Frankenstein (1910)

For many years, historians considered J. Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein to be one of many-thousand lost silent movies. Most people had forgotten the 1910 version of Mary Shelley’s novel even existed. Then, in 1963, a historian found an edition of The Edison Kinetogram among the millions of documents in the Edison archives. The magazine’s cover, dated 15th March 1910, featured the actor Charles Ogle in full monster make-up. Only then did the search for the lost film begin.

In 1980, the American Film Institute included it on its top ten list of most ‘culturally and historically significant lost films’. That was when an eccentric movie collector from Wisconsin announced he had owned a 35mm nitrate copy since the 1950s. How Al Detlaff came to own the film is a story almost as unlikely as the one told by Shelley. Detlaff’s wife’s grandmother, Marie Franklin, originally owned the film, which she used to incorporate into a stage show. When she died, ownership of the film passed to her son, who, in time, left it to Detlaff’s brother-in-law. He sold it to a collector, who sold it on to another collector, who then sold it to Detlaff in the 1950s.

Detlaff, an avid private collector, valued his collection of silent films at $45 million. He was extremely protective of what had suddenly become his most prized possession. In the early 1980s, he allowed the BBC to include a few minutes of the film in a documentary (for a price, presumably), which was later released on video. Detlaff was annoyed to find these excerpts turning up in other video compilations without his permission or recompense and grew extremely possessive of the film. He did release a copy to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986. However, he first inserted a scrolling copyright notice across the middle of the film, making it difficult to view.

Forrest J. Ackerman, the founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland, recalled a private screening Detlaff once gave at Ackerman’s home. The friend who drove Detlaff back to his hotel later told Ackerman that the collector had left a gun on top of the film can. Ackerman also claimed that Detlaff tried to persuade the Academy to include the film in one of its awards performances – and demanded a five-figure sum. Don Crafton, Chair of the Department of Film, Television, Theater at Notre Dame, revealed in a speech at the first ‘Orphans of the Storm’ symposium that Detlaff kept his print of the film in a safe deposit box in a bank ‘not in Wisconsin.’ It was only in 2010, five years after Detlaff’s death, that the film was finally released without the scrolling copyright notice.

As of October 2025, the 1910 version is the first of 423 movies to feature a version of the monster. It is unusually elaborate for a picture made by Edison, a studio not known for its artistic integrity, although at fourteen minutes, it offers a severely truncated version of Shelley’s saga. As the opening titles confess, it provides a liberal adaptation of her novel.