Hello. This is Scott MacQueen, and we're about to watch the perfect horror movie,
James Whale's 1935 Universal production of Bride of Frankenstein.
Wanting nothing to do with a sequel to his 1931 film Frankenstein,
James Whale responded to the inevitable with style, wit and production value.
He extracted the absolute best in concept and craft from his cast and technical staff.
Every department excels under a director who knew exactly the effect he wanted:
An opera of the macabre, distilling ideas and fusing imagery
of a myriad antecedents, instilling them with subtext and theme.
Mastery, control and purpose inform every frame of this remarkable film.
A stellar cast of largely British principals is amended at the bottom
with "The Monster's Mate" played by... a question mark.
The servant walking Lord Byron's hounds is Irish actress Una O'Connor.
We'll meet her again in her principal role as Minnie,
housekeeper of Castle Frankenstein.
This whimsical doubling foreshadows that of actress Elsa Lanchester.
In an hour or so, we'll meet Elsa as the monster's bride.
Here she is as Mary Godwin.
The cast list notwithstanding, she's not Mary Shelley yet.
The prologue was conceived by Whale and first written by Edmund Pearson.
Pearson created anachronisms, as he put it, "for the benefit of the censors".
In historical reality, English poet Percy Shelley
abandoned his wife Harriet and their two children
to live abroad with his lover, Mary Godwin.
Mary bore their love child, William.
They wed only after Harriet's convenient suicide,
coincident with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818 -
its author also anonymous, like the cipher in the Universal cast list.
Originally, the prologue celebrated the naughty behaviour of its principals.
"We are all three infidels, scoffers at marriage ties,
believing only in living fully and freely" stated Mary
in dialogue cut from the prologue - along with lingering views of Elsa's décolletage.
When Mary refers to "such an audience",
she doesn't mean her reading public, but her circle of friends.
Contract player Frank Lawton was considered to play Shelley.
David Niven tested for the part, but was rejected.
Screenwriter John Balderston worked the prologue into his second draft,
but only in William Hurlbut's final script was the precision achieved
that makes Bride of Frankenstein so memorable.
Eight writers worked on it, but the story and language of Bride of Frankenstein
is ultimately due almost entirely to William Hurlbut and James Whale.
This shot of the funeral cortege was the original opening of Frankenstein,
curiously still missing from prints today.
As originally recorded, Franz Waxman's music for the prologue ran 5¾ minutes,
indicating that the sequence has been trimmed by nearly two minutes.
Waxman scored the prologue as salon music of the early 19th century,
utilising strings and celeste to create a delicate minuet in A-B-C-A form:
Statement, development, followed by a scherzo
as the original picture's horrors are relived in flashback.
The scherzo is a minor-key desyncopated variation of the minuet.
At each depiction of the monster
is sounded a nine-note ascending/descending chromatic run,
patterned on the monster's growl.
It will recur as a danger motif several times in the score,
usually in conjunction with a five-tone third-interval motif for the monster.
The motif that we heard in the main title is saved for Karloff's first entrance.
That was Torben Meyer being throttled by the monster -
the only new footage in the flashback.
Meyer played the Danish tenant in Universal's Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Some thought the prologue immaterial.
Film editor Ted Kent argued for its complete elimination.
As the flashback ends, the demure 'A' section of the minuet returns.
The anticipatory mood is reflected as the violins play the minuet col legno,
tapping the wood of their bows on the strings.
The metre slows, the musical phrase fails to complete,
the key changes to minor with drawn strings.
In what period and place is this story occurring?
Post-Tesla generators, telephonic electrical devices
and 1930s marcelled hairstyles
will coexist with a peasantry by Brueghel.
Burgomasters and serfs with Teutonic names like Hans and Karl
speak in accents hailing from Glasgow, County Cork and Pasadena.
Quote: "I've taken the rest of the story far into the future
and made use of developments which science will someday know,
100 years to come", said Mary Shelley in dialogue removed from the prologue,
rationalising an alternate universe peppered with anachronisms.
Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado takes place in a Japan
that is suspiciously like Victorian England.
In similar fashion, the English-born Whale has created a Goldstadt
that is really a British never-never land.
Several 1935 press squibs actually stated that the locale for the picture is England.
In a contemporary interview, Whale explained.
"The whole of the theatre, both stage and screen, is unreal,
and if, for 1½ hours, the audience can be transported
into a strange atmosphere in which unnatural things happen,
but appear to happen naturally and believably,
the object of the film producer is accomplished."
"While the intention is a thrilling melodrama", states a production note,
"it is punctuated by the comedy of the burgomaster and the housekeeper,
who voice the scepticism of the audience in the manner of The Invisible Man."
Whale knew during the writing who would play these two.
Essentially reprising their roles from that 1933 film
are Whale favourites EE Clive as the burgomaster
and Una O'Connor as Minnie, the housekeeper.
The parts were written for these specific performers.
The unforgettable role of Dr Pretorius was apparently tailored for Claude Rains.
It is not known why Rains bowed out.
According to later studio memos,
he declined the Basil Rathbone part in Son of Frankenstein
because it was a horror picture.
Ernest Thesiger, another Whale favourite, filled the gap,
dramatically changing the movie's orbit.
The old Baron Frankenstein, referred to here, is never mentioned again.
In the preview version, the news of Henry's alleged death did the old man in.
The baron wasn't shown, but the priest and altar boys attending last rites were,
and they can still be found in one or two production stills.
The parents of Maria, the child drowned in the original film,
are played by Reginald Barlow and Mary Gordon.
Michael Mark, the father in Frankenstein, was called Ludwig.
Reginald Barlow, here called Hans,
appeared in the concurrent Werewolf of London as the estate caretaker, Timothy.
Upon reviewing the November 30th, 1934, shooting script,
Joseph Breen, the omnipotent censor of the Production Code Administration,
wrote the studio "We counted ten separate scenes
in which the monster either strangles or tramples people to death -
this in addition to murders by secondary characters."
"Such a great amount of slaughter is unwise,
and we recommend earnestly that you do something about toning this down."
Whale balked: "Kill them all. Let Breen sort them out."
Whale's first cut contained no less than 21 deaths either committed or alluded to.
After Breen's sorting,
the casualty rate plummeted to a mere ten confirmed decedents.
Franz Waxman's famous five-note motif for the monster, usually played by brass,
provides the backbone of the score,
and will recur in various guises and developments,
including flutter tonguing for danger and harmon mutes for comic effect.
As developed, it comments both on the creature
and other characters' reactions to him.
Poor Mary Gordon is Hans' wife. Her Mrs Hudson suffered for years
the eccentricities of Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes films.
The Scottish-born actress is tossed into the cistern here by Boris Karloff,
and would be throttled by Lon Chaney in The Mummy's Tomb.
She survived a rematch with Karloff in The Body Snatcher,
only to see Boris bludgeon her wee doggie and steal her son's corpse.
That's Hollywood for you.
Jack Pierce brilliantly extrapolated Karloff's make-up in Bride,
creating several stages of distress and regeneration, all in narrative continuity.
The wounded monster healed progressively.
Karloff seems fleshier because he is more padded than in the first film.
The need to speak means that he does not remove his dental plate this time,
forfeiting the cadaverous sunken cheek.
Nor did Pierce paint him with as many hollows.
The hollow in the monster's cheek became an annoying grace note
until, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it looked like Bela Lugosi's monster
and llona Massey's heroine both sported duelling beauty marks.
Elizabeth, the true bride of Frankenstein, played by a 17-year-old Valerie Hobson -
truly a child bride.
Whale would have liked Mae Clarke, his original,
but her frail health by 1935 made this impossible.
D'Arcy Corrigan, who plays the morgue attendant in Murders in the Rue Morgue,
delivers the bad news to Valerie.
He is flanked by the family of Whale's longtime companion David Lewis.
His mother, Fanny Levy, is the chubby peasant,
his father, Pon Levy, the stout, bearded man.
David's sister, Leah Bishan, is the sweet-faced girl blinking back tears.
Leah's daughter recalls Uncle Jimmy helping the Levys survive the Depression
with extra work in Bride, One More River and The Road Back.
How soon after Frankenstein was a sequel planned?
According to Robert Florey, that film's disinvited director, almost immediately.
Florey submitted an unsolicited seven-page treatment,
which was returned to him without comment in February 1932.
Frankenstein hit, a money machine, and Carl Laemmle Junior wanted more.
James Whale refused, finding the entire premise repellent.
Former newspaperman Tom Reed wrote a sequel in June and July 1933,
floating random chunks of the Shelley novel into his own mindless stew.
The now-educated monster demands a mate, killing Elizabeth for body parts.
Henry destroys himself and his creatures.
The old baron, written as the grumpy Frederick Kerr from the first film,
monopolises the first half of the script until the monster mercifully chokes him.
Then bad comedy with villagers, the bishop, a gay dance-instructor, take over.
Henry steals the legs of Frau von Hassenbagovitz
from a pompous undertaker's embalming room,
he ambulance-chases a train wreck to scavenge body parts,
and steals the hydrocephalic head of a suicided circus giantess
to build the bride.
A glimmer or two emerge from the dross to be retained -
the monster seeing his reflection in a pool, his education in speech,
the befriending of a blind man, the mate, the destruction of the lab,
and the thematic seed of religious piety.
Josef Berne and Morton Coyne prepared an independent treatment
based on Reed's material that was equally uneventful.
By September 1933, Kurt Neumann was announced to direct,
but the returns on The Invisible Man
made Whale the obvious commercial - protesting - choice.
"They've had a script prepared", he told The Invisible Man's writer, RC Sherriff,
"and it stinks to heaven."
Whale was preparing One More River with Sherriff,
a property Whale was passionate about, but that made the Laemmles yawn.
A bargain was made: One for James, one for the Laemmles.
Whale resigned himself to the sequel.
Two original treatments were evolved independently
by mystery writers Lawrence Blochman and Philip MacDonald, in December 1933.
Blochman's treatment seems partially inspired
by Todd Browning's 1932 film Freaks.
Henry and Elizabeth, incognito, have joined a travelling carnival as puppeteers.
They re-enact the monster's drama with marionettes.
All the carnival oddities have spouses and lovers -
even Emma, the lion tamer, who boasts about how she beats her husband
even as she dallies with Fifi, the giantess.
Enter the monster, wanting a love match.
The bride is produced in a carnival wagon
and the enraged monster dies in the jaws of Emma's lions.
Philip MacDonald's story was absolutely up to date,
equally original as Blochman's and equally useless.
War clouds over Europe, and Henry has developed his delta death ray,
that he wishes to sell to the League of Nations as a deterrent to war.
Henry has neglected his sickly wife Elizabeth,
over whom family friend Victor Moritz is still spooning.
A nocturnal demonstration of the ray inadvertently revives the monster,
and a second exposure gives him superhuman strength.
The monster plays with the apparatus' dials like a child,
inadvertently raining death and destruction across Europe,
decimating whole cities.
A remorseful Henry apologises to his creature, vaporises him with the ray,
and then immolates himself in its beam.
It was written that Elizabeth's vision would be a classical grim reaper,
a ghost of Christmas yet-to-come, bearing a strong whiff of the monster.
It would have been dangerous to go over the top so early on,
with so many fancies yet to come.
Far better to drop the other shoe with the arrival of Dr Pretorius,
a literal figure of death.
We're ready for our wake-up call, Dr P.
Promethean hubris drives the story - or this telling of it.
Henry rationalises his blasphemy
by conjecturing that his actions are part of the divine plan:
The devil didn't make him do it, God did.
Having created a shambling revenant with unpredictable powers,
Frankenstein refuses to take responsibility for its care or destruction.
Whale was a man of absolutely no religious convictions,
according to his biographer, James Curtis.
It is fashionable to view the religious parable
and Christ imagery in Bride of Frankenstein as mocking,
and to attribute it to Whale's nonconformity.
This view assumes the fey Dr Pretorius is the director's absolute alter ego,
and that the godless reprobate represents an alternative
to the vulgar Philistines of Goldstadt.
As the movie unfolds, I will suggest that the story's thesis is larger.
His entrance here is yet another one of Whale's bravura stage entrances.
Several pages of dialogue, eliminated here,
made it clear that this is an old acquaintance.
Pretorius had been Henry's teacher at school,
passing on his forbidden Promethean knowledge.
Henry's indiscretions in monstermaking had been traced to the doctor,
causing Pretorius to be sacked.
Pretorius also made it clear that the monster is most likely immortal.
The invisible man merely dreamt of walking into the holy of holies.
Dr Pretorius has done it, and stolen God's fire.
Like all worthy devils, Pretorius is magnetic.
He fascinates us with wit, intelligence, self-assurance.
He tempts us by giving voice to our worst impulses.
He controls destiny, irresponsibly and without consequence.
Disdainful of women, contemptuous of mankind and God,
utterly self-absorbed, ingenuous about vice,
Pretorius is literally one hell of a guy.
He is the climax of a noble line of cinematic Mephistos
that include Mr Scratch in All That Money Can Buy
and Emil Jannings' primordial Mephistopheles in FW Murnau's Faust.
The return of Frankenstein malingered while Whale shot One More River
and developed A Trip To Mars, which was ultimately abandoned.
He asked RC Sherriff to work on the sequel of Frankenstein,
but Sherriff refused, as he said, "to spend his summer writing pulp".
Whale conceived a prologue with Mary Shelley as a frame,
and Edmund Pearson wrote the earliest treatment.
Whale hired John Balderston, coauthor of the Dracula and Frankenstein plays,
and coauthor of the film The Mummy.
Now Hollywood's horror specialist, Balderston would contribute to such films
as Mad Love, Dracula's Daughter and Mark of the Vampire.
Raised in the Quaker faith, John Balderston balanced grim brutality
and equally grim religious moralising in his stories.
He worked through June and July 1934 on a workmanlike but unmagical script
that supplies a road map but no gas.
Rough narrative lines are there, but no spirit.
Elsa Lanchester is indicated as the player for Mary Shelley and the monster's mate.
The soul of the picture arrived with William Hurlbut in November 1934.
Born in Illinois in 1886, Hurlbut had been a New York playwright for 30 years.
He arrived at Universal as a dialogue writer -
on pictures such as The Cat Creeps - when talkies came in.
Trained as an illustrator, background in theatre, a confirmed bachelor,
Hurlbut and Whale shared much common ground.
Whale wanted to treat the film as a hoot,
and he found the idea of a female monster delirious.
He preferred the title "Bride of Frankenstein".
With Hurlbut, Whale re-engineered the story on fanciful, witty lines.
Dr Pretorius, his miniature creations, Minnie, and the burgomaster, were born.
Balderston's piety was rather suspect.
In his finale, the monster jealously kills Henry and the mate.
In an unbelievably maudlin scene, a priest, Father Gerard,
convinces the monster to accept God - and indeed, he proves his love
by dispatching the hapless brute with a lightning bolt. Deus ex machina.
With Hurlbut, Whale developed the spiritual subtext
into something meaningful and special.
To a new world of gods and monsters.
The perfect line, the perfect staging:
English gin in a chemist's retort, as drunken science toasts itself.
The cabinet of Dr Pretorius. He has donned a medieval skullcap,
an archaic fashion associated with alchemy,
as depicted in Murnau's Faust and Paul Wegener's The Golem.
More like black magic than science.
Pretorius is wardrobed in black, with high, white, nearly clerical collar and cuffs,
like an English country vicar.
The skullcap makes the image discordant:
The Reverend Dr Pretorius, High Priest of Satanic Arts.
Special effects men John Fulton and David Horsley
shot the little people over two days in full-scale jars against black velvet.
This was meticulously lined up to match the production plates
of Thesiger, Clive and the practical jars.
The film, or foreground plate, of the tiny people was rotoscoped,
then matted into the background plate.
As usual with John Fulton, the optical work is flawless.
Joan Woodbury, formerly Nana Martinez,
was at the start of her career portraying the queen.
In short order, she was a busy B-picture ingénue.
The king is the image of Henry Vlll, 16th-century English sovereign.
Henry defied the Catholic Church to divorce Catherine of Aragon.
The rutting monarch is portrayed by English actor Arthur S Byron.
No, not Sir Joseph Whemple in The Mummy - that was Arthur "Pops" Byron.
Elsa Lanchester's husband, Charles Laughton,
had just copped an Academy Award playing Henry for Alex Korda.
Norman Ainsley is the drowsy archbishop.
The religious parody is probably institutional, not canonical.
The screenplay even indicated the cleric's mitre askew
at a "deliberately nonepiscopal angle".
Peter Shaw plays the devil - not as a cloven-hoofed satyr, as in the script,
but as an urbane Mephisto.
Franz Waxman provides an off-kilter quotation from Faust by Charles Gounod.
He would again write musical miniatures for Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll.
Monte Montague is the stunt double as the mini monarch is airlifted to his jar.
If you slow down the soundtrack,
you can hear an engineer say "And the king gets picked up by the ears."
Montague was the sleepy policeman in The Invisible Man.
Bride received its only Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Recording.
Kansas DeForest plays the tiny toe-dancer.
Josephine McKim, in blonde wig and fins, was a 1932 Olympic swim champion.
She was also Maureen O'Sullivan's nude body double
in the erotic underwater pas de deux with Johnny Weissmuller
in 1934's Tarzan and His Mate.
In the right front bottle, seen from behind, is Billy Barty as the baby,
seated in a highchair, rending a flower to bits and waving his rattle.
Whale went over the top here, and wisely eliminated the main business.
The tyke is described as "looking like it might develop into Boris Karloff."
"I think this baby will grow into something worth watching", quipped Pretorius.
The censors softened Pretorius's reference to scripture as "fairy tales"
to "Bible stories".
Thesiger restores blasphemy with his inimitable reading of the line.
A book novelisation was prepared in England in 1936
by author Michael Harrison, writing as Michael Egremont.
Harrison recalls consulting the script and a single screening - but once was enough.
In his story, Harrison coyly enunciates the flamboyant homosexuality
that Thesiger brings to the character.
Quote: "I disobey the Biblical injunction 'be fruitful and multiply'."
"'You"' he tells Henry, "'have the choice of natural means,
but as for me, I am afraid there is no course open to me
but the scientific method.' He chuckled throatily."
Curtain down on act one.
Bride of Frankenstein has three neat acts, each lasting about 25 minutes.
Karloff portrays the monster as a lost soul
desperately seeking contact with humanity and desiring friendship.
He's met by a population that responds with nothing but cruelty and anger.
Whale's brilliance in cutting is evident here.
Cutting back to the hand already over the mouth,
truncating the action for effect.
Among the villagers is John George, a diminutive actor
whose stature - or lack of it - made him a fixture as a decorative gargoyle
in pictures like Babes in Toyland, East of Java and Trick for Trick.
You'll spot him again, pushing to the front of the crowd before the dissolve.
The sets for the earlier forest scenes are lush with waterfalls, grass and fir trees.
Here, as the monster is pursued by the mob,
Whale, himself a former stage designer, has instructed art director Charles D Hall
to provide an expressionistic forest of the dead -
dirt, rocks, leafless trees like upright telephone poles,
all the better to play the monster's crucifixion.
Whale is often incorrectly called expressionistic -
Whale used expressionism when it suited him,
as in this sequence and the "OI' Man River" number in Show Boat.
Bride, if anything, is rococo,
a robust co-mingling of baroque, gothic, the decorative,
the expressionistic and the derivative.
Dwight Frye, body snatcher to the stars, is first glimpsed leaning against a tree.
David Lewis's sister is again kibitzing with the rabble.
There's Dwight.
Mr Levy, wearing spectacles and leaning on his cane,
has just darted behind EE Clive.
The point is not that the monster is Christ.
In Christian theology, Jesus is the redeemer.
His death and resurrection contain the promise of eternal life.
The monster is the son of man, a gross parody of all that is human,
lacking the divine spark and therefore a mockery of the divine.
Whale was an ironist, not a parodist.
He doesn't crucify the monster to suggest that Golgotha was a cosmic joke,
he punches our buttons by inverting a fundamental tradition of Western culture:
The monster, the son of man, is resurrected from the dead, then crucified.
Strangely enough, the film would open on Good Friday, 1935.
Everything about the look of the film is stylised.
Nowhere do we see a natural sky.
With glowering, painted skies, it's as if a thunderstorm is always looming.
Here, the sky is filled with an architectural matte painting
by Jack Cosgrove and Russell Lawson.
These are the only back-lot exteriors in the picture,
tightly composed on the German village set from All Quiet on the Western Front.
The monster's jailer here, who gives EE Clive some lip,
is Charlie Murphy, curator of the Universal zoo in the early '30s
and a frequent bit player in action pictures for Universal and Republic.
Thanks to Breen, much of the monster's rampage was cut -
actually improving the picture.
The fatter film contained a vignette in the morgue,
followed by an inquest sequence where Minnie and others
admit not actually witnessing any murders.
The pompous burgomaster is insisting there is no monster
when the creature plucks him through a window and cuffs him about the head.
Just as Minnie was spared at the ruined mill,
the burgomaster is a fool figure, the voice of the audience -
he can be humbled, but he must not be killed.
Fleeing in the crowd, we then met Auntie and Uncle Glutz,
played by Tempe Pigott and Gunnis Davis,
and their nephew, played by Dwight Frye in his amalgamated state.
At their house, nephew killed his uncle and stole his hoard,
blaming it on the monster.
The scene closed as nephew pondered the convenience of a scapegoat
and mused that the monster might soon visit auntie.
The communion girl who speaks is Helen Parrish,
sister of film director Robert Parrish.
Helen grew up to become a leading lady in Three Smart Girls Grow Up
and was Boris Karloff's ingénue in You'll Find Out in 1940.
A shot of Frieda's mother carrying the body was cut by the censor.
Gossiping with Una O'Connor is David Lewis's mother, Fanny Levy,
earning her seven and a half dollars a day extra-player's pay.
Poor old Newman has been hacked to death by the monster.
That's Walter Brennan handling the murder weapon.
Mr and Mrs Newman's moans were dubbed in later
to lessen the official body count.
Perhaps they aren't dead yet, but, in Monty Python fashion,
are feeling much better after the dissolve.
The Gypsy camp was added during reshoots in April
to bridge the deletions in the village.
Maurice Black plays the Gypsy man, and Elspeth Dudgeon is his sour mother.
She's made up to evoke Eva Moore's crusty matriarch in The Old Dark House.
Elspeth also appeared in that film - billed as John Dudgeon -
as the 102-year-old family patriarch.
Whale used her again in Show Boat and The Great Garrick.
She is memorable as the titular villain
in a loony 1938 horror comedy for Warner Bros, Sh/ The Octopus.
Elspeth played the octopus, not the imperative,
and her transformation as the grandmother from hell
was an unsung high point of '30s horror movies.
In a sequence inspired by Shelley's novel,
the monster finds refuge with a blind hermit.
Whale had shut the picture down February 19th to March 2nd, 1935,
waiting for OP Heggie to finish a picture at RKO Radio Pictures.
Whale was on dangerous ground here - with the censor and the audience.
One false step, and this delicately charged material
could explode into maudlin sentimentality,
ecclesiastical heresies or baggy-pants burlesque.
The integrity of this performance from Heggie was crucial,
or we would have had Mel Brooks 45 years ahead of schedule.
The hermit is a saintly figure, aged, bearded, possessed of inner sight,
deliberately wardrobed to suggest a New Testament figure.
Breen had cautioned Whale that his script contained references to Dr Frankenstein
that "compare him to God,
and which compare his creation of the monster to God's creation of man."
"All such references should be eliminated."
Craftily, Whale and Hurlbut retained these as shooting drew nearer.
Three weeks before production, Whale helpfully reminded Breen
of his oversight in his last communication:
"There are points about God, entrails,
immortality and mermaids, which you did not bring up again,
and I am very anxious to have the script meet with your approval in every detail."
Greg Mank asked Valerie Hobson late in her life
if she could pinpoint why Bride of Frankenstein remained so popular.
She replied "Karloff is so moving, like one of the great clowns who make you cry."
"I think this was the secret of its enduring success."
Franz Waxman asked for Clifford Vaughan as his orchestrator
specifically because of Vaughan's expertise with the organ.
The instrument is associated with sacred music,
evident in this solo rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria".
Oliver Wallace, later a mainstay of Disney's music department,
was the session player on a Wurlitzer-style theatre organ.
Elsewhere, the organ is used for profane colour,
notably in the danse macabre of the crypt sequence
and in multiple renditions of the bride's theme.
Vaughan also orchestrated for staff composers Edward Ward
and Heinz Roemheld in 1934-35.
He was also a fine composer, contributing the memorable main title and recap music
to Universal's first Flash Gordon serial.
Film editor Ted Kent maintained that he executed the glowing crucifix
behind this scene all on his own.
Whale didn't much care for it, but let it stay.
Symbols of Christian ritual are hidden in plain sight.
When the monster says "Bread good, wine good",
he is really reading the Eucharist.
This is his Last Supper, complete with the holy sacraments of bread and wine.
Soon the Romans will come for him.
Perhaps this explains Dr Pretorius's otherwise inexplicable name:
From "praetor", a Roman magistrate.
Like his namesake, Pretorius is his own law, meting out life and death.
Thesiger would play a genuine praetor in the CinemaScope epic The Robe.
In teaching the monster the pleasures of a cigar,
Whale lets the creature indulge in the director's own trademark habit.
When fire threatened to engulf Whale's home in the early 1950s,
his cigars were the one thing he cared to rescue,
and stood by, calmly puffing, as he watched the blaze.
Karloff thought giving the monster speech was stupid,
and destroyed whatever impact he had. He argued against it.
Karloff was right, for speech removed the alien remoteness of the creature.
But the monster could now no longer be the totemic black Injun of the first film.
He had to be an evolving character and interact with the others,
or he would become the lifeless prop Karloff sensed coming into being
after Son of Frankenstein.
Universal publicists refused to believe the novelty was gone.
A New York Times squib reported that, during production,
Laemmle insisted that Karloff wear a veil over his monstrous features
when walking to and from the stage - the same gambit they had milked in 1931.
The Times reporter was sceptical -
who, in 1935, didn't know already what the monster looked like?
The melody being fiddled is an original by Franz Waxman
called "Children's Theme", that will be quoted later at the end of this sequence.
The hunters - on the left, John Carradine, and Robert Adair.
Whale had used Carradine in a small part in The Invisible Man.
In the 1940s, Carradine added the role of Dracula to his considerable résumé.
In late life, Carradine raised eyebrows
by insisting that he had turned down the role of the Frankenstein monster in 1931.
Karloff emits the warning growl
which Franz Waxman picked up on as the monster's secondary danger-motif.
Shortly, the monster will stumble into a group of children
and be posed before an icon of Jesus Christ.
He beseeches the children, and is again rejected by humanity.
Marilyn Harris, the drowned Maria of the first film, is the children's leader.
Also fleeing in the gaggle is child actress Carmencita Johnson.
Whale upgraded Marilyn's silent bit with one word of dialogue,
making the part a higher-paying speaking role.
He would use Marilyn again in Show Boat and The Road Back.
Balderston's July 23rd script had the angry monster wrestle and destroy
a stone angel in the cemetery - literally a fallen angel.
Hurlbut's shooting script had the monster come upon a crucified Nazarene,
etched against a glowering sky.
Seeing it as a living figure, tortured as he has been, the monster toppled the effigy
and attempted to free it from the cross.
The Breen office told Whale in no uncertain terms
to find another monument.
Whale salvaged the ghost of the intention
by including the unmolested Christ icon in the margin.
Censor cuts in Frankenstein perverted the poignant encounter with a little girl
into an act of paedophilic depravity.
As if Pretorius, the burgomaster and Minnie
jointly ran the Production Code Administration,
the most resonant Christian image was twisted into an act of godlessness.
Casting sheets show that Dwight Frye was originally cast
for his part here as Ghoul Number One.
A screenplay anachronism retained Fritz,
the hunchback assistant who had been killed in the first film.
Dwight Frye Jr recalls that Whale helped his father by creating roles,
and Frye's Karl is an amalgam of four characters in the Hurlbut script -
Pretorius's servant, first Ghoul, Nephew Glutz and Fritz.
This is why Frye has two different partners.
Neil Fitzgerald, here in the crypt, is Rudy, aka Ghoul Number Two.
Ted Billings, as Ludwig, will help to fly the kites at the climax.
Dwight Frye's reading of the tombstone gives the story a definite anchor in time.
He tells us the girl died in 1899.
Corruption is complete, and now, years later, only her bones remain.
As Universal's press book stated in 1935, "The time of the story is the present" -
though clearly an alternate universe.
Déjeuner sur le crypte. The drunken doctor blows smoke in the face of death,
just as Henry tossed dirt at the grim reaper in the original film.
Franz Waxman titled this cue "Danse Macabre",
using organ and padded xylophone to mock the skeletal décor
in three-quarter time.
This is the role of a lifetime for Ernest Thesiger.
A true eccentric, his performance draws much from his private persona.
Valerie Hobson remembered him as a terribly sweet man with a good heart.
"I don't think he had a very strong male approach to things,"
she told historian Greg Mank.
"He was one of the very first people to make, almost, camp fun."
"He did it as a serious thing, you know."
"Sort of the arched eyebrow and arched nostril."
Elsa Lanchester recalled him as weird, strange and acid-tongued.
Thesiger opened in the play A Sleeping Clergyman
at the Theatre Guild, New York, on October 8th, 1934.
When it closed after 40 performances, he was able to train west
to join the cast of Bride after the New Year.
Reading Pretorius's dialogue, it is easy to hear Claude Rains' brushed-velvet tones
and imagine the cynical, twinkling bemusement
with which he played Captain Renault in Casablanca.
That same dialogue plays very differently when enunciated by the man who,
in The Old Dark House, spoke the phrase "Have a potato"
and endowed it with seven levels of malevolence.
Thesiger's best film roles are all macabre.
Less well-known than The Old Dark House and The Ghoul
are his parts as Marley's undertaker in the Alistair Sim version of Scrooge,
the asthmatic industrial tycoon, swathed in furs, in The Man in the White Suit,
a 19th-century wraith who must release his dead lover's soul
from the body of a possessed girl in the 1948 British thriller A Place of One's Own,
and the milk-toast Mr Hoover, the silk-stocking killer
of the 1938 Warner Bros British production They Drive by Night.
Pretorius's preoccupation with the female being
radiates an unhealthy, prurient interest.
As the monster realises the implication of the word "wife", Thesiger's glance
suggests that Pretorius will be a most interested spectator on the honeymoon.
Whale had a good film editor in Ted Kent, but Kent was the first to credit his director
with pinpointing precisely where and when to cut,
both to punch dialogue and to catch the eye.
Notice these opposing shots of Thesiger and Clive, each pushing in to close-ups.
This symmetrical pairing of shots will be seen again in the creation sequence.
Another bravura entrance here, as the monster is revealed at the door.
The successively closer cuts play on our memory of the first film
and repeat its impact.
Whale reveals his strange characters in this fashion frequently -
Rains in The Invisible Man, Karloff in The Old Dark House,
even Colin Clive in One More River.
This time the monster is the master,
as the "sit down" tutorial from the first film is inverted, with Henry as pupil.
In Hurlbut's script, Elizabeth is stolen off-screen.
Valerie and Boris were to appear together for only one shot in the cave.
Whale realised he had omitted the beauty-and-the-beast ritual,
and seized this opportunity to make, not a parody, but a reprise,
of Elizabeth's symbolic rape in the first film.
The setting is again the bedroom, but with Frau Frankenstein no longer a Fräulein,
the bed is less functional furniture than associative backdrop
to Elizabeth's abduction by her robber bridegroom.
Here's another example of Whale and Hurlbut's good theatrical instincts.
As written, Pretorius and Dr Frankenstein remain together during this episode.
Pretorius merely shrugs at the suggestion that he is behind the abduction.
On the set, Whale contrived for Pretorius to make another grand entrance,
smashing the bric-a-brac while the camera dollies in to a low angle
to punch the impact of the moment.
Here's another Whale trademark: Moving his camera through the wall of a set.
The watchtower set from the first film is revisited,
with a crossbeam now spanning the staircase -
just in case one feels like hanging oneself from a convenient rafter.
The mordant pleasantries about slimy steps
and the charms of the house are ad-libs.
The next four minutes are mainly the contribution of John Balderston.
The immediate necessity of a fresh heart is a full incident retained from his script.
Pretorius's line to Henry about "once upon a time
being burnt at the stake as wizards for the experiment" is rather ingenuous.
He fails to consider that kidnapping, grave-robbing,
corpse mutilation and murdering young girls for their body parts -
have I forgotten anything? - Might merit the gallows, if not the stake.
This line was spoken in Balderston's script by a professor of anatomy,
while energising dead frog parts with a galvanic battery.
In his screenplay, Balderston shamelessly rehashed
the medical-school business of the first film,
even to reviving the deceased hunchback Fritz.
Apparently nothing is impossible when your boss is Dr Frankenstein.
Fritz procures a desiccated specimen,
enraging Henry, who demands a fresh one, and offers the 1,000-crown bounty.
Fritz obliges - in the Great Depression people would do anything for money.
Having appeared in every crowd scene in the film for seven and a half dollars a day,
it seemed the only way to get rid of David Lewis' sister, Leah Bishan, was to kill her.
But it was worth it for Leah - records show that the Goldstadt street victim
was a 50-dollar turn. Hardly 1,000 crowns, but not to be sneezed at in 1935.
One myth that has been repeated over the years
held that the fresh heart for the bride was at one time intended to be Elizabeth's.
A still of Dwight Frye hovering near Valerie Hobson with a knife,
and the bride's instantaneous attraction to Henry, have been cited as proofs.
At no time was this ever considered.
More's the pity that it wasn't - it's in tune with the story,
and Elizabeth died anyway in the final cataclysm - at least, until the preview.
The monster's recitation of the work ethic to Henry is also courtesy of Balderston.
Cinematographer John Mescall had first worked for Whale
on The Invisible Man before filming By Candlelight, The Kiss Before the Mirror,
Bride of Frankenstein and Show Boat for the director.
Mescall was an alcoholic.
On the set he was efficient and produced luminous work -
provided that he made it to the set, which the studio ensured by sending a car daily.
Despite a good rapport, Whale finally sacked Mescall for drunkenness
on the set of the much-troubled The Road Back.
By the late '50s, he was working for Roger Corman, and ended his days on skid row.
His work on Bride ranks it as one of the most exquisitely photographed films ever.
In a 1935 interview with Movie Makers, magazine of the Amateur Cinema League,
Mescall spoke of his use of Rembrandt lighting
and asserted that, despite the greasepaint Jack Pierce applied,
the monster was never intended to be a jolly green giant,
but "a dead-white corpse."
With variations, Rembrandt lighting is used throughout -
a hard and contrasty light, with deep, rich shadows and brilliant highlights.
It involves neither a straight crosslight nor a flat light from the front,
but a combination of the two, with the light originating
from a point in front and to one side of the objects to be photographed.
This tends to impart a roundness to the features,
and this pseudo-stereoscopic effect is heightened
by having a dark background behind the bright side of the face, and vice versa.
"It was our desire to maintain an eerie, mysterious atmosphere."
"Supplementary lights were projected from odd angles, especially for Karloff."
"Many settings were filled with dark shadows."
"The sets themselves had distorted walls, involving many angles and offsets."
"In scenes in which only the monster appeared,
the camera, with a short-angle lens,
was placed low and comparatively close to the subject,
and thus was gained the impression of a distorted figure and unusual height."
"In contrast, we placed the camera at a high elevation
in photographing the rascally Pretorius,
and thus achieved the effect of a bulging cranium."
"To give the effect of deadness, Karloff's make-up was blue-green in colour,
and the light was projected through blue filters."
"When other characters appeared with him,
the make-ups of the others were pink or reddish in tone,
and lights of a corresponding shade had to be trained on them,
while the blue lights must be shielded from them."
The laboratory scenes are patterned in equal parts
on sequences from two silent films produced in Europe.
They are the creation of the female robot in Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis,
filmed in Germany,
and the medieval climax of the 1926 Rex Ingram film The Magician,
filmed in France.
Kenneth Strickfaden built the electrical apparatus.
"I got my start in high school from my interest in science" he said.
"Otherwise, I might have been a teenage werewolf."
His high-voltage Art-Deco assemblages - all sizzle and no steak -
are the original light show, a defining image of science fiction.
Mrs Strickfaden didn't think much of horror pictures. "She's no fan" he said.
"I have to remind her that she lives in a house built and paid for by Frankenstein."
Universal's publicity claimed, after the fact,
that an intense hunt had been mounted to engage the bride.
The exhibitor's trade magazine, Universal Weekly, named a few also-rans:
Brigitte Helm, the malevolent female robot from Metropolis,
Phyllis Brooks, a fashion model just edging her way into supporting roles,
and Arletta Duncan, a Universal bit player
who had been Mae Clarke's maid of honour in Frankenstein.
Poor Arletta - always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
But Whale knew who he wanted, and Elsa Lanchester's name, with a question mark,
is prominent on the cast page of Balderston's first draft of June 9th, 1934.
It's still there six weeks later in the July 23rd script,
only now Elsa is indicated as both Mary Shelley and the mate.
Ted Kent's montage for the creation sequence
is as artistically valid as anything by Sergei Eisenstein -
and it won't give you an urge to take up collective farming.
It was noted in the 1970s that the first three notes of the bride's musical theme
are the same as the first three notes of the song "Bali Hai" from South Pacific.
By the 1990s, this casual observation became conflated into an urban legend
that had Franz Waxman receiving a hefty settlement from Oscar Hammerstein.
The Waxman archives confirm that no litigation occurred.
Franz would hardly sue the librettist of a Richard Rodgers composition,
and there are, after all, only eight notes in the diatonic scale.
Waxman's score for Fritz Lang's 1933 French production Liliom for Fox Europa
caught Whale's ear - particularly the ethereal music for the heaven sequence,
with its airy colouring of celeste and ondes Martenot,
an early electronic instrument.
Mere days before production started on January 2nd,
Whale and Waxman met at a Christmas party.
Whale explained that nothing in the story would be resolved, everyone would die,
and offered Waxman the job if he would give him an unresolved musical score.
The orchestra for the Bride sessions was conducted by Constantin Bakaleinikoff.
Session photographs show 32 players on the recording stage,
14 of whom are violinists.
Orchestration sheets reveal that at its largest the orchestra had 40 players.
Waxman music appeared memorably in Universal's Flash Gordon serials.
Cues from his score have been recorded by Charles Gerhardt and Erich Kunzel.
In 1993, Kenneth Alwyn conducted the first substantial recording
of the nearly complete score.
Waxman's use of timpani here echoes the heartbeat of the monster bride.
Boris's monster in the first film looked like triage at an auto wreck,
his face and torso swathed in bandages,
naked legs truncating in size 16, triple-E foot splints.
The script called for the mate to give the effect of an Egyptian mummy,
and this was realised exactly, including leg bindings.
Will the bride be beautiful or ghastly?
Whale fools us with quick, progressively closer cuts, deliberately non-matching,
alternating from diffuse to crisp.
He even has the actress' mouth stuffed with wadding
to distort and swell her features for one flash cut.
Dr Pretorius, bridesmaid to the bride. Franz Waxman provides wedding bells.
The script described Elsa's 'do' as "curled close to her head,
hanging straight and dark on either side."
Keeping to the mummy idea,
Whale and Jack Pierce memorably designed this Nefertiti number.
Lanchester's own hair is marcelled and swept back on a wire cage.
She looks like she has stuck her finger in a socket.
The white electric bolts from her temples add the final exclamation points.
Monster coiffure would never be the same.
Elsa's streaks and tips set a fashion craze - for Rafaela Ottiano in The Devil-Doll,
Ramsay Ames in The Mummy's Ghost,
Humphrey Bogart in The Return of Doctor X,
even Boris Karloff himself in The Walking Dead.
Elsa Lanchester told Greg Mank "Jack Pierce did really feel
like he made these people, like he was a god who created human beings."
Lanchester elaborated in her memoirs: "He had his own sanctum sanctorum,
and as you entered you did not 'go in', you 'entered'."
"He said 'Good morning' first."
"If I spoke first, he glared and slightly showed his upper teeth."
"He would be dressed in a full hospital doctor's operating outfit."
"At five in the morning, this made me dislike him intensely."
Another baroque camera angle, with a short lens to keep the bride distorted.
No one can explain the presence of this lever - unless it's the lever to heaven.
Lanchester said she cultivated her hiss
by observing angry swans at Regent's Park in London.
The Production Code Administration saw Whale's original cut on March 20th
and demanded changes.
Subsequently, the picture was previewed at 92 minutes on April 6th,
and in this form reviewed by the Hollywood Reporter.
Breen approved it on April 15th.
Mere days before the April 19th, San Francisco, Good Friday opening,
Whale relented on the script's "positively final fade-out",
and reshot the ending so that Henry and Elizabeth would live.
Yes, there was going to be a Son of Frankenstein.
Waxman's unresolved musical ending now had a coda,
cracked from the creation cue.
James Whale's biographer, James Curtis, tells us that Whale had the last laugh.
Taking friends to a revival showing in the late 1940s,
the director was snickering at his ironic creation
when an irate moviegoer whipped around in her seat.
"If you don't like the show" she commanded, "you can damn well leave."
65 years later, no one in the audience is leaving.