There’s a lot of brilliance packed into Bride of Frankenstein’s slight 75 minutes. Here are 10 reasons why
James Whale’s final monster movie remains cinema’s greatest.
1. What of My Mary?
As we open on Bride of
Frankenstein, we witness one of its most inspired scenes. We are not in a
laboratory of blasphemous horrors but an opulent living room where literary
giants Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley discuss
the latter’s most famous creation. Informing her husband that Frankenstein “wasn't the end at all,”
she proceeds to tell the tale of the Monster’s quest for a mate. There is
literary accuracy in this scene, since Shelley’s original novel did, indeed,
include a major subplot in which the Monster compels Frankenstein to build him
a bride. There is also great cinematic ingenuity in this prologue. It is a way
to directly transition into the second chapter of Frankenstein, to acknowledge its literary origins, and to tie the
new monster to her true creator, as Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and The
Bride. As barrier-breaking ideas often do, the prologue had its obstacles. Editor
Ted Kent wanted Whale to cut the sequence, feeling it detracted from the
horror. The décolletage-baring gown Lanchester wore as Shelley set off alarms
with the censors. Fortunately, Whale ignored Kent and a few minor cuts placated
the censors enough for the prologue to remain, providing Bride of Frankenstein with its cleverest postmodern touch.
2. Woman… Friend…
Wife
She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named
after her, but Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is without question the
most memorable female monster in cinema history and certainly the first
significant one. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike
awkwardness, The Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an
innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid
weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour (designed by Universal’s resident makeup
whiz Jack P. Pierce) laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that
followed her, from Vampira to Princess Asa Vajda of Black Sunday to Morticia Addams to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh of Lair of the White Worm. Her hairstyle
has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily
Munster to singer Dave Vanian of The Damned. Her teasingly brief presence in Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous
attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride;
Franc Roddam’s film The Bride), yet
she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by
leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a
wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with
an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That
concise arch from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes The
Bride a fully realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that
complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most unforgettable female
monster of them all.
3. A Perfect Human
You can take your Freddys and your Jasons and your Michael
Myerses. When I hear the word “monster,” I immediately think of Dracula, The
Mummy, The Wolf Man, and The Gill Man. The Universal monster movie cycle
supplied cinema’s most iconic monsters. When it came to giving those creatures
memorable human foils, it was less prolific. Most of the humans in those films
suffer from a severe lack of personality. Jonathan Harker? The guy’s a snooze. Colonel
Montford? Blah. David Reed? Who? The same cannot be said of the humans who
share the screen with the Frankenstein Monster and The Bride. Sweaty, tortured
Henry Frankenstein. His shrieking, positively loony bride Elisabeth. The
sneering, mugging housekeeper Minnie. The sweet hermit. The deliciously wicked
Dr. Pretorius. Sniveling and immoral lab assistant Karl. Even that guy who
tells Minnie, “Aww, go bite your tongue off!” is great. Bride of Frankenstein is fully populated with funny, fascinating,
full-of-personality people.
4. There Have Been
Developments
Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein was brilliant because he conveyed all the Monster’s
fearsomeness and humanity with nothing more than expert physical movement and
the occasional grunt. It is the kind of acting that separates the giants from
the amateurs. When Karloff became aware that his old friend was to speak in Bride of Frankenstein, he protested. He
felt speech would rob the Monster of his menace (what he must have thought when
he learned Frankie would also smoke cigars and dance!). I personally agree that
the Monster is more frightening in the first film. However, his ability to talk
gave him new layers in Bride. He sure
isn’t eloquent, as the creature in Shelley’s novel is. He is succinct. His
words are direct, immediate, impactful. “Friend.” “Alone: bad.” “She hate me.”
Despite his reservations, Karloff delivers his fractured lines intensely,
imbuing the Monster with a level of sympathy and humanity he did not have in Frankenstein. Karloff insisted he return
to silence for his final turn as the Monster in Son of Frankenstein. We were left with an infinitely less
interesting and emotionally resonant performance.
5. More Amusing
Universal surely expected a hair-raising shocker when they
ordered Bride of Frankenstein. James
Whale, his screenwriters John Balderston and William Hurlbut, and a cast of
comedic wonders such as Ernest Thesiger and Una O’Connor turned in something
more like a black comedy. The Monster was still frightening enough for Bride to play as a full-blooded horror
film. This became totally clear to me when I had the good fortune to see it
with an audience that was probably old enough to have seen the movie in 1935—they
gasped every time Karloff came on screen! The humor is a lot more apparent to
modern audiences, and I felt like a jerk when I was the only person regularly
laughing during that screening. But Bride
of Frankenstein is funny, and with a wit like Whale at the helm, there’s no
question that he intended it to be. Minnie and the Burgomaster are obvious
comedic figures, broad in their daffy deliveries and goofy mannerisms. As Dr.
Pretorius, Thesiger gives a subtler comedic performance, delivering his
numerous jocular lines (see the ninth entry on this list) with perfect timing
and emphasis. While I support tsking at viewers who snicker during the scene in
which the hermit expresses sincere gratitude for meeting a new friend, I
believe it’s OK to laugh along with much of a film James Whale designed to be laughed
along with.
6. To a New World...
Susan Sontag mapped out the parameters of camp in her
landmark 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”,
defining it as something that displays “a relish for the exaggeration of sexual
characteristics and personality mannerisms” and “the spirit of extravagance,” that
“sees everything in quotation marks” and “is alive to a double sense in which
some things can be taken.” James Whale was thirty years ahead of her. A
marvelous wit who had nothing but trouble taking his role as monster maker
seriously, the director fashioned a film that has often been cited as a prime
cut of proto-camp. The Monster’s capering put his scariness in “quotation
marks,” something often lost on the film’s original audience but strikingly
clear to modern ones more attuned to camp sensibility and less likely to
shudder at the sight of a guy with a flat head and electrodes jutting from his
neck. The acting is exaggerated beyond the beyond, with Colin Clive, Valerie
Hobson, and Una O’Connor giving especially hysterical performances that no
doubt tickled Whale to his core. The Bride’s wild corruption of feminine
stereotypes is equally exaggerated, with her glamour-puss make up offsetting
her absurdly elongated eyelashes and up do. Finding much in the way of double
senses, contemporary film theorists regularly read the film through a prism of
James Whale and Ernest Thesiger’s homosexuality, noting how Dr. Pretorius (whom
Minnie describes as “a very queer-looking old gentleman”) disdains
Frankenstein’s pursuit of a “straight” marriage and is eager to hook up with
him to make a monstrous baby. In Father
of Frankenstein, Christopher Bram suggests that Whale intended a shot of
the hermit leaning over the Monster’s prostrate figure to imply oral sex
(beneath a crucifix, no less!). Those who knew Whale, including his boyfriend David
Lewis, insisted he never intended a homosexual subtext in any of his films. Considering
that Sontag also declares, “intending to be campy is always harmful” and “Camp
rests on innocence,” this makes the argument that Bride of Frankenstein is a delightful proto-camp classic stronger.
7. It’s More Like
Black Magic
In The Invisible Man,
James Whale worked with John P. Fulton, a special effects supervisor on the
cutting edge of movie magic. The pair collaborated again in Bride of Frankenstein to craft its most
bizarre scene. Dr. Pretorius unveils his life-creating experiments for
Frankenstein in the form of tiny homunculi encased in glass. A ballerina compulsively
dances to Mendelsohnn’s “Spring Song.” A mermaid swims. A king scales the side
of his jar to get at his queen as a bishop chatters his disapproval like a
chipmunk. A devil bears a certain resemblance to the wicked doctor (or does he
flatter himself?). The little people run across the table, get nabbed by a
giant pair of tweezers, and interact seamlessly with the giant Ernest Thesiger.
The scene is an early example of the kind of awe-striking illusion that can be
accomplished in a motion picture and it hasn’t aged a single bit. I’ll leave it
to you to research how Fulton accomplished his feat. I wouldn’t want anyone
accusing me of breaking the spell.
8. Gooood! Music?
While Dracula was essentially devoid of music, and the
horrors that followed featured little more than that, Universal sprang for a
lush score to accompany its most lush monster movie. James Whale recruited
Franz Waxman after meeting him at a Christmas party and explaining how much he
liked the composer’s work in Fritz Lang’s Liliom.
Waxman outdid himself, creating the instantly recognizable leitmotifs that
electrify Bride of Frankenstein. For the
Monster, Waxman wrote a raspy, four-note brass grunt. Dr. Pretorius is
introduced by shuddering strings, while his drunken escapades in a crypt are
accompanied by a loopy rattle inspired by Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. The Bride is signified by a swooning ellipsis whether
she’s on screen or merely discussed by other characters. Elsewhere Waxman
discharges what Scott McQueen describes as a “charming period-style minuet”
that devolves into an ominous fugue when Shelley and Byron recount the story of
Frankenstein, a clangor of church
bells when we first see The Bride in her wedding gown, and an orchestral rush
that heightens the already apocalyptic destruction of Frankenstein’s laboratory
to utter hysteria.
9. Whataya Say, Pal?
Few horror films—few films of any sort—have wittier, more
memorable, more deliciously quotable dialogue than Bride of Frankenstein. Among John Balderston and William Hurlbut’s
glimmering gems are:
Dr. Frankenstein: “She’s alive! Alive!”
Dr. Pretorius: “To a new world of gods and monsters!”
Dr. Pretorius: “Do you like gin? It is my only weakness...”
Dr. Frankenstein: “This is Professor Pretorius. He used to
be Doctor of Philosophy at the university but, uh...”
Dr. Pretorius: “…but was booted out. ‘Booted,’ my dear
Baron, is the word for knowing too much.”
Minnie: “Let them all be murdered in their beds!”
Dr. Pretorius: “Leave the charnel house and follow the lead
of nature — or of god if you like your Bible stories.”
The Frankenstein Monster: “Alone: bad. Friend: good!”
Dr. Pretorius: “Sometimes I have wondered whether life
wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils; no nonsense about angels
and being good.”
Karl: “Whataya say, pal, let's give ourselves up and let 'em
hang us... This is no life for murderers.”
The Frankenstein Monster: “I love dead… hate living.”
Dr. Pretorius: “You are wise in your generation.”
Karl: (On The Bride’s heart) “It was a very fresh one!”
The Bride: “Hisssssssss.”
The Frankenstein Monster: “We belong dead.”
Dr. Pretorius: “Here, have a cigar... they're my only
weakness!”
10. Would You Like to
Hear What Happened After That?
The reason sequels get made is no mystery. They exist almost
solely to cash in on the success of their predecessors, to milk previously
fresh ideas dry. That’s why there are so few good sequels. The list of ones
that actually best their predecessors is even shorter. The Godfather Part II, The
Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek 2: The
Wrath of Khan, and Evil Dead II
are usual candidates (I’d personally include The Curse of the Cat People on that list, but I’m pretty sure I’m
in the minority on that opinion). Another regular pick is Bride of Frankenstein. The original is an excellent film to be
sure, swelling with Gothic atmosphere and sincere about its scares and gravity
(the scene in which the Monster accidentally drowns a little girl remains
powerful, disturbing, and terribly sad). However, Bride of Frankenstein is such a powerhouse of imagination and
emotion that it still stands ahead. Its humor, its creativity, its characters, its magic tricks, music, and quotability; for all the reasons already
examined on this list, Bride of
Frankenstein is nothing less than the most.
