BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), goood

Posted by Stephen Jannise

In this month’s edition of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Club, Lars, Daniel and Dr. Tom Schatz brought us the Universal horror classic, Bride of Frankenstein. Having grown up loving the Universal monster movies of the 1930s, it is surprising that this was only my second viewing of the film, the first having been in Dr. Schatz’s Classical Hollywood Cinema course. I can tell you that, whereas most of the other films like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) are the kind of comfortable films that you enjoy seeing once a year at Halloween, revisiting the old haunts so to speak, Bride is a film that grew immensely in my mind upon this second viewing. There are many layers to this movie, surprisingly more than meets the eye at first, making it a film that is worthy of multiple viewings. And not just in October.

Where to begin? How about the beginning, in a hilariously over-the-top scene featuring Lord Byrrrrron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the author of Frankenstein herself, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, played by the same actress, Elsa Lanchester, who will portray the Bride in the climax of the film. What an absurd and altogether marvelous way to remind audiences of the original film’s story and conclusion. Not only does director James Whale provide us with a nice bit of Royal Shakespeare Company scenery-chewing, but he also gives us a great image that will be repeated, again with Lanchester, in the film’s final moments: that of Mary Shelley being groped at on both sides after she accidentally pricks her finger, Byron tugging at one hand, Percy at the other. Since Whale returns to this exact image with the Bride, Dr. Frankenstein, and Dr. Pretorius, it would seem as though Whale and crew have something to say here, perhaps even going so far as to compare this male-created monster of femininity with the gender-based obstacles and prejudices that Shelley had to deal with herself. Is there a bit of the author in this scarred, smothered Bride?

Those poets are always so grabby.

This is just one example of the ways in which the filmmakers go above and beyond the call of duty in this film. I don’t need to tell you that, after the huge successes of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the other monsters, Universal’s one and only reason for making Bride was to cash in on these creatures to an even greater extent. It is laudable, then, that Whale agreed to make the film only on the condition that he might take it to places it doesn’t really need to go in order to fulfill that ultimate financial goal. Though Universal reportedly wanted to cast Claude Rains as the villainous Pretorius, Whale fought and won for the casting of Ernest Thesiger, an openly gay actor who brought to the role an element of camp that elevated the character from stock mad scientist to one of the great representations of closeted gay despair in the history of cinema.

Don't pull that lever, Pretorius! It makes all the sets explode!

In this film, under the guidance of Thesiger and Whale (also gay), the laboratory seems to serve as a place where a couple of mad scientists can just be alone together for a while, where what they do won’t be judged by the people outside. Dr. Pretorius, so lonely is he, has used his vast intellect to create tiny versions of people that he keeps in jars. Now that he has learned of Frankenstein’s impending marriage, he kidnaps Frankenstein’s soon-to-be-wife and forces the doctor to join him in the lab, so that they might work together to create a female mate for Boris Karloff’s monster. In this film, mad science could be the result of a lifetime of solitude forced upon a man by the strictures of society. Perhaps the Bride’s ultimate rejection of Karloff’s male monster is Pretorius’s last laugh.

Whale and the cast aren’t the only talents working on this film. Composer Franz Waxman crafted a supremely elegant theme for the Bride. This melody pops up here and there throughout the film, but never more triumphantly than in the conclusion, when Pretorius, like the preening host of a beauty pageant, announces “The Bride of Frankenstein!” Suddenly, we see Lanchester, in her flowing gown and tall shock of white-streaked hair, and Waxman’s music trumpets, “This is Woman.” I’m no musicologist, but I detect in the notes of the piece elements of the kind of music that accompanied Douglas Sirk’s domestic melodramas and early radio/TV commercials for flour or pantyhose. Might these chord progressions somehow have struck a tone with the public consciousness to such an extent that the music came to represent thoughts of femininity and domesticity in the years to come? I don’t know, I’m no musicologist.

I’d link you to a YouTube video of the scene to let you decide, but instead might I suggest that, if you missed Cinema Club on Sunday, you make up for your error by attending the encore brunch screening at the Ritz this Saturday? It’s not every day that you get the chance to see this masterpiece in glorious 35mm. And believe me, Waxman would prefer you hear his work through the cinema’s speaker than your laptop’s tinny excuse for one.