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Bride of Frankenstein

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Bride of Frankenstein is a movie for and about weirdos

by rick
written by rick

It is infuriatingly difficult to write about a film you love. I love Bride of Frankenstein.

Trying to locate the source of this affection — to contextualize it in ways that might be interesting and don’t amount to gushing, “Hey, you know what is great? Bride of Frankenstein. It’s really great. Have you seen it? Bride of Frankenstein? Man, it’s awesome. Do you want to watch Bride of Frankenstein right now, actually? It’s so good,” like a teenager who just bought Bride of Frankenstein, and also cocaine — is difficult. I want to do it justice, but I also just kind of want to give you a copy.

Iconic Elsa Lancaster scream in Bride of FrankensteinIt’s a ridiculous thing, art proselytizing. Who even cares? Bride of Frankenstein doesn’t. In fact, James Whale’s combination of navel-gazing puffery and honest retconned genius actively refuses to play along. That’s one of the reasons that it is one of the greatest films ever made.

4 years after the original made Boris Karloff a semi-star for portraying a walking collection of other people’s bodies, tortured and misunderstood for existing in a world that demanded his presence, Bride of Frankenstein appeared. As its title implies, the frame is shifted. In fact, even the now-constant “Frankenstein vs. Frankenstein’s Monster” goofballery gets lampooned: this is in a bunch of ways the story of a doctor, his wife, and a corrupting influence. (It comes as a surprise every time that Elsa Lancaster is hardly in this movie.) Everything comes in threes, like hetero couple and the intruder and their doppelgangers in the form of the Monster, His Bride, and the twinned men who would create them. Anyone expecting a regular monster film will be disappointed.

We open on another set of three: Lord Byron, Shelley, and Mary, adorably bickering and providing the occasion for a flashback, a sort of highlights reel of its predecessor, underscored with purple prose. It’s a costume comedy, pitched at a level of high camp. From its opening moments, Bride announces that we get something different, something almost hostile to the prevailing norm:

Lord Byron: And we three. We elegant three within. I should like to think that an irate Jehovah was pointing those arrows of lightning directly at my head. The unbowed head of George Gordon, Lord Byron. England’s greatest sinner. But I cannot flatter myself to that extent. Possibly those thunders are for our dear Shelley. Heavens applause for England’s greatest poet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: What of my Mary?

Lord Byron: She’s an angel.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: You think so?

Elsa Lancaster as Mary Shelley in Bride of FrankensteinThe rest of the film echoes this sentiment. From an entirely incongruous opening we segue into a story about solidarity and difference, run through with as much skepticism about heteronormative coupling as God-like creation. If the first film, and Mary Shelley’s novel for that matter, are about the horrors of reproduction and responsibility, Bride is about the ways in which presumptions about our connection to others fail us, especially connections based in patriarchy. If Frankenstein will present a drowned child, Bride will feature a rescue from drowning. It is an inverse, a mirror-image reflected in broken glass.

Gary Morris, who Roger Ebert kind of sneers at in his review before allowing a few of the points, thinks it’s a queer parable. Many others have joined him over the years, and it’s not hard to see why. Bride showcases not just a monster who doesn’t fit in, but a whole range of them, up to and including the corpse-bride fashioned for him by madmen. Yet the happiest moment in the film is when he smokes cigars and drinks whiskey with a blind man.

The monster (Boris Karloff) can be seen as the terrifying “child” of the unholy “marriage” of Pretorius and Henry — Henry the father in giving it life, Pretorius a mother-figure who nurtures it. The monster is society’s paranoid vision of the logical outcome of a homosexual tryst. It is a child in many ways: inchoate, demanding affection and attention, unreasonable and violent when crossed. Like a child, too, his sexuality is unsettled, bisexual, his attentions captured equally by the male hermit and his possible female bride. Henry exhibits an overall revulsion toward his “child,” alternately excited and repulsed by what he has produced; Pretorius is the monster’s more involved, but manipulative, even abusive parent figure — the embodiment of society’s fears of the vast damage the homosexual, nefariously moving into the role of domestic caretaker, teacher of social values and sex-role attributes, is capable of doing.

All of which raises the question: who is this baffling weirdness even for? Fans of monster movies? Sure, and the extended Elsa Lancaster in Bride of Frankensteinshortlist: queers, freaks, people who don’t fit in, outliers, people skeptical of modern science’s ability to explain our pain, existentialists, revolutionaries, those who find white people in positions of power inherently suspicious, anyone who’s wanted to burn it down, anyone who’s wanted to know more than they do right now, anyone who’s known too much, cinephiles, James Whale enthusiasts, Karina Longworth,  Mel Brooks, rooftop architects, fans of Byron or either of the Shelleys, German Expressionism enthusiasts, violin players, suckers.

In short, weirdos.

Among the Universal monster cycle, Bride of Frankenstein stands alone, because it is guided by an authorial sense that’s bothDr. Pretorius and a homunculus in Bride of Frankenstein bemused by the material and in thrall to it. It’s a not-so-secret attack on conventional values, masquerading as a horror movie about a big dead guy and his big dead wife. It’s perfect. It is art.

Also, Dr. Pretorius created a tiny royal family who he apparently just keeps in jars for some reason.

Why? I have no idea. Anyways, do y’all want to go watch Bride of Frankenstein?

Favorite Ebert quote:

The genre also encourages visual experimentation. From “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) onward, horror has been a cue for unexpected camera angles, hallucinatory architecture and frankly artificial sets. As mainstream movies have grown steadily more unimaginative and realistic in their visuals, horror has provided a lifeline back to the greater design freedom of the silent era. To see sensational “real” things is not the same as seeing the bizarre, the grotesque, the distorted and the fanciful. There is more sheer shock in a clawed hand unexpectedly emerging from the shadows than in all the effects of “Armageddon,” because “Armageddon” looks realistic and horror taunts us that reality is an illusion.

 

 

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Commentary

After October: Thoughts on Horror

by rick
written by rick

Reflecting, in 1967, on the experience of seeing old movies on TV, notorious curmudgeon/amazing writer Pauline Kael wrote, “Horror and fantasy films … are surprisingly effective, perhaps because they are so primitive in their appeal that the qualities of the imagery matter less than the basic suggestions. Fear counts more than finesse, and seeing horror films is far more frightening at home than in the shared comfort of an audience that breaks the tension with derision.”

As someone who just watched a bunch of old (and not so old) horror movies, often alone, on a laptop (not even a TV, fancy or otherwise), I will second that on several counts.

It’s true that there’s something reassuring when everyone giggles at the right time – we’re all in this together, after all, we say, and it’s just a dumb movie. And that dumb movie doesn’t even need to look that good: it just needs to look good enough.

But when there’s no one around to giggle, no one to point out the continuity error or how goofy everyone is behaving, no one to second-guess your identifications or chuckle when you tense up, you might find yourself a little freaked out.

Kael’s larger points about movies in that essay – that trash accumulates, that we can’t tell an epic chase scene from a shitty chase scene thanks to the proportions of “the box,” that everything is so simultaneously available that we lose historical continuity and can’t even determine which pictures were considered “good” back in the day (“as it is,” Kael notes, “people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago”), that everything is leveled out and presented simply as “classic” because it is past … well, these things are true, too. More true now, in my opinion, than when she was writing.

Horror, however, likes the small screen. Scary movies work in close confines, and especially in the dark. They’re “primitive in their appeal,” often unconcerned with finer nuances, and aimed at something visceral and barely-remembered and impossible to shrug off. They tap into the veins of those who hang around too long, and keep lookout for those who can’t turn away. The good ones are out to get us.

Recently, my cousin asked me why I even watched “horror movies.”  I said we should come to a definition of terms (yes, I’m fun at parties). I sensed he was talking about gore, about exploitation, about “extreme cinema,” I guess – basically, what’s with all the stabbing and the eyeballs and the nasty shit really, c’mon? But underneath that, the question was … why do you want to be voluntarily scared?

Personally, I don’t get very enthusiastic about the stabbing and think most movies would do better without it (apart from the sweet opportunities for effects folks to do their thing, which is worthy and rad), and that’s only become clearer over the course of watching movies this past month. I have enormous respect for the technicians and artists who make gross-out scenes happen, but I generally am not that enthused to be constantly grossed out at the movies. (The works of David Cronenberg are hereby exempted.) This wasn’t always true; maybe I’ve gone soft. My thinking is there’s plenty of carnage to be had in the real world.

But the latter is a reasonable question. You could watch a funny movie. It could be sad or bittersweet or melancholy or wistful, it could be inspiring or galvanizing or revolutionary. It could speak to your better nature, or amaze you with its beauty. Why watch a scary movie?

My basic answer: I watched Night of the Living Dead on network television when I was 6 or 7, and it blew my mind. I was certain the zombies portrayed were coming for me. The people seemed more or less like people I knew – they weren’t hamming it up in a Universal product of the 30s or 40s, or whatever else Channel 20 was showing on Sundays at noon. They were regular folks, and they were scared.

So I was scared, too, and it didn’t wear off when the movie was done. That’s an accomplishment – what was the last thing you read, heard, or watched that kept you up at night, thinking about it? What was the first thing? To me, as a child, Night of the Living Dead was art that mattered.

As an adult, and presumably a more informed movie viewer, that basic feeling is still there, along with an awareness of other nuances and connections. Watching these older films – the Val Lewton movies, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Vampyr especially – and newer ones – Peeping Tom, Sisters, Santa Sangre, Trouble Every Day, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 – is to be reminded of all the ways we cloak what we have to say, rework identities to fit with the situation, and manipulate those around us. We make monsters of the other, and of ourselves. We can’t help it. And horror movies know this.

Horror also tells us: If you can’t name a thing, it becomes a monster. And this is a problem: there are a lot of things we can’t name. So there must be many monsters, and they definitely aren’t just outside. Some are basic aspects of who we are as a species, society, and individual. The monsters are real, and they’re coming for us.

We kind of knew it was true, but no one wanted to say it, except for horror movies. And it’s nice to be told the truth every once in a while.

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Reviews

Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

by rick
written by rick

 There are few more iconic images in cinema than Frankenstein’s monster rising from the operating table or, in its sequel, his bride standing straight and horrified, with the lightning shock of white through her towering hair. In fact, they might be so iconic that no one watches the movies anymore – we already know what happens. Specifically, the monster rises from an operating table, and his bride has crazy hair. Done and done.

I made sure to include these in the list because I honestly can’t remember if I ever watched them from start to finish. They both played on regular rotation on television throughout my childhood – Sundays, Channel 20, in the afternoon, along with westerns and a grab-bag of other old films the network had been able to grab cheaply, one presumes. I remembered them like dreams, or like pictures I saw on someone else’s mantel, in a house I haven’t been to in a while.

Watching them now, I learned a few things: 1) Bride is significantly funnier and better than the first one; 2) director James Whale did a fairly honest transposition of Mary Shelley’s novel, making the monster more a tragic than a diabolical figure; and 3) even from the start, horror movies have been intensely concerned about gender, identity, and transformation.

Bride of Frankenstein significantly improves on the rather by-the-numbers adaptation of Frankenstein. To its credit, it attributes the story to “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley;” in the original, it says it’s based off a tale from “Mrs. Percy Shelley,” which is fucked on a number of levels. That’s not the only nod towards feminism in the film (not to mention basic decency), but it’s comforting to see it on the screen first thing.

There’s not much to talk about in the story – Frankenstein’s monster desires a companion, his creator wants nothing to do with it thanks to the earlier murders, a mad scientist is only too happy to help – but it’s a structural masterpiece (built around Mary Shelley, slyly knitting before a fire, telling Lord Byron and her husband the rest of the story, which she says she hadn’t yet published), and the script gives everyone plenty of room to breathe. It’s far less stilted than the original: the monster’s efforts to gain language are funny, his failures to communicate are poignant, and the transformation scene at the end deserves every bit of its fame.

Whale, an openly gay man in early Hollywood (and so something of a rarity), made these classics of misunderstood outsiders, inherently suspected “deviants” rejected and misunderstood by mainstream society, who piece together identities, struggle to define themselves, and long for community in a hostile world. Throughout the month, the movies I watched kept coming back to these themes, in overt and oblique ways. Horror – located in the body, seeking to generate visceral thrill, concerned above all with flesh, its vulnerability and capacity for transformation – lends itself particularly well to symbolic treatments of questions of identity and sexuality. In Frankenstein and especially The Bride of Frankenstein, these questions bounce around without being answered, but both films make a wise decision: they treat them in passing, and focus on presenting something new and fun and relatable and scary. The themes are so crucial to the genre that they don’t need to be underlined – they’ll always be there. We couldn’t avoid desire if we wanted to.

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