie, with its cardboard sets, great laboratory and secret doors out of a 1930’s "Old Dark House" picture, are what makes the film exciting and legendary.

Donald Murphy stands out as Dr. Frank (aka Frankenstein). Playing the character entirely against type, using a laid-back method-acting approach which is highly refreshing, even disarming, Murphy breathes exciting new life into a horror film archetype which had become redundant and stale. Eschewing the timeworn clichés of histrionic madness and megalomania, Murphy’s Frank is a suave, dashing, and intensely bright person, complex and charming. He has more of the gigolo than the ghoul in him, indeed more of the con man than the brute.

Murphy’s Dr. Frank is essentially one of the first postmodern screen villains, a canny schizophrenic misanthrope who can charm his way out of the most damning situations, indeed, can lure even skeptical victims into his web of death. Two others of this archetype who come to mind are Quinlan in Orson Welle’s Touch Of Evil (1958), and Norma Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Murphy has the uncanny ability to make Frank charming in one breath, and downright terrifying the next. As slippery as a snake, Dr. Frank can be mauling a girl one second, and offering her a friendly cocktail the next, without skipping a beat. In fact, this is what makes him so dangerous; his agenda is often hidden and subtle; even audience members have come away confused about him; "Sure, he was evil, but he was so damn charming, too!"

Another interesting aspect of Dr. Frank is his wounding candor. He can turn on charm like a faucet, but likewise he can be brutally straightforward, to the point of cruelty. This is another of his "secret weapons", much more effective than the battering-ram approach used by villains of the old school. Dr. Frank is indeed "Doctor Frank!"

Even with all this, what makes Frankenstein’s Daughter one of the most unique and innovative B-movies of the Fifties is its extremely sophisticated, and somewhat convoluted sexual politics. Firstly the creation of a female monster, itself a riff on James Whale’s Bride Of Frankenstein, is not attempted here to foster a monster-mate, but to create the prototype for an obedient and aggressive killing machine! Mad Doctor Frank’s sexist edict " Like all women, she will obey!" is as shockingly nasty as it is absurd.

Also, the domestic situation in Frankenstein’s Daughter is unruly, unhealthy, and surely perverse. Carter Morton’s teenage niece, a busty, precocious brat named Trudy (Sandra Knight) lives in a house with monsters both literal and figurative. Her boyfriend, Johnny (John Ashley), is an oblivious dope, a scathing portrayal of the typical vapid male teenager of the day, more aware of his ducktail haircut and hot rod than the evil world around him.

Dr. Frank is a sexual predator, pure and simple. Every female he lays one on he tries to seduce, and own, and finally destroy. In fact, one might easily see his primary sexual interest as being of an violent and oppressive nature. Dr. Frank owes less to Frankenstein than to the Marquis deSade!

The scenes where Dr. Frank mauls and paws Trudy are intensely lurid, even somewhat shocking by the relatively tame standards of the 1950’s. In a ‘50s monster movie, we are usually prepared to see two cute kids necking in the woods in their shiny new car; we are less prepared to see an aggressive middle-aged deviant making involuntary sexual grabs at a virtual naïf, scenes which could charitably described as foreplay to rape.

The scene could also easily be read as symbolic incest, as a father figure makes forceful sexual advances towards a veritable girl-child. Even creepier, the dapper gigolo’s designs on the buxom young girl are highly erotic, making the audience implicitly guilty by deriving sensual energy from this illicit act. A similar sexual dynamic is seen in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll.

Yet there are other scenes where Trudy treats Frank not only as a houseguest but a friend and collaborator! Indeed, she accepts the poison formula from Frank without question, this only minutes after he has tried to have his way with her! This suggests that Trudy is a deeply conflicted person, as good sense battles with darker instincts towards sexual intrigue and dangerous liaisons. Either that, or schizophrenic.

As we soon find out that Trudy is completely under Frank’s chemical as well as psychological control, we see that she is truly "Frankenstein’s Daughter", with all that sinister connection implies.

Elsewhere, Dr. Frank shamelessly flirts with Trudy’s saucy teenage pal Suzie (the delectable Sally Todd). Shock upon shock, the girl’s a tramp, and agrees to meet the old fart at night! Here is a girl you would never find in any of those lame AIP drive-in flicks!

When Suzie meets Frank, he immediately tries to make her and she coyly resists, in the true schizophrenic fashion of the Fifties slattern. Rejected and enraged, Frank decides to have his way with her anyway, by running her over with his car! This gruesome and horrible symbolic rape deftly skirts the boundaries of good taste (and likely censorship).

The overt (and illicit) passion of these ill-formed and deadly sexual liaisons gives the scenario in Frankenstein’s Daughter much of its erotically charged dramatic tension, as the odd sexual politics degenerate into downright depravity.

When the bonafide "Daughter of Frankenstein" is finally revealed, it is an absurd figure, something out of a child’s nightmare, an expressionist masterpiece like Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster or Roger Corman’s It Conquered The World; a giant, lumbering man wearing bizarre leather pajamas and a bandage on his head. His face is a great rubbery disfigurement (Cuhna loves disfigured faces, they appear in virtually all his works)

To get across the notion that this hulking, huffing beast is a delicate female, (indeed, someone's daughter!) they smear grotesque black lipstick over the crusty, malformed pie-hole that passes for a mouth! This touch is too good to be true.

And the poor dear walks around with vacant plastic eyes, confused, with a "Duh!" expression, like somebody's old grandmother back from the dead. In other shots, "she" walks with funny, jerky arm motions, like a kid's impression of a comic-book robot. Simply astounding.

Here as elsewhere, Cuhna eschews traditional logic for pure absurdist poetry, creating something memorable in the process. It seems certain that Frankenstein’s Daughter will someday be seen as a milestone in budget filmmaking of the Fifties. In addition, buffs and historians will surely be studying Donald Murphy’s singular take on the classic movie villain for years to come.