The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I continued our trip through James Whale’s cinematic canon for his next two films in sequence, his 1935 productions of The Bride of Frankenstein and Remember Last Night? I’ve already commented on The Bride of Frankenstein on my moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-bride-of-frankenstein-universal-1935.html, so I’ll have little to add here except that in his Whale biography A New World of Gods and Monsters (a title actually taken from William Hurlbut’s and John L. Balderston’s script for Bride) he acclaims it as Whale’s masterpiece. It’s an audacious movie that took the brief Whale was given from the Laemmles – do a sequel that would rehash everything audiences loved from the first Frankenstein and give them more of the same – and went to town with it.

The film opens in the Villa Deodati in Switzerland during that famous summer of 1816 when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lanchester), her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Walton), their friend Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon – James Whale would pick two of the queeniest actors in Hollywood just then to play them!) and Byron’s “traveling companion” John Polidori (not depicted in the film) thought of the idea that each would write a ghost story. Byron began a beautifully wrought story about a young man serving as “traveling companion” to a mysterious older one who turns out to be a vampire; the other two men had their own ideas; but Mary Shelley was the only one who actually finished her “ghost story” and actually got it published. (Blessedly she’s credited in Bride as “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” – in the credits of the 1931 Frankenstein she was rather jarringly listed as “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley.”) She narrates a bit of the first Frankenstein accompanied by clips from the first film, and protests that she meant the story as “a moral lesson” – a statement the Production Code Administration came down on because she said it while wearing a very low-cut gown that looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen. The PCA forced Whale to cut down on the number of close-ups of Lanchester’s decolletage. (She might have been flattered that she was considered dangerously sexy; she never had that glamourous a reputation and, as she recounts in her autobiography, her real-life husband, Charles Laughton, chose their wedding night to tell her he was Gay.)

Once we get into the film proper, we see how the Monster (Boris Karloff) – billed merely as “Karloff” (Bride was the only one of his three films as the Monster in which he got top billing, and this was during the period in which Universal was billing him as “Karloff the Uncanny” to suggest that he was really some sort of supernatural being instead of just an ordinary human actor with a special flair for these sorts of roles) – escaped the burning mill by falling into a pool of water under it (well, when you have a mill you expect there to be water nearby; later writers in Universal’s Frankenstein cycle got more and more preposterous in their explanations for how the Monster had survived whatever cataclysm supposedly befell him in the immediately previous film) and dispatched the parents of Maria, the little girl he’d accidentally drowned in the first film. The film parallels the Monster’s flight through the countryside (in which he’s briefly captured and strung up in a way deliberately reminiscent of Christ’s crucifixion; later Whale wanted to include a scene in which, fleeing through a cemetery, he comes on a statue of Christ on the cross and tries to rescue him, but the Production Code Administration struck again and vetoed it, though the Christ statue itself is visible in the final cut) and his brief discovery of affection in the hut of a blind hermit.

This is one scene taken directly from Mary Shelley’s novel and Whale scores a directorial triumph in getting the actor playing the hermit, O. P. Heggie, to underact the role – Heggie was usually one of the biggest hams in Hollywood. His brief idyll with the hermit, who teaches the Monster to talk and educates him on the difference between good and bad, ends abruptly when two hunters (one played by an uncredited John Carradine) come upon the hermit’s hut, tell him he’s been sheltering “the fiend that’s been terrorizing half the countryside,” and force both the hermit and the Monster to flee, in the course of which the hermit’s hut burns down. The action with the Monster is paralleled with what comes across as an elaborate Gay seduction of Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive again) by his old university professor Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger), who as I’ve pointed out about this movie before is a mad scientist but also one you could invite having over as a dinner guest; he’s courtly, disarming (at different points in the film he describes gin and cigars as “my only weakness”) and refreshingly frank about what he’s doing and why.

Dr. Praetorius has devised a way of creating doll-sized artificial humans – and there’s wry satire in the identities he’s created for them: a queen, a king (shown eating chicken off the bone in an obvious reference to Charles Laughton’s role in The Private Life of Henry VIII), an archbishop, a devil and a ballerina – but he’s upset that he hasn’t been able to create an artificial human in normal human size. “You did achieve size,” he tells Frankenstein – sounding for all the world like a Gay man with a small penis baring his anguish about it to someone much better hung. Though James Curtis is quite emphatic about rejecting specifically Gay readings of Whale’s work, I think the Gay implications of his Frankenstein movies are inescapable. Even in the first Frankenstein, Whale and his screenwriters, Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh, deliberately paralleled Frankenstein’s father’s insistence that he give up his experiments, marry his fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke in the first film and Valerie Hobson in Bride) and father “a son to the House of Frankenstein” through normal heterosexual means, and Frankenstein’s own insistence on going to an abandoned watchtower with a male companion (in Shelley’s novel Frankenstein worked alone) to create a new human life without having to have sex with a woman.

In Bride Whale carried the analogy even further; the moment Praetorius is introduced Frankenstein’s maid, Minnie (the delightful Una O’Connor) refers to him as “a queer sort of gentleman.” Praetorius storms , and he bursts into the bedroom where Henry and Elizabeth are sharing a bed and almost literally pulls him away from her in order to enlist him in a new round of artificial life-creation. Though Henry is reluctant at first and has to be dragooned into cooperating with Praetorius when he has his assistant (Dwight Frye again! So the Monster kills Frye in both of Whale’s Frankenstein films!), once he’s ensconced into Praetorius’s old lab he becomes an enthusiastic participant in the project to create “the bride of Frankenstein!” (Incidentally the scene in which Frye and his partner steal the corpse into which they’re going to insert Praetorius’s artificial brain gives the young woman’s date of death as 1899 – at last answering the question of just when these films take place.) The famous set-piece climax shows the creation of the female Monster (played, uncredited, by Elsa Lanchester – it was always Whale’s intent that the same woman play Mary Shelley in the prologue and the Bride at the climax) in a set of laboratory gizmos even more elaborate than the ones used in the first film, only when she comes to life she’s as frightened by the Monster’s appearance as everyone else (including the Monster himself, who earlier was shown recoiling from his own appearance when he saw his reflection in a lake) and the Monster, realizing he’s never going to have her as a friend/mate/sex partner/whatever, pulls the self-destruct lever that blows up the entire laboratory, sending Frankenstein and Elizabeth away while destroying himself, the Bride and Praetorius after saying, “We … belong … dead!”

Originally Whale wanted Frankenstein and Elizabeth to die in the lab explosion, too – at least in part because he wanted to eliminate the possibility of a second sequel – but the Production Code Administration struck again and insisted that the basically good central couple be spared the final holocaust. Whale had a lot of censor problems with Bride, but it’s amazing how much he got through, including Praetorius’s recruitment speech to Frankenstein: “Have you forgotten your Bible stories? Male and female created He them.” (This is even more amazing because, in a period of looser Production Code enforcement, Whale had still been forced to delete the line from the first Frankenstein in which, as the Monster comes to life for the first time, Frankenstein responds to Dr. Waldman’s entreaty, “In the name of God!,” with, “In the name of God? Now I know what it feels like to be God!”)

Another key element of the success of Bride is Franz Waxman’s musical score – his first for an American film. Waxman had fled the Nazis when they took over Germany in 1933 and had come to Hollywood but hadn’t been given anything to do until Whale ran into him and hired him as his composer. Waxman wrote what I consider the finest score for any horror film; aside from one rather obvious agitato cue at the end of the hermit sequence, Waxman’s score continually plays against the already hardening clichés of horror-film scoring. The dissonant main theme and the dazzling wedding bells Waxman puts on the soundtrack as the Bride emerges in all her finery are just two of the master touches in Waxman’s score. While Waxman didn’t stay at Universal long – within a year he was working at larger studios like MGM – he lasted long enough to do at least one more horror film, the 1936 Karloff-Lugosi vehicle The Invisible Ray, and he’s also credited with the much more nondescript music for Whale’s next film, Remember Last Night?, Waxman’s themes for Bride got quoted in a number of other Universal films, including The Werewolf of London (Universal’s first foray into werewolfery, from 1935, and to my mind a far better film than the better-known 1941 The Wolf-Man) and the first two Flash Gordon serials.

Also worthy of note is Elsa Lanchester’s spectacular hairdo as the Bride; in her autobiography she said that only the jagged white lightning streaks were artificial. The rest was her own hair, teased into a framework that reminded her of a bird cage which makeup genius Jack P. Pierce devised and put on top of her head. I remember reading this in her book and telling Charles about my surprise that only the white streaks were not her own hair, and he said, “You didn’t expect that to be her own hair, did you?” “Actually,” I explained, “I was surprised in the other direction; I’d always thought the whole thing was a wig!”