Frankenstein's Monster

Frankenstein's Monster as portrayed by Christopher Lee in Terence Fisher's 1957 Hammer Horror classic "The Curse of Frankenstein."

I remember seeing this for the first time as a kid and being all disappointed because the monster didn't look like the Jack Pierce monster that we all know and love. But as I grew older I came to love this film, and I have to say that if pressed I would probably admit that Peter Cushing's Baron is actually my favorite portrayal.

The following is taken from one of the best websites about the Frankenstein Mythos, Frankenstein's Castle:

Victor, played by the then 40-year old Peter Cushing, is no longer a young student, but a dandy-like aristocrat. He is not the naive man from the novel, who wants to create a race of superior beings, but a cold and villainous madman who is totally obsessed by his work and even kills for it. But he does not only kill a Professor to implant his brain into the creature. To prevent his lover Justine from telling the police about his experiments he even sets up her death.

These crimes have no equivalent in Shelley's novel, where Frankenstein never kills anyone. (In the novel Justine is hanged because Victor cannot tell anyone the truth about his monster.) In The Curse of Frankenstein Victor is the true villain, who shows no remorse for his horrible crimes. "We are given a Frankenstein to hate, a Frankenstein [...] who is the real monster, a villain who ends the film facing the guillotine", as literature critic Paul O'Flinn points out. (1995: 41). In the BFI Companion to Horror Hammer's Frankenstein is called a "ruthless, predatory creature, not much inclined to self-justification or self-pity" (Newman 1996: 146).

However, actor Peter Cushing did not deem his role to be that negative. In an interview he stated, "I do not agree that he (Frankenstein) is an evil man; his motives are for the eventual good of mankind, but like many a real life genius, he is misunderstood and mistrusted and thus forced to use unorthodox and sometimes ruthless methods to carry on his work and research." (Del Vecchio 1991: 13). Yet it is doesn't come as a surprise that most critics do not share Cushing's point of view. It rather seems that in the interview he referred more to Shelley's Frankenstein than to his impersonation of the Baron.
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I also found the wonderful quote from Peter Cushing at the Wikipedia:

"In some ways I see Frankenstein as rather like Dr Robert Knox, the anatomist, not as villain, but as someone trying to make people understand that this envelope that we live in for three score years and ten is not important... [He] had to close his one good eye to the way Burke and Hare supplied him with cadavers so that he could show how the human body ticks for the good of all mankind... I have always based my playing of Frankenstein on Robert Knox, though with variations based on the demands of the script and differing degrees of ruthlessness because no one will ever leave him alone to work." — Peter Cushing.