Tuesday, January 21, 2025

NFR Project: 'Bride of Frankenstein' (1935)

 


NFR Project: ‘Bride of Frankenstein’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: John L. Balderson, William Hurlbut, Edmund Pearson

Pho: John J. Mescall

Ed: Ted J. Kent

Premiere: April 20, 1935

75 min.

One of the finest of all horror movies is, surprisingly, a sequel. (Normally, sequels exploit the original, successful film’s concept but do little to improve on it.) Bride of Frankenstein outclasses Frankenstein, and it does so because its director didn’t think the effort would amount to much, so he decided to have fun with it.

It took the efforts of several writers to cobble together a script that both appealed to director James Whale, back for the sequel, and the censors. The spring of the plot is the monster’s quest for a mate, a “friend” who will love him. This is patently impossible, as he is a lurching, murderous hulk saddled with a criminal brain. Brilliantly, the film takes the monster’s side, turning him into a figure of pathos, a real character who changes and develops, and is arguably the wisest and sanest of the characters still standing by film’s end.

We are told that the film’s tale is intended to be a cautionary one, a “moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” However, we soon move on to the terrifying attraction of graveyards, dead bodies, and dank and dismal laboratories. Whale rubs our faces in the horrific. Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) often bemoans his urge to violate the secrets of nature, but he’s easily drawn back into dark science.

The film is shot in the studio, and its patent artificiality underlines the fairy-tale nature of the film’s events. Whale revels in the transgressive elements of the screenplay and exploits them to the fullest. We begin with a prelude featuring author Mary Shelley regaling her companions with a continuation of the story . . .

The monster survives the fire at the end of Frankenstein, and promptly kills the parents of the little girl he killed in the last movie. He also scares the bejeezus out of Una O’Connor, a British actress who specialized in playing malevolent, hysterical hags (Whale lets her overact her head off, providing us with a little comic relief).

Dr. Frankenstein is determined not to meddle in things beyond his ken, but the arrival of the severe-looking and coyly gay Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger), his former teacher, quickly changes his mind. Praetorius has half the key to creating life – he can do so, but only by creating miniature men, homunculi. Together the pair plan to try to create another living being.

The monster wanders through the forest, frightening gypsies, a shepherdess, and some hunters, who shoot him. An angry mob captures him, ties him to a pole in much the pose of a crucifixion (crosses are nearly everywhere you look in this film) and carts him off to prison. Chained there, he soon rips away his bonds and wanders off again.

It is then that he meets the blind hermit (O.P. Heggie). Taken in by the man and tended to, the monster finds compassion and understanding for the first time. Fittingly, it is only the blind man who can see the monster as a creature with a soul, capable of learning and doing good. The monster abides with the hermit for a time, until two more hunters (one of them a young John Carradine) enter, decrying the presence of the monster and starting a fight that ends up burning down the hermit’s home.

Lost again, the monster wanders into a cemetery, and flees down into a crypt, descending into the netherworld. There he finds Praetorius, who is assembling a creature out of the bones of the dead. (The great Dwight Frye, who played the hunchbacked servant Karl in the original Frankenstein, is back, reincarnated as assistant and body-snatcher Fritz.) The ghoulish doctor and the monster strike a pact.

Soon they are confronting Dr. Frankenstein, forcing him to create a mate for the monster by kidnapping his wife and holding her hostage. The sweeping, breathtaking climax is set again inhe laboratory, on a stormy night, with all of special effects creator Kenneth Strickfaden’s electric gizmos flashing and banging away in the background. The procedure is successful! And out comes the Bride (Elsa Lanchester, in a marked departure from her Mary Shelley earlier in the film). Stiff and ungainly, halting, topped with a flaring, flying, grey-streaked hairdo, she recoils from the monster’s advances. Even his intended is repulsed by him.

The monster lashes out, and touches a lever that could destroy the entire laboratory. Dr. Frankenstein’s wife comes for him. “Go! You live! Go!” cries the monster, saving the two of them. To Praetorius and the Bride, he turns and has the last word, saying “You stay. We belong dead!” And he throws the switch and destroys them all. (Or does he? Frankenstein had many Universal sequels yet to go.)

What seems relatively tame now was extremely transgressive for the time; many places cut the film down or banned it outright. It certainly has a whiff of blasphemy, with Praetorius acting as the devil’s advocate. Dr. Frankenstein is once again spared from his own folly, as the providential nature of his creation spares him from destruction.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Naughty Marietta.

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