“To a new world of Gods and
Monsters…”
By the
mid-1930, the horror film was in a virtual coma, killing time between its
initial fever of box-office excitement that began with Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein (1931-32) through a gradual slump until revitalisation
again in 1938 thanks to the surprise hit double-bill pairing of the two by an
enterprising cinema owner in New York. There were sporadic twitchings of life
though, such as The Mummy and the impressively
consistent run of splendid James Whale-directed films. After Frankenstein, he had continued to
develop his signature combination of horror and dark subversive humour in The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and then his crowning achievement in the genre, The Bride of Frankenstein. This was to be
his swansong in horror and many fans regard it as one of the very greatest
horror movies of all time.
The success of the original Frankenstein seemed to demand a sequel even before its release. Such was the positive feedback from the Santa Barbara preview that Universal hastily added a rushed ending to allow Henry Frankenstein to survive. The studio had wanted to put Boris Karloff into a sequel called Return of Frankenstein, based on a treatment by Tom Reed, going so
far as to design posters for it. The title was kept until the actual sequel
began. Whale was resistant to being involved, having felt he’d already fulfilled
his intentions with the first film. He said "I squeezed the idea dry on the original picture, and never want to work on it again". He was persuaded back so long
as he could exercise personal control over the screenplay development, credited
to William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston, and many of its ideas (the Shelley
prologue and bottled miniature people are his, for example).
The path to Hurlbut and Balderston's eventual version was almost as convoluted as that of The Invisible Man and the problem was solved similarly by reverting to clues in the source novel. En route there were several scenic stops including the temporary return to the fold of Robert Florey who offered a seven-page treatment with the unwieldy Penny Dreadful title: The New Adventures of Frankenstein - The Monster Lives! However, the irksome director made such a liability of himself in claiming untrue authorship of the first film, and difficulties for Laemmle Jr on Murders In The Rue Morgue that his ideas were disregarded. Another iteration by L.G. Blochman had Henry and Elisabeth as travelling carnival folk who are threatened by the Monster into creating his mate. Philip McDonald came up with the entertaining notion of Henry inventing a death ray that he hopes the League of Nations will buy - and uses this to zap the offending Creature. Even the reliable R.C. Sherriff took a whack at a script but could never muster up enough genuine enthusiasm. There were so many development drafts that the one finally submitted to PCA (the Breen Office of Censorship) was a Frankenstein patchwork in itself for which Universal had to apologise as it was the only complete one available.
In writer Paul M.
Jensen’s later interview with Elsa Lanchester, she told him that amongst the credited ideas, it was Whale who insisted that she play both Mary Shelley and the Bride. These performances not only create well-crafted bookends to the film, but a clever dramatic device tying the Bride so closely to her literary parent.
The prologue
is a treat of an opening, drawing together the story’s heritage with its modern
cinema telling. As we saw in the discussion of 1931’s Frankenstein, Mary Shelley conceived the novel during a holiday stay
at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816 as part of what became a remarkable
powerhouse foursome of literature gathered together. Lord Byron and her husband
Percy Bysshe Shelley were already poets of great acclaim. Mary Shelley was yet
to begin her writing career and Byron’s friend Dr John Polidori would go on to
publish his short tale The Vampire,
the very first mainstream vampire story published, that same year.
In Bride of Frankenstein, we bypass the bet
that inspired the original filmed novel in favour of a neat introduction to the
sequel, well-directed and characterised despite the scene’s brevity. Gavin
Gordon’s Byron is an excellent preening peacock, darkly revelling in the
public’s condemnation of him as ‘England’s
greatest sinner’, fruitily rolling his ‘r’s and inevitably eclipsing Douglas
Walton’s milquetoast version of Percy. Whale’s point in the prologue was to
suggest that beautiful people are just as capable of wicked thoughts as those
less prepossessing. Elsa Lanchester imbues Mary with the requisite beauty and a
formidable self-possession that easily holds her own with the menfolk. A
montage covers the first film and then she invites her friends, minus the
absent Polidori, to hear what happened next…
The
narrative timeline that follows is interesting. Whilst Bride picks up so closely from the end of the original Frankenstein film that the burnt-down
windmill of the climax is still smouldering, it backtracks just enough to show Colin
Clive’s Henry Frankenstein being retrieved from the wreckage. (We saw him safe
at home at the end of the first movie). The debris is surveyed with shrill-voiced
shrewishness by that most combatively vivid villager from The Invisible Man, Una O’ Connor, as Minnie – a favourite of
Whale’s rep company of regulars. She undermines the authority of the
Burgomaster in the form of another favoured player from that movie, E.E. Clive,
a specialist in nincompoops of authority. There’s a brief glimpse as well of
Karloff’s Monster, emerging from his encasement in a wall of mud to save a
villager, but more of him later.
By showing
Henry’s rescue, Whale expands on the hurriedly-filmed ending of Frankenstein which merely showed him
bed-ridden in a long shot – due to a last-minute decision forced on him by
Universal to not kill the scientist off. Henry is doted on by his wife
Elizabeth, an impressively mature (if stagey) 17 year-old Valerie Hobson who
replaced Mae Clarke. She is concerned for her husband, whose post-traumatic
stress has him “tossing in your delirium”.
Henry expresses regret at his insane God complex of tinkering with life: “Perhaps death is sacred and I have profaned
it”. Clive’s heartfelt sentiment
could almost be a mouthpiece for the censor here who was hugely vexed by the
perceived quasi-blasphemousness in the first film.
Never fear
though, for the slumbering body of this sequel is about to be injected with an
all-new treatment, courtesy of Henry’s old mentor Dr Septimus Praetorius. The
name alone reeks of Victorian Gothic and embodied by Ernest Thesiger, he is a splendidly
camp queen of a gentleman, severely waspish and bearing a permanent lofty sneer
at the world. Though allegedly Claude Rains and Lugosi were considered,
Thesiger is prissy perfection in the part and in real-life was Whale’s own mentor from
his theatre days. Praetorius is a terrific component in Bride as he allows Henry to have his experimental cake and eat it.
By blackmailing Henry into continuing his work, it allows the protégé to writhe
on the hook in moral torture (Clive’s most compelling actor quality) whilst
appealing to his still-burning desire to perfect the rejuvenation of dead
tissue.
Under the
guise of a coerced seduction of Henry‘s vulnerable mad scientist, Whale must
have relished the chance to throw blasphemy in the face of Joseph Breen, head
of the Hays office. The Production Code of censor approval was in full effect
now, forensically combing through Hollywood films for anything remotely
controversial, which made something of a game for the director. His subversive
side enabled Henry to get away with the almost messianically hot: “It may be that I am intended to know the
secret of life. It may be part of the divine plan”. Even when the Breen
office forced a line-change, there were still ways to convey the underlying
meaning. At script-approval stage, they vetoed Praetorius’s intended: “Follow
the lead of nature or God…if you like your fairy tales” with the less
incendiary : “…if you like your bible
stories” but Thesiger caps the line with such scorn, it has the same
derisory effect even in censored form. Later, there is even a toppling of
religious iconography in Karloff’s knocking over of a graveyard bishop’s
statue, not to mention the Monster being inbued with Christ-like suffering if
you’re inclined to read it subtextually that way.
Praetorius seals
the deal with the famous quote that begins this article and then trumps the
shadowy grandeur of his entrance with an illustration of his perversely cruel
nature and a touch of Whale’s offbeat sense of humour – the mythical miniature
characters under glass that he has bred. They are a parade of satirised icons
mostly of the fairy tale world: the greedy King, the Queen, the widow’s-peaked
Lugosi-esque Devil, the Mermaid and, for sheer mischief, an Archbishop. All are
parodied in their pantomime gesturing and pip-squeak voices, the special
effects pulling off a smooth transition as the King is lifted with tweezers by
Praetorius and dumped back into his own jar.
We then
switch focus to Karloff’s Creature, now free and roaming the countryside – a
superbly realistic studio backlot set of which Whale was justifiably proud. He
lumbers through the forest in search of the basic needs of all – food, shelter
and companionship. He finds none of the first two with the frightened gypsies
but strikes lucky at the home of a hermit, O.P. Heggie. (Whale's great taste in always selecting the right actor for the part paid off handsomely here. Such was his belief in the difference the Australian actor's talent would make, that upon hearing he was filming elsewhere for RKO, Whale shot around him on the creation scene, the prologue and then shot down production for ten days till Heggie was ready.)
The relationship between the Hermit and the creature is indeed another of
the celebrated highlights of the film and well worth the wait in filming. The tenderness of Heggie’s kindness
toward the Monster is very moving, not least for its utter lack of irony or
condescension. The blind old man finds a kindred spirit in Karloff’s fellow
outcast, offering him the comforts of his soup, wine and cigar, the only person
ever to recognise the Monster’s inner humanity. It is a clumsy negotiation
between them and all the more touching for Heggie’s soothing of Karloff’s fear
of fire and the disarming directness of their mutual understanding. “Alone…bad. Friend..good” grunts Karloff,
his deep rumbling utterances somehow enobling him.
Karloff always had
misgivings about giving voice to the Monster, fearing it would detract from the
poetic mystique of his performance, and although it was a device never used again, here its beguiling simplicity of expression gives extra poignancy. The scene
also contains an example of Franz Waxman’s finely-judged music score,
delicately adding a biblical, saintly atmosphere to the hermit and his guest.
Such is the scene’s depth that even when lovingly pastiched by Gene Hackman and
Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, ["Wait, I was gonna make espresso..."), the affection for the
relationship is still evident. Look out for a very young John Carradine as one
of the hunters who cruelly breaks up the temporary friendship.
It is no
coincidence that The Bride of Frankenstein brings
two misfits together like this. Indeed all of the film’s principal players
barring Elizabeth fit that description, whether by circumstances (as these two
must endure, along with Lanchester’s Bride
thrust into the world) or inner direction (Praetorius and Henry Frankenstein’s
transgressive scientific views render them apart from the mainstream world).
Whale had an innate sympathy for those who are different, living as a gay man
in a prejudiced society, albeit more comfortably than Colin Clive could with
his own alleged homosexuality.
On the
subject of comforts, Boris Karloff was by now enjoying some influence in his
career. The lowly Universal contract player who shot to fame just four years
before as the mad scientist’s ‘off-spring’ was exerting a star’s persuasion not
only on behalf of the Hollywood actors’ community in his sterling work for the new Screen Actors Guild, but on a personal level he
negotiated to reduce the punishing hours for himself spent undergoing the make-up
every day for the Monster. Whilst the time-consuming layering on of cotton
and collodium by resident genius Jack Pierce still apparently took four hours a day to apply, Karloff was given a single piece
rubber forehead as a short-cut. His new prosperity had also generously accorded
him a slightly more well-fed look than the cadaverous face of 1931, so his
appearance was rounder. The aftermath of the mill fire shows in the burns
Pierce applied to his hands and face and crew-cut hair (which gradually grows
more over the evolving story).
The great
cinematographer John J Mescall was another of Whale’s long-standing
collaborators who used clever lighting techniques to enhance Karloff’s
blue-green skin tones provided by Pierce. Film historian Scott Macqueen discusses
this in She’s Alive (Universal’s
informative Bride documentary): “If the monster were filmed wearing this
shade of greasepaint on ortho-chromatic film…with blue gel light, he would read
as dead white. To increase the contrast, red was mixed with the other actors’
make-up sharing scenes and train warmer lights on them” – thus re-creating
that all-important walking corpse veracity. Mescall was renowned for his
overall shooting style nicknamed ‘Rembrandt lighting’, simulating the great
painter’s work by using a central light with cross lights from opposing
directions to add contours to faces as well as Charles Hall’s wonderful sets -
Praetorius’s shadowy first entrance is a striking example.
Another
surprising meeting of minds in the film is the first encounter between
Praetorius and the Monster. Thesiger sits eating and drinking at night in the
cemetery vault, using a coffin as a table for his bread and wine. The
candlesticks and skull décor add a darkly funny gothic tinge as he guffaws at
the world between mouthfuls. When Karloff appears, the sequence becomes an
imitation of the hospitality he has just enjoyed – indeed Praetorius greets him
with the amusingly unruffled composure of a new travelling companion. “I thought I was alone. Good evening”. What
the Monster doesn’t know is that a hidden agenda bubbles away now inside his
new host, one that will use the Creature as leverage to force Henry into
creating a female version of the revived dead.
This brings
us to the famous climax of the movie as the Bride is unforgettably brought into
the world. Charles Hall’s high-ceilinged set for the laboratory is magnificent,
showcasing the return of Kenneth Strickfaden’s astounding equipment such as the
‘cosmic defuser’ and the awesome spiralling coil that connects the lightning above
to the stretcher bearing Lanchester to the heavens. Her birth is sensational. “She’s alive – alive!” crows Clive, even
more effusively than when he created her male ‘suitor’.
As with the casting of Frankenstein's original monster, the choice of Elsa Lanchester was delayed until filming began, here eight days into the shooting, so both the prologue and climax were moved to the end of the schedule. Nevertheless, when Lanchester's Bride enters imperious, she is a Queen gowned in flowing white before her subjects, taking the space with an unforgettable regal power. Her scorching appearance is dramatically enhanced by her Nefertiti white-streaked hair locks streaming back across her natural brunette tresses (built around a hidden wire cage for extra vivid scale)
The actress
gifts her role with memorable details: the bird-like gaze flitting about her in
wonder, staring up at the moonlight. Then comes the awful moment of truth as
she surveys Karloff and emits a silent almost feline yowl of disgust. “She hate me – like others” the Monster
poignantly utters before literally bringing the house down with one of the
great epic horror movie closing lines: “We
belong dead”. Lanchester hisses with venomous defiance and is gone, a truly
stunning performance that resonates beyond her incredibly brief appearance (no
more than five minutes) into the history books as the most vivid female horror
character ever represented.
Before the
castle detonates, this section of the film is also appreciable for Waxman’s
music cues. There are effective stings that augment the mood – the lone drum
that imitates the heartbeat of the comatose Bride and the grotesque parody of wedding
bells as she stands triumphantly alive. The composer was careful to attribute evocative
leitmotifs for each character, even to remind us of them when off-screen –
Elizabeth’s romantic melody, the Monster’s three-note ‘da-da-da daaa’ that
replicates his growl and the graduating violin shiver when Praetorius lurks.
In advance of its
release, there were roughly fifteen minutes of scenes excised from Bride. Elsa Lanchester’s cleavage was
considered revealing enough to warrant judicious edits to the prologue, but the
main bulk of cuts consists of an entire ten-minute sub-plot involving Dwight
Frye as the nervy criminal body-snatcher Karl. To boost audience sympathy for
the Creature, Whale filmed a whole section whereby Karl kills his aunt and
uncle and attempts to frame the Monster for the murders. Ultimately the
sequence proved an unnecessary hindrance to the pace and was dropped. Frye
would still have been grateful to Whale’s characteristic loyalty though; Karl
was a composite of various parts rolled into one by the director to give his
admired friend more screen time in the rest of the film. (We still have the
pleasure of his jittery defence for procuring the Bride’s corpse: “It was a very fresh one!”). The final
release print of the film is masterfully edited by Ted Kent, leaving no fat in
its prime-cut 75 minutes. It came in ten days over its 36 day schedule and $100,000 over its $293,750 budget but the box office business from its April 19th release in 1935 was well worth it.
In spite of
the great success of The Bride of
Frankenstein, the increasing burden of debt was too great to save Universal
from being sold a year later to new owners who lacked any artistic taste or
ambition. Boris Karloff showed the wise career judgement which may have eluded
his contemporary Bela Lugosi in only agreeing to one more sequel as the Monster,
Son of Frankenstein in 1939. He
foresaw the descent into bad jokes and worse sequels. The lack of Whale’s input
made the law of diminishing returns an inevitability as the franchise wagon
rolled on.
The success of The Bride of Frankenstein was ultimately bittersweet. Although it led to Whale being granted his first million-dollar budget to realise a second studio attempt at the epic musical Show Boat, he later became
disillusioned with the industry. The new studio owners rewarded him for the musical's windfall and previous bonanzas by palming him off with decreasing budgets and schedules to force him into quickly fulfilling his current contract. Even though he handled these assignments with speed and some surprising success on those terms, several years later after the failure of The Road Back - his sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front - he
enjoyed a comfortable retirement before suffering debilitating strokes that caused
him to commit suicide in 1957. He never lived long enough to enjoy the great
critical re-appraisal of his contribution to cinema (and horror especially). Bill Condon’s affectionate biopic Gods
and Monsters (1998) goes some way to pay homage to James Whale’s talent and
sensibility decades after his life as we shall see next. Stay tuned for my next episode...
This is such a fantastic piece, Ian! Great writing and depth.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've understood about Lugosi, he was one bad negotiator. So desperate to play Dracula, he took an amazingly low offer and he never bounced back from that. I think he had no choice but to do another sequel to keep food on the table.
Great research and wonderful work!
Thanks again. Yes, you're right about Lugosi. I covered this unfortunate aspect of his unequal bargaining power in my DRACULA review below - and the book BELA LUGOSI IN PERSON details the many increasingly threadbare iterations of DRACULA stage tours he kept plugging away at until he died.
ReplyDeletehttp://historyofhorrorcinema.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/dracula-bela-lugosi-1931.html
Thanks, Ian. Sorry I missed that one. So much horror history, so little time!
ReplyDeleteI always felt that hearing the monster speak lessened his presence on screen. Great reference to Hackman/Boyle. I couldn't help but think of their scene watching this one.
ReplyDelete