Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
“It's a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.”
I am finishing my series on director James Whale with a review of Bride of Frankenstein. This is largely considered Whale’s best film, and I cannot refute that.
We have to start at the beginning, because these opening credits are wonderful. I could tell from the credits that we were in for something different than the first movie—and it is indeed campy all the way through.
It’s not everyday that we have a question mark in the credits. Some of the marketing I’ve seen for Bride plays up this “who will be the bride?” mystery. It is an odd marketing angle, as there was one woman in the first film and 3 living women in this one.
I imagine the audience was to expect that Elizabeth, the love interest, was to die and become the creature. In an early draft of the script, Henry Frankenstein’s assistant did kill Elizabeth. Instead, the corpse they revive here is some random disinterred 19 year old, and the assistant murders a passerby to get a healthy woman’s heart.
The double casting of Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and the Bride is really effective, although I don't know that I would have recognized her from the prologue to the end if I hadn’t known about the double casting. Elsa Lanchester suggested that the double casting and the prologue with Mary Shelley was intended to portray that pretty people have dark imaginations.
I think any reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that sees the Creature as a proxy for Mary is fascinating. Here’s a tumblr post that articulates it better than I ever could.
This is the first movie for Horror History that had its script submitted to the Production Code Administration. The Hays Code was a set of conservative rules dictating what movies could and could not depict, and was enforced starting in 1934. Bride’s script was given notes to soothe over some of the religious, sexual, and violent content.
We open on a framing story that the filmmakers use to explain how they made a sequel when the Monster died at the end of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley sit in a parlor and Mary sets up for us, with clips from the first film, that the Monster managed to get away so we may have a sequel.
These flashback prologues always feel weird to me, but I realize that audiences in the 1930s, before home video and streaming, would have potentially never seen or it had been 4 years since they had seen the first Frankenstein, so a little refresher is helpful.
I’ve really enjoyed watching Whale’s loose troupe of actors evolve throughout his filmography. He enjoyed working with many people and, during his heyday, Universal Studios let him have a lot of agency in selecting his cast and crew. E.E. Clive and Una O’Connor are back from The Invisible Man. O’Connor is wearing a silly hat. Despite that, I liked her role less here than in The Invisible Man. Dr. Pretorius, our new evil scientist who entices Henry back into the lab, is played by James Whale’s friend Ernest Thesiger.
Fun fact, Thesiger was a prolific embroiderer and Vice Patron of the Embroiderer’s Guild, which is the UK’s leading educational charity promoting embroidery. During World War I, he assembled kits and promoted needlepoint for soldiers recovering from the war.
The sets are, once again, fucking crazy. Charles D. Hall did the art direction as well as in Frankenstein. Like the first film, I wanted to screen-cap just about every set. They built a fucking waterfall on a sound-stage for this film.
Dr. Pretorius is more interesting than Henry Frankenstein in this film. Henry is shell-shocked and doesn’t have a lot to do. Colin Clive was recovering from an injury during filming, so he spends much of his time on screen seated and pathetic.
I really loved Dr. Pretorius. He’s a great villain. Clive Barker described Pretorious as an “archetypal old queen”. We saw Thesiger play another archetypal old queen a couple weeks back in The Old Dark House (read my review here). However, Dr. P is a different type of queen, and I’m chuffed to see Thesiger show some range. In The Old Dark House, Thesiger was nervous and tittering. Here, is is unbothered (moisturized, in his own lane). He’s a lot less traumatized and neurotic than Henry Frankenstein, which balances well when they're together—like the id and superego pushing and pulling each other’s desires.
The moment that sent me from loving Dr. Pretorius to being obsessed, however, is the gay little gesture he does when he introduces “The Bride of Frankenstein” at the end of the film. Iconic
I haven’t seen any indication that ‘30s audiences thought Pretorius was super gay, but viewers in the decades since have made a lot of his portrayal in this.
By this point in his career Boris Karloff was credited as KARLOFF. KARLOFF has a lot more to do, and he’s giving a great performance that could have gone slightly wrong and into completely awful. The Monster talks somewhat in this movie. I have little patience for ‘caveman talk’, but KARLOFF manages to play it in a way that doesn’t make me want to throw things.
I think the scenes where the Monster is learning how to talk with a blind man whose house he wanders into were charming and teetered on annoying, but never fell into being annoying. The scene starts off innocently enough with the old man presenting the Monster with bread (which he takes a chomp out of and says his first word “bread”). When the old man breaks out two cigars, however, the tone has completely shifted into goof town. All I could think of while this was happening was how much I need to re-watch Young Frankenstein.
The old man tries to teach the Monster the ways of the world: “There is good and there is bad”. That line is ironic in a story where the binary of good and bad don’t apply. The Monster isn’t bad, and this film (as the first) makes him rather sympathetic despite the fact that he intentionally or accidentally kills a lot of people. The Hays era of Hollywood is founded on a conservative Christian ideal that good and bad are separate and we can remove the “bad” from things to heal society. That may sound like a noble pursuit, but the Hays code included things like interracial relationships and homosexuality as social ills that cannot be depicted on film lest it degrade the ethics of all who see it. The Hays Code also required that scripts like Bride of Frankenstein talk around a lot of subversive subject matter. The Hays Office didn’t actually rid films of these “bad” messages, but required film makers to code their messaging and rely on innuendo.
After the cabin sequences, Pretorius is having a drink by himself in the crypt (iconic) when the Monster finds him and they collaborate. Pretorius isn’t afraid of the Monster, and invites him for a smoke. So, our bad guy is good to the Monster, and doesn't get immediately killed for his efforts. The Monster helps Dr Pretorius intimidate Henry into helping with the science project, and we’re taken into an even more amped up version of the already-dope as hell lab from Frankenstein. Everything about this sequel is bigger, better, more expensive, and more elaborate.
When the Bride comes to life, she is stunning. There is a reason that every drag queen and their mom has done a Bride look. They tease her appearance out much like the Monster in the original, showing only her snatched form under gauze for several minutes of mad science shenanigans. When we see her face, the film cuts closer and closer in a way that mirrors the first time we see the Monster in the first film.
When she sees the Monster for the first time, she screams and scrambles away from him. It’s actually really heartbreaking because the Monster has spent the entire movie looking for a friend. I also can’t blame her. Dr. Pretorius and Henry should have at least cleaned the Monster up—his jacket is torn and I assume he stinks to high heaven.
Elsa Lancaster is the best part of this great movie. She’s twitchy and hisses like an angered swan. She has no dialogue,
The Monster, sick of how shitty everything is, shoos Henry away and blows up the laboratory, himself, the Bride, and Dr. P.
I am going to gripe with how the Monster shoos Henry away. I know we’re far from the source material here, but the vengeful relationship between Frankenstein and his creation is the most interesting part of the novel, and the resolution in this movie feels unearned. The weird love-triangle with Dr. Pretorius, Elizabeth, and Henry as well as the one between the Bride, Henry, and The Monster are great points of tension throughout the film, and for all of it to be resolved so quickly is a bummer.
I wanted to take a moment to write about the makeup on this film. The Monster makeup has been updated, he has some burns and his hair is singed off but gets longer throughout the film. The Monster also has more of the metal clamps along his head. The updated look is scarier than the original. Apparently Jack Pierce used a rubber head for this film, as opposed to the painstaking and uncomfortable cotton head from the original. The Monster is scarier in this movie, probably due to his injuries and tattered clothing.
Bride is much better paced than the first one. If you want to see a classic Frankenstein film and don’t have patience for the pace or tone of 1930s films, this will be more your speed than the original.
Elsa Lanchester is my crush for this movie. Her appearance is the climax of the movie, and, at the end of the fourth James Whale movie, it is the climax of this Horror History project. If you don’t want to watch this movie, at least watch the embedded YouTube video of The Bride’s appearance both to bask in Elsa Lanchester and to see Dr. P’s gay little pose.
This wraps up my 5 part series on James Whale! Thank you for reading! It has been a lot of fun to explore the Frankenstein films for the first time and do a close rewatch of The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man. Next week, I’ll be writing about German Expressionism.
Sources:
Laemmle, C., Lee, R. V., Waggner, G., Malvern, P., Whale, J., Kenton, E. C., Fort, Garrett., Faragoh, F. Edwards., Hurlbut, W. J. (William J., Cooper, W., Darling, W. S., Lowe, E. T. (Edward T., Karloff, B., Clive, C., Hobson, V., Lanchester, E., Rathbone, B., Lugosi, B., Chaney, L., … Shelley, M. W. (2004). Frankenstein : the legacy collection : Frankenstein ; Bride of Frankenstein ; Son of Frankenstein ; Ghost of Frankenstein ; House of Frankenstein. Universal.
Miller, C. J., & Van, R. A. B. (Eds.). (2016). The laughing dead : The horror-comedy film from bride of frankenstein to zombieland. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, February 28). Bride of Frankenstein. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:57, March 3, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bride_of_Frankenstein&oldid=1210738619
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, February 12). Embroiderers' Guild. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:40, March 4, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Embroiderers%27_Guild&oldid=1206520631