Well, this one is another example of a film I came to a little bit later in life, by which I mean that I was over the age of 18 when I saw it for the first time. But of course, I knew all about it well in advance of actually seeing it all the way through. I think my appreciation for James Whale has been well established around these parts, these haunted hallowed halls of higher horror ed here at Scare U.
By 1935, following the success of Frankenstein, the OG Frankenstein, the release of the deliciously and deliriously odd The Old Dark House and the technical mastery demonstrated in The Invisible Man, I think the strangeness of Whale's visual and storytelling sensibilities has been given freer reign and greater encouragement for this picture, Bride of Frankenstein, which is of course to say nothing of the fact that this is one of the rare sequels in the history of cinema to achieve the same or greater adulation than the original film to which it responds. and whose story it ostensibly advances, which cannot necessarily be said of the ensuing sequels, Son of Frankenstein in 1939, or The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942, or Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man in 1943, House of Frankenstein in 1944. House of Dracula, in 1945, which is technically a sequel to Frankenstein, and eventually Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein in 1948. And of course, the franchise's diminishing returns, artistically at least, can probably be attributed to Whale's absence from any of the further sequels, as well as Colin Clive's, since Clive died in 1937 at the age of 37 from chronic alcoholism and complications from tuberculosis. Eventually Karloff hung up the old neck bolts himself following Son of Frankenstein.
But in 1935—oh man—the team was still together and Whale was wailing and he was up to his usual tricks. Maybe it's more fair to say he was employing his unique filmmaking techniques. Here he supplemented the cast of the 1931 film with the glaring exception of Mae Clarke having been replaced by Valerie Hobson in the role of Elizabeth, Henry Frankenstein's fiance, with actors who'd been added to his Mercury Theater-style ensemble of delightful coups.
in the interim, from the uncredited, aforementioned Elspeth Dudgeon in that brief cameo, though John Carradine also has a brief cameo in this, to Una O'Connor, who is so memorable in The Invisible Man, to Ernest Thesiger, among my favorite actors of all time as Dr. Pretorius, and as his crowning jewel, his Bride of Chaos, he brought Mrs. Charles Laughton (whom we recall was Sir William Porterhouse in The Old Dark House singing about the roast beef of Old England as he sat at, as he sat at Thesiger's mean, and very potato laden table) to play the titular role. And Whale has more than a few surprises up his immaculately tailored sleeve.
The music that we hear under the opening titles is less ‘dance of the dead’ than it is romance of the dead. The bait and switch that happens in the first few frames of moving images flout audience expectations of what we're going to find in a Gothic castle on a dark and stormy night, when instead of finding ourselves in some wild-eyed doctor's laboratory, we seem to be on the stylized almost literally Hollywood Regency shores of Lake Geneva, replete with uniformed servants and genteel greyhounds that seem to glide through the frame. Because here we're witnessing a kind of double refraction of the creation of life from the inanimate. Whale frames his story with that of the invention of the Frankenstein concept and its continuation beyond the conclusion of his 1931 film. Here, in a kind of meta-cinematic glimpse behind the curtain, we also get a refresher on the imagery of the original film as Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley, hiding from the rain, recall the finer plot points of Frankenstein. And Mary spins another weird yarn that picks up immediately upon the conclusion of the previous: a burning mill, a ululating mob, and the prompt reveal that all has perhaps not gone as planned.
And while we don't see Karloff again after it's suggested that he lives for another half an hour, the horrors of Bride of Frankenstein are more philosophical than simply physical. And of course, the subversive delights of Bride are also super textual. Here, of course, I refer to the look and feel of the physical production, into which great care and consideration were obviously poured. More so ostensibly than into the screenplay. The score, with its three major themes or motifs, like other formal elements in the production design, locate us in the time the film was made and take us to other places.
In total, in the sum of its parts, Bride of Frankenstein pits the sacred against the profane. It shows us both the ridiculous and the sublime, sometimes in the same frame. The prototype of the Hollywood monster is entranced by the strains of Ave Maria played by a blind man on his violin. By another who is afflicted, the mute creature is taught to speak, and from thence to express his fundamental, elemental desires. And in the last reel, we see those desires satisfied in deleterious ways when they are unreciprocated. Because, as Dr. Pretorius explains, the human heart is more complex than any other part of the body.
And on the subject of the human heart and the concept of friendship, something that we haven't ever really touched on this podcast, not ever, I don't think, is that I am presently and have been for some time at work on a documentary that's being produced by Blumhouse, our great horror studio, Blumhouse, and is waiting for a conclusion. And it was through that project that I met Dorian, and her husband, Don, who is one of its principal subjects. And when I initially made the acquaintance of Don and Dorian, they were sort of a dynamic duo. They were a package deal. They had this way of memorializing events together, filling in story blanks for each other. And every time I called Don, I also got a conversation with Dorian. And it was very early in the process of making the documentary that on one of those calls, I think Don got another call he had to take. I was chatting away with Dorian and she asked me with what I learned is a famous line that she uses at cocktail parties and academic events. She asked me if I knew the name “Peggy Webling.” And I think my answer to her was, I know that name, but I'm not sure why.
I have a feeling that Dorian didn't quite buy that answer until I said, I know it from a book by David Skal. Skal, of course, being the recently departed scholar of horror. And I said, either Hollywood Gothic or The Monster Show, I think she had something to do with, and Dorian said, Frankenstein. And I said, yes, of course. Fom the opening titles of Frankenstein. Dorian explained she wrote the play on which the film was adapted. And I like to think it was in that moment that Dorian knew that I wasn't a bullshitter.
And since then, we've had many, many lengthy, abstract, esoteric conversations. And a fantastic outgrowth of this friendship is that, as I said, I got to work on Dorian's and Bruce's extraordinary book, which will be out from Bloomsbury and on shelves in just a couple of days, April 18th. And of course, there are story elements of Bride of Frankenstein that are directly related to ideas in Peggy Webling's adaptation of Frankenstein for the stage, founded on the novel of the same name by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, as it said on the program's title page from its production at the Little Theatre in London in 1930.
And so it's a particular thrill for me tonight to have these two scholars in conversation with us about this film. It's almost as exciting to feel like I've played some tiny part in the historical continuum of Frankenstein as it is to talk about movies with old friends and with new ones.
To hear our take on Bride of Frankenstein, click here.
Bradford Louryk