Films: 1930s
(1935) Bride of Frankenstein
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Bride of Frankenstein
Director: James Whale
Release: 1935
If "Frankenstein" was James Whale carefully hinting at sexuality, religion and social normalcy, "Bride of Frankenstein" is the man with a budget, political capital to spend and a medium in which to elaborate.
Nothing short of a tragi-comic romp through fringe behavior and proscribed values, "Bride of Frankenstein" illustrates the undercurrent of a growing tacit awareness and acceptance of homosexuality in Hollywood (and America) and a progressive post-Catholic intellectualism, both of which would erupt into components of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and open alternative identities in the later 20th Century.
Following a quasi-feminist prologue featuring "Frankenstein" author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lanchester, in a dual role as Shelley and The Monster's Mate), her husband Percy Shelley (Douglas Walton) and colleague Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), "Bride of Frankenstein" picks up where its predecessor left off.
The windmill in which the Monster was trapped at the end of "Frankenstein" collapses, the villagers search the wreckage and begin to disperse. No body is found. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is believed dead (revising the studio-imposed wedding-toast at the end of "Frankenstein," a necessary elimination given what follows). He is carried home where his virtual child bride (now played by 18-year-old Valerie Hobson) will revive him.
In the aftermath, Hans (Reginald Barlow, assuming the role of the carpenter who lost his daughter in "Frankenstein") and his wife (Mary Gordon), continue to comb the burned windmill. Hans is gripped in grief, and obsessed with seeing the Monster's corpse. Deep in the water-filled belly of the collapsed structure, Hans find the Monster and the Monster finds Hans.
As the Monster then roams the village and the countryside, exacting a prolonged revenge for his suffering at the hands of the mob, Henry has retreated into a nuptial fantasy. He and Elizabeth plan to escape the village and live another life. Their escape is interrupted, however, a visit from Dr. Pretorius (a deliciously odd and evil Ernest Thesiger). Pretorius knows Frankenstein from past academic circles, and he seems to have secret knowledge of his former classmates particular transgressions.
Pretorius has unlocked the key to life and death on his own, and keeps a laboratory of homunculi, grown from scratch in their little jars. Although Frankenstein resists, Pretorius urges him to join his own scientific findings with the homunculus experiments. Pretorius wants to add homegrown brains to Frankenstein's full-sized corpse bodies.
What follows is a parallel story of the Monster's ascent to a kind of humanity, meeting a hermit (O.P. Heggie) who adopts him and teaches him about music, food and friendship, and man's descent into madness. While the Monster learns to speak, Pretorius dines with the bones of the dead in village tombs and revels in his newfound power.
When the Monster's refuge is finally discovered by hunting villagers, and the blissful fraternal love of Monster and hermit is destroyed, he flees into the very same tombs as Pretorius, uniting evil (Pretorius) and rage (the Monster) in a terrible partnership. At Pretorius' instructions, the Monster kidnaps Elizabeth and confronts Frankenstein. Pretorius has injected the Monster with a new single purpose: To acquire a mate which Frankenstein must construct.
Frankenstein devolves into the madness of his prior experiments. While he works, the Monster becomes increasingly agitated, desperate for the love which the villagers erased at the hermit's hut. Pretorius struggles to keep him sedated while Frankenstein physically transforms into a semblance of his pre-marriage self.
Finally, when the experiment succeeds the Monster must confront his own horrifying reality, and accept his given identity. In the final moments of "Bride of Frankenstein," the Monster achieves the humanity his creators have abandoned and makes a final double decision, born from compassion and born out of despair.
"Bride of Frankenstein" is suffused with impossible or proscribed relationships. Its principals either take their outlawed relationships underground (sometimes literally) or they attempt to restructure their desires along accepted norms.
Henry's impossible love for the profane sciences is personified by the Monster, an outside thing born of his "experiments" which he has forced away from him, that he cannot understand but that returns to constantly remind him of who he is and where his desires lie.
Pretorius is a full-blown example of a man who has given in to the lust which Henry resists. When Pretorius first tempts Henry, he tempts him along these lines - maintaining that they are alike and that they should rightfully claim their identities within their illicit practices. Pretorius suggests that the pair could build a society that would accept them, in which they would find satisfaction and recognition. Henry is conflicted, admitting that he, too, has "probed" the unknown lifestyle (or at least, only briefly known in "Frankenstein") that Pretorius dangles before him, but he chooses a conventional life with Elizabeth, instead. Pretorius develops, in response, a plan to "out" Henry, to force his complicity and make him accept his truer, underlying identity.
The Monster, in "Bride of Frankenstein," is pursued throughout most of the film. Outwardly identifiable and hated, society pursues the Monster through street and through forest, until he is far removed from the people and things of the village.
In the borderland, where the Monster comes to rest, a new relationship is at last possible. The blind hermit and the Monster who finds him build a mature, domestic male-and-male relationship - a combination of spiritual acceptance (note one key scene, in which the hermit puts the Monster to bed, and the fade to black lingers on the crucifix) and filial caring.
There is nothing overtly sexual about the two, but the hermit does help the Monster discover pleasure. They drink, they smoke, they make music. It is a complete household. Only when the villagers finally encounter their partnership does the violence and pain of "Bride of Frankenstein" resume. Fire obliterates peace and the film rumbles towards its final observation on relationships and choices.
Where the Monster was passive and content in his fraternal love, he is impatient, unskilled and ultimately a disaster in his one potentially conventional sexual partnership. The scientists, Frankenstein and Pretorius, know they can never build a person who fits the world around them. Their solution, according to Pretorius, is to construct an entire replacement race - to simulate normalcy by replicating the things civilization will accept. There is an important difference between integration and simulation, here. The making of a woman for the Monster is not really about solutions, it is about hiding the hideous nature of their existence within an artificial representation of regular life.
When the Monster and the Mate finally meet, the reaction is one they could not predict. The Mate, presented with her corpse husband, sees the truth of their existence and recoils. The Monster confronted with the impossible fiction of the scientists' efforts, loses his will to continue living.
The Monster makes a complicated choice.
The Monster realizes Frankenstein can run from the profane to the ordinary by escaping with Elizabeth, something he can never do with his sewn-together bride. When the Monster sends the couple away from the scene of its self-imposed destruction, and the destruction of Pretorius and the Mate, it is condemning the wholly unchangeable (and perhaps "out?") characters to obliteration, but sparing the man who can suppress his inner desires for a conventional lifestyle.
"You go," the Monster says. "You live."
In a sense, if Whale and writer William Hurlbut (actually joined by a team of uncredited adaptors and co-writers) struggled with homosexuality and alternative sexual lifestyles in the story of "Bride of Frankenstein" they ultimately concede that the choice of freedom in 1935 comes with either death or submersion of the identity.
Henry and Elizabeth look back on the collapsed tower, the place from which a new world of outsiders would emerge reduced to rubble, and Elizabeth sighs her husband's name. Henry Frankenstein perhaps belonged in the rubble. Only his chameleon ability allows him to walk free. Which is the sadder tale is a question posed by Whale's final shots, of the fallen structure and then of Henry and Elizabeth looking back.
As Whale expanded from "Frankenstein," broadening the moral and sociological scope in "Bride of Frankenstein," he also multiplies his use of German Expressionist sets and lighting. Interiors and exteriors change shape throughout the film, from the relatively Gothic but recognizable shapes of village homes and Henry's rooms to the outright diagonals and askance angles of Pretorius' labs and the tower in which the Mate is made. The psychological world of the alien lifestyle that Frankenstein, Pretorius and the creatures represent becomes their physical environment.
In some places "Bride of Frankenstein" strains against its best qualities. Whale injects a distracting level of silliness into the film, especially in the shrill and stilted performance of Frankenstein's maid Minnie (Una O'Connor), who serves as a kind of chorus. Her mugging and physical acting become a disruptive wink, perhaps meant as a safety valve for the religious and sexual themes so deeply intertwined throughout the rest of the characters.
Elsa Lanchester, however packs a fabulous performance into a few dramatic shots. Whale jump cuts from left to right around Lanchester's head, as she jerks her face toward and away from the lens in a protracted sequence. The creation of a psychological story for the Mate occurs entirely within these shots - as she is otherwise devoid of action or dialogue, save reacting in terror to her corrupt and unendurable situation.
Whale sees the bewildering moment in his mind's eyes, the confrontation of normal and unacceptable, and he films that crossroads by delivering this jittery, fragmented study of Lanchester's face.
It is a triumphant moment, pure cinema, and a landmark fusion of meaning and subtext to the popular horror film.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Bride of Frankenstein, 1935
Elsa Lanchester, however packs a fabulous performance into a few dramatic shots. Whale jump cuts from left to right around Lanchester's head, as she jerks her face toward and away from the lens in a protracted sequence. The creation of a psychological story for the Mate occurs entirely within these shots - as she is otherwise devoid of action or dialogue, save reacting in terror to her corrupt and unendurable situation.
