When I was a kid, Halloween had one dominant face: Frankenstein. It didn't matter that the old movie was long out of release and hadn't yet appeared on television (this was long before video, which now makes "Frankenstein" and its sequel "The Bride of Frankenstein" readily and handsomely available). The name conjured up nightmare images, and more than a few nightmares - none of which the children of the night genuinely regretted. Here are some reflections on what the movies meant and where they came from. -Ed.
In 1931, the director Robert Florey had a Los Angeles apartment with a view of a Dutch-style bakery and its logo, a windmill complete with turning vanes. Florey had just been assigned by Carl Laemmle Jr. to direct a production of "Frankenstein" for Universal, and as he mused on a possible look for the film, he found himself considering a windmill as, perhaps, the site of the scientist's secret laboratory. As it happened, it would be James Whale, not Florey, who directed "Frankenstein," and Henry Frankenstein would set up shop in "an abandoned watchtower." But that windmill got lodged in the collective brain of the filmmaking team (also in one line of dialogue absentmindedly retained from an early script draft), and finally made it on screen as an opportunistic but aptly crazed-Gothic setting for the film's fiery climax.
Movies are a messy business, and the truth is that some landmark films have become utterly indispensable and culturally pervasive despite being created by committee and riddled with imperfections. "Frankenstein"'s imperfections include half-baked sequences, tedious subsidiary or comic-relief characters and abrupt lacunae traceable to censorship or to front-office insistence on a shorter running time. No one would dispute director James Whale's signature, which is all over the decor, staging, lighting, composition, editing and characterizations. But there is a sense in which this milestone of the horror genre and indelible fixture in Western culture uncannily took on a life of its own.
The very term "Frankenstein" entered popular consciousness as a misapprehension. In the 1931 film, as in the 1818 novel by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein was the aristocratic scientist, "the modern Prometheus" who stole lightning from the heavens to give life to a creature he'd assembled from parts of dead bodies. Yet almost immediately, audiences (and people who had only heard about the movie) started applying the name to the creature - superhuman in size and strength, effectively unkillable and murderously insane. This was reinforced by "Franken-stein"'s becoming all but interchangeable with "Boris Karloff," the harsh, foreign-sounding, slightly ersatz name of the actor who had played the Monster (and who was born William Henry Pratt). How did the confusion arise? Perhaps it was only a testament to star quality - Karloff's and the creature's; Frankenstein was too ringing a name to waste on an effete gent in a lab smock (the top-billed, but soon eclipsed, Colin Clive). By the prologue to the 1935 sequel "The Bride of Frankenstein," Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) congratulates authoress Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) on her imagining of "Frankenstein, a monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves." And indeed, the very title "The Bride of Frankenstein" invites multiple read-ings as to which is who.
"Frankenstein" takes place in a nowhere universe; contemporary fashions rub up against generic peasant wear (Tyrolean-Magyar), while a polyglot cast of stage Brits and flatfooted American movie types try to look as if they belong in a nonspecific Mittel-Europe where hanged felons are left creaking on crossroads gallows in the medieval manner. The village near the Frankenstein estate is an elaborate German town set left over from Universal's Academy Award-winning "All Quiet on the Western Front," but otherwise the prevailing decor is (a) cheap and (b) brilliantly expressionistic, a testament to Whale's origins as a stage director and designer. The film's patently manmade landscape features stark hills and starker trees thrust straight up against stormy skies that crowd close behind the players - who could in fact reach out and touch their canvas splendor.
Then there's the Monster. That he is a monster is never in doubt, and it's perfectly understandable that the local citizenry should take up arms against him when he starts killing their neighbors. But we also understand that he never had a fair chance. Wrenched into life and then abandoned by a fickle Creator, implanted with a criminal brain, and tormented almost from "birth" by Henry's torch-wielding assistant Fritz (horror-movie mainstay Dwight Frye), the Monster is driven to slaughter even as he yearns foremost to reach for the light. Karloff's miming of this aspiration remains heartbreakingly eloquent despite decades of imitation and parody. And just as King Kong became the most sympathetic figure in the mon-ster movie of that name two years hence, Whale would decisively adjust the vectors and valences of sympathy in "The Bride of Frankenstein," a sequel as inevitable as its superiority was unexpected.
Following the aforementioned prologue - which introduces a creator of another sort, Mary Shelley, to continue her exemplary tale from a lightning-lit, clifftop castle distinctly reminiscent of Henry Frankenstein's tower - "Bride" casts back to the burning windmill where "Frankenstein" ended. There have been changes in the minutes/years separating the action of the two films. Ignoring the inconvenient post-lude to "Frankenstein" that showed Henry recuperating after his fall, "Bride" reverts to Henry apparently dead - but only so that the twitching of his hand can signal survival, as a similar twitching of the creature's hand signaled coming to life in the first film.
Tiresome characters (Henry's father the Baron; best friend and romantic rival Victor) have been allowed to disappear without comment. Better actors have replaced dull predecessors: the liquid-eyed Valerie Hobson in for Mae Clarke as Elizabeth, Henry's betrothed; E.E. Clive taking over as the burgomaster; and Una O'Connor drafted from Whale's intervening "The Invisible Man" (1933) to play Minnie the maid, a screeching Greek chorus obsessed with whether people are in their proper beds.
The righteous outrage of the townsfolk has mutated into sadistic glee over the Monster's presumed destruction. And to tip the director's hand, when the Monster rises to send two of them to their deaths in the waters under the mill, Whale marks their separate splashes with droll nonreaction shots of an imperturbable owl.
In short, "Bride" replaces the Gothic portentousness of the original with acid black comedy, as well as a heightened, breathlessly sustained energy (a flamboyant fluidity of camerawork, and an adventurous music score by Franz Waxman instead of, in the case of "Frankenstein," none at all). However many days or weeks may have passed during the events of "Frankenstein" (there's really no telling), "Bride" seems to cram a third of its running time into one frenzied night, with near-corpse Henry brought back to life and settled in what should have been his marriage bed, only to be enticed out of it and off to yet another secret lair by a fellow scientific heretic.
The entrance of this new character, the preternaturally gaunt Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger, an old theatrical crony of Whale's), is anticipated by Elizabeth's hysterical vision of "a figure like Death" coming to separate her and Henry, and announced by Minnie - in perhaps the most outrageous intro in Hollywood history to date - as "a very queer-looking gentleman." Queer-looking, and brazenly queer-sounding: as both the dialogue and Thesiger's deliciously fruity delivery make clear, Praetorius regards Elizabeth, the conventional bride of Frankenstein, as a tedious rival and obstacle to his seduction of Henry to come "probe the mysteries of life and death together."
Nor does Whale - a well-regarded and successful Hollywood figure who lived openly as a homosexual - stop at having a little fun with a campy villain. "The Bride of Frankenstein" develops a complex, and still startlingly brave, theme of the Monster as the ultimate outsider, someone feared and rejected by society even more for what and who he is than anything he has done.
This covert gay parallel is soon interwoven with another line of iconography: Captured by the mob at a hilly place of rocks, the Monster is bound and raised on a pole in an echo of the Crucifixion (which Whale emphasizes with half a dozen separate camera angles and the equivalent of a long gasp in the editing). Escaped, then pursued anew, he literally descends into the underworld, the graveyard (his movement directly lined up with a slanting Christus), to confront Death - Praetorius. Only in this case, the potential Redeemer doesn't conquer Death but rather allows himself to be drawn into a bargain with him. Again there is a peerless Karloff moment: bending over the silken profile of a dead woman in her coffin, the Monster tentatively salutes, "Friend?..."
And from that point on, the film rushes magisterially toward its climax, and the high-water mark of classical Hollywood horror: the creation of a new Bride of Frankenstein (again, with devastating irony, Elsa Lanchester). True to her name, she prefers her maker, Henry, and loathes the "man" she was born to love. Inconsolable, the Monster accepts his destiny: "We belong dead." And in an ecstasy of grief and the craziest gleam of triumph the movies ever dreamed, they are.
This has been adapted from an essay written for the 2002 National Society of Film Critics anthology "The A List."
