The Bride of Frankenstein *****

The next in the series of the top 25…

by Allan Fish

(USA 1935 75m) DVD1/2

A new world of gods and monsters!

p  Carl Laemmle Jnr  d  James Whale  w  John L.Balderston, William Hurlblut  novel  Mary Shelley  ph  John Mescall  ed  Ted J.Kent  m  Franz Waxman art  Charles D.Hall, Kenneth Strickfaden (apparatus design)  spc  John P.Fulton  make-up  Jack Pierce

Boris Karloff (Monster), Colin Clive (Henry Frankenstein), Ernest Thesiger (Dr Septimus Praetorius), Valerie Hobson (Elizabeth), E.E.Clive (Burgomaster), Una O’Connor (Minnie), O.P.Heggie (Blind Hermit), Elsa Lanchester (Mary Shelley/Monster’s Mate), Gavin Gordon (Lord Byron), Douglas Walton (Percy Shelley), Dwight Frye (Karl), Lucien Prival, Mary Gordon, John Carradine, Walter Brennan, Anne Darling, Billy Barty,

The Bride of Frankenstein is that rarest of beasts, in more ways than one.  It’s a masterpiece that improves on an original that was a classic in itself, a feat that can be counted on the digits of one hand. So much more than a horror film, it’s a spoof of the original, a spoof of itself, a religious allegory and a cry out for humanity in a dark, cruel world.  “It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror, the air itself is filled with monsters” Mary Shelley tells us before narrating the tale in the prologue, and she’s right.   

            Opening on a stormy night at the actual historical meeting of Mary and Percy Shelley with Lord Byron, Mary tells the others how her story of Frankenstein actually ended.  Taking up where the original left off, the monster is left burning in the windmill and the villagers return home.  However, the monster is not dead at all, returns and, hoodwinked by the sinister Dr Pretorius, convinces Frankenstein to make him a mate to help make life bearable for him.

            Of course, in actuality, there are a lot of continuity errors, and not just in terms of everyone but Karloff and Clive not returning to reprise their roles.  The dead Maria’s father is now called Hans not Ludwig; we are asked to originally believe that Frankenstein is dead, even though we have seen him recovering in bed at the end of the previous film; the old baron conveniently dies; and that’s just for starters.  Yet it’s the clarity of Whale’s intention and vision that acts against such pedantic exclamations.  Bride has so much more going for it than the original; Waxman’s score, for one, and an even greater cast.  Fair enough, Hobson is weak as the actual title character and Frye has only a token reappearance as a different character, but O’Connor is her deliciously cackling self as the maid, E.E.Clive is an inimitably ineffectual burgomaster (though his death scene is now lost, the original 90 minute version having been lost since the thirties) and Lanchester iconic in both her roles.  Karloff, meanwhile, if anything improves on his performance in the original, in spite of the fact he was wary of having the monster speak.  (As his own daughter said in Brownlow’s documentary Universal Horror, time has proven him wrong.)  Yet pièce de resistance has to be Thesiger’s Pretorious, a ghoulish vision in what appears to be the garb of a sinister sideshow magician, devilish in his arrangement of miniature toys in glass bells, paying homage to himself in The Old Dark House (“have some gin, my only weakness“).  It’s a camp classic of unabated scene-stealing. 

            However, what really makes Bride such an impressive film is the near blasphemy of its subtexts.  Here we see the monster equated to Christ, going through his own awful Passion, raised up on a wooden plank as if crucified and hypnotised by Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’.  After all, Mary Shelley herself warns of the moral of her story about “the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to imitate God” and Henry himself laments “I have been cursed for delving into the mysteries of life.”  Pretorius may blackmail him back into the darkness, but Whale finally allows his Henry to escape to freedom at the monster’s behest.  Like Christ, the monster has come to rid the world of Henry’s sins, who is forgiven by the almighty as his creation gladly gives himself up to die.  In the end, it’s about good triumphing over evil and this morality is perhaps best summed up by the creature itself; “alone…bad…friend…good.”  Who can disagree with that?