My first exposure to the story of the creation of Frankenstein was the prologue to The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, directed by James Whale), in which Lord Byron and Percy Shelley attend Mary Shelley as she works on her needlepoint. The night is appropriately stormy and Byron imagines an angry Jehovah hurling lightning bolts at his nose. Then Byron intones his disbelief that such a mild, delicate woman could have conjured horrors to make HIS blood run cold. He laments that the story ended at the windmill in the previous film, prompting Mary to tell them that that's not the end at all. And so it isn't. The Creature born from the hubris of that pale student of unhallowed arts shows no signs of letting go of the popular imagination. A dozen films or more from this decade alone revisit Frankenstein in one way or another. Perhaps more surprising, though, is the number of films that revisit that mad weekend at Lake Geneva where the Shelleys, Byron, Dr. Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Claire gathered to tell stories to ease the boredom of The Year Without A Summer. This, too, comes from Mary's imagination, forming a Gothic story all its own. It's not by accident that films like Gothic or A Nightmare Wakes or Haunted Summer present the weekend as a horror story. Shelley herself framed it that way in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, and now it is a persistent narrative in the meme pool. I like to think when she described Frankenstein as a "pale student of unhallowed arts," she was also describing herself.
The Bride of Frankenstein one of the key films in the explosion of horror movies in the pre-Code era, though it was released a year after the code was instituted. It serves as a capstone to the first wave of the Universal horror movies and their fellow travelers from other studios during the first half of the 1930s. It is every bit the myth-maker that its predecessor was. It's also the result of its director playing games with the arbiters of public morals and the pushback from those very forces. The Bride of Frankenstein is among the most violent of the Universal horror movies, with a higher on-screen body count than any of its predecessors (in terms of lethality, The Invisible Man has this film beat, but most of that film's body count is off screen). The Production Code Authority were concerned about the film's brutality, and sent Whale and the producers a list of cuts they wanted to see. They were short of patience with Whale because he had assured them prior to filming that the film would uphold the spirit of the code. He was lying through his teeth. Upon receiving the list of cuts, Whale and the legal counsel for Universal had a meeting to negotiate the cuts the studio would accept and the cuts the Breen office demanded. This resulted in only a handful of the cuts they demanded being made to the finished film. At this point, it's worth considering the actual function of the PCA, which was to place a barrier between the film studios and the various state and local censor boards around the country. Their desire regarding The Bride of Frankenstein wasn't to mutilate the film, it was to protect it from being mutilated by other bodies. Their list of suggested cuts was prescient, because every single one of the cuts they originally suggested were ultimately imposed on the film by censors across the world. It's also worth noting that it was not tampered with in many of the film's largest markets, including--surprisingly--Massachusetts, where "Banned in Boston" was a meme. There is a lesson in this: violence is baked into the horror movie and if one removes the violence completely, you get kiddie films like the later Universal horrors. Ultimately, you get Abbott and Costello. Personally, I think Whale was playing a deeper game. By confronting the Breen office with the film's violence, he was disguising how queer and how blasphemous the film is. That element of The Bride of Frankenstein is completely unfiltered.
Assigning a contemporary understanding of queerness to historical figures is always a guessing game. Mary Shelley was known to have had same-sex encounters to play "tousey mousey" with some of her female acquaintances. She wrote about this in her diary. Her host at Villa Diotati, Lord Byron, was also bisexual. Percy Shelley, too, and some commenters suggest the Shelleys had a lavender marriage. The queerness of Frankenstein was always there from the start. What was the secret Frankenstein wrested from God? Creating life? Women do that all the time, so it is more apt to say he was infringing on the domain of women. Frankenstein's interpreters at Universal were also mostly gay, starting with the openly gay James Whale. The case for Colin Clive's homosexuality is less definite, but most everyone who knew him said he was bisexual at the very least. While the queerness of the first film is buried in the subtext, in The Bride of Frankenstein it is unambiguous. It starts with the casting of Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and as The Bride. While Lanchester was a straight woman, she was married to Charles Laughton, who was gay. Colin Clive was back as the good doctor, and the film provides him with a foil in Ernest Thesiger's Dr. Pretorius. Thesiger was another member of Whale's circle of queer friends, and the relationship between Frankenstein and Pretorius can be interpreted as two gay men collaborating to create life. They're even wedding planners, if you take the shroud they dress The Bride in as a wedding gown. It certainly looks like the part. Whale, of course, denied everything. His friends deny it, too. You can take that at face value if you like, but subtext is not always intentional on a filmmaker's part.
Anyway...
After the prologue, the film picks up where the previous film ended, at the smoking ruin of the windmill where, presumably, The Monster has met a fiery end. Henry Frankenstein is found to be alive after being tossed from the top of the building, and he is hauled to his ancestral manor for treatment. The villagers pick over the embers and the burgomaster disperses the crowd and tells everyone to go home. One of the villagers takes one last look down into the flooded basement and falls in, whereupon the monster murders him. He, too, has survived. When he climbs out of the ruin, he throws the man's wife in after him. The Frankenstein's maid, Minnie, witnesses this and flees to the manor to warn Henry and Elizabeth that the monster isn't dead after all. Henry is too frail to do anything about it, and the couple withdraw into his convalescence. That convalescence is interrupted by the arrival of one of Henry's old mentors, the sinister Dr. Pretorius, who urges Frankenstein to collaborate on making a mate for the monster. He shows Henry the homonculi that are the results of his own experiments. Henry quails at the idea. Pretorius schemes to change his mind. The Monster, on the other hand, heads into the countryside, murdering most of the people he meets. Eventually, the mob catches him and hoists him on a cross to carry him to the town jail, which, predictably, fails to hold him. He rampages through town killing more people including another little girl. He escapes back to the countryside where he does not murder the blind hermit who welcomes him into his home, though, and here he finds a modicum of human kindness that has been denied him in his short unlife. The hermit feeds him, teaches him to speak, and plays music for him. The Monster is at last content until a couple of hunters stumble on the hermit's cottage and discover the monster. In the scuffle, the hermit's cottage burns and the men take the hermit to safety even as he bemoans the loss of his friend. The Monster is once again bereft. He makes his way to the cemetery where a couple of grave robbers are at work. They vacate the crypt where Dr. Pretorius has set up his lunch and The Monster wanders in. Pretorius has his lever to move the intractable Frankenstein and bend him to his purpose. The Monster kidnaps Elizabeth as a hostage and Pretorius and Frankenstein embark on the creation of his bride...
The Bride of Frankenstein is a very different kind of film than its predecessor. Where that film was stark, breathless, and terrifying, this one is droll and ornate. In his previous two horror movies, Whale imbued the horrific elements with a dry comedy. He brings many of the cast members from those films to The Bride, including Una O'Connor, E. E. Clive, and Ernest Thesiger. He wanted to bring Claude Rains, too, as Pretorius, but Rains was too big a talent to remain in the genre and was too expensive for the part. Whale was a victim of his own success. The Bride of Frankenstein tips its hand early, as Una O'Connor transports her shrieking hysterical character from The Invisible Man whole and breathing to the ruins of the windmill. All of the new characters have distinctive comedic tics, from the burgomaster's English authority to Pretorius's repeated declaration that "they're my only weakness" whenever he indulges some vice or other. It's a fine collection of caricatures, and would be at home in an English comic opera. The veneer of comedy occasionally crosses the line into camp, as in the scene Pretorius's homunculi. Where the film needs to be serious, though, it is serious. Mel Brooks and Gene Hackman may have adopted the blind man scene for its comedy value, but Whale plays it, well, straight. This is a scene taken directly from the novel, in one of the few places Whale's films hew to Shelley herself rather than to theatrical versions like the Peggy Webling play. It's a scene that goes directly to the core of why The Monster succeeds as an archetype unto himself on top of the mad doctor meddling in things man was not meant to know. He's the outsider, the pariah, the wretch who needs only the hand of human kindness to rescue him from his misery. To have it stripped away by those who perceive his monstrosity the way the blind hermit cannot is the core of the film's tragedy. It's one of the best stories in the horror movie myth pool. I think it's best that Whale saved this for The Bride, because it would utterly shatter the grim tone of the first film. Karloff thought it was a mistake to have the monster speak, but this scene requires that he does. We would all be poorer if he didn't. This finds an echo in the scene in the crypt where Pretorius is having his picnic. He recognizes The Monster's fundamental naivete and profound loneliness and uses kindness as a means to exploit him. The Monster has a beef with his creator and every time he utters the word "Frankenstein," there's a note of abject hatred in it. Pretorius offers The Monster supremacy over his creator. Whale's version of the good doctor was always weak and here he gets swamped by the inmates at the asylum in spite of the film's ostensible "happy" ending.
The creation scene, as it is in the first film, is the centerpiece of the film. Here, Whale matches, or maybe even exceeds the original. As with the original, the laboratory they've built for Frankenstein and Pretorius is a place of madness, shot with expressionistic shadows and Dutch-tilted cameras. It culminates with a refrain of "She's alive!" The image of The Bride is more striking than anything she actually does in the film, with her shock of Nefertiti hair and her birdlike motions. Her full debut in the film is accompanied by the pealing of wedding bells on Franz Waxman's score. Then the tragedy: Her rejection of The Monster is of a piece with everyone else in the film, excluding the blind hermit, and Karloff's reaction--"She hate me. Like the others"--is on point. I do love the conceit of having a lever easily at hand that will "blow us all to atoms," as Pretorius puts it. There's no precedent for that in the film to that point, but whatever. What is an evil villain's lair without a self-destruct. The Monster has the last word to Pretorius and his recalcitrant bride: "We belong dead." But being blown to atoms isn't enough to keep a good monster down. You could add a card in the credits that says: "The Monster will return in Son of Frankenstein" a la James Bond or Marvel.
I admit that The Bride of Frankenstein is only my third favorite of the initial trio of Frankenstein films from Universal, but I wasn't thinking that at all while I watched it earlier this month. While I was watching it I was fully transported into its world. It's a gorgeous film filled with unusual faces, and now and then it provides scenes with real poetry behind them. I cannot even speculate what Mary Shelley herself would have thought of this film. It might have given her the heebie jeebies given that the very idea of a race of monsters has her Dr. Frankenstein sabotaging the creation of a mate. In one of the few scenes that speak to the fact that Shelley was 19 when she wrote Frankenstein, her naivete prevents her from realizing that a scientist skillful enough to build a body from spare parts has the skill to render that body sterile without The Monster being any the wiser, though that idea would have derailed the plot and the book would be very different. I have no idea if Whale's version of The Bride could have mothered a race with The Monster, because The Monster doesn't take his rejection at all well.
I am indebted to a few sources for this post, but two deserve specific callout:
Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema 1930-1968 by Stephen Prince, 2003, Rutgers University Press, pages 77-86.
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, Revised edition, by David J. Skal, 2001, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Thus, I continue with this year's October's Horror Movie Challenge, in which I try to watch as many horror movies as I can. I have some competing activities this month, so I doubt I'll make it to my usual 31 films, but we'll give it the old college try.
My friend Aaron Christensen, the redoubtable Dr. AC, is once again running his Scare-A-Thon for charity. This year's beneficiary is Impact Chicago, where Dr. AC volunteers as a human punching bag in order to teach vulnerable populations how to fight off attacks, sexual and otherwise. Here's the link to the fundraising portal. You know what to do.
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