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She's Alive! Creating the Bride of Frankenstein (1999)
It's an old clich that a sequel
is never as good as the original. But director James Whale set that on its head with Bride of Frankenstein, the crowning achievement of Universal's golden age of horror. Never had a studio lavished so much production value and acting talent on a so-called monster movie. Bride of Frankenstein transcended its genre and remains one of Universal's best-loved films. For Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the attempted creation of the monster's bride was always part of her original vision. How James Whale and Universal Pictures played matchmaker for Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester is quite a story. And, like a good cast, well worth repeating. Oh. I thought I was alone. It's one of the great American films. It's right up there with Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. It's usually discussed as "Oh, just a horror movie", but it's much more complex. Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is? And who you are? Yes. I know. Made me from dead. The various story elements, the intellectual elements, the artistic and acting elements that came to bear in this film, really crystallised all the things that had been building in that genre, at that studio, at that time. I love dead. Hate living. You're wise in your generation. The Bride of Frankenstein quite simply is the most complex and most brilliantly achieved and conceived horror film ever made, and certainly the crowning jewel in Universal's initial series of horror films. You make man like me? No. Woman. Friend for you. It's a wonderful film. It's just delightful. Certainly there are some scenes where humour and terror are all beautifully blended. When you get into Bride of Frankenstein, you're making it all up. There are no rules. The only rules are those of the imagination. Whale had an extraordinary imagination. There are some imaginations which are best left to go do their own Gothic thing. This isn't science. It's more like black magic. When Universal unleashed the original Frankenstein in 1931, it found a new formula for box-office magic. In a stunning portrayal, Boris Karloff was catapulted to international stardom. James Whale, well-regarded for his British stage work, had been imported to Hollywood for his ability to direct dialogue. Ironically, as movies were learning to talk, it was a silent performance that made the Hollywood careers of both Karloff and Whale. Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle, didn't want his son, Carl Junior, to make films like Dracula and Frankenstein. But there was no arguing with the box office. As soon as Frankenstein was complete, the studio began planning a follow-up. This time it was the director who objected. James Whale didn't want to do a sequel to Frankenstein. He seemed to be trying to squirm out of it, as it were, avoid it, bypass it. Do something else instead. He said he'd gotten everything out of the first one, that he'd "wrung it dry". Maybe that was the phrase. You have to remember that Frankenstein was the Jaws or Star Wars of its day. It was such a big hit. The studio had so much invested in it that finally he agreed to do it. But again I love the fact that he only did it on his terms. Meantime, Universal again teamed Whale and Karloff for The Old Dark House, a sardonic thriller that introduced Whale's mischievous sense of humour. The Invisible Man, with Claude Rains, mixed laughs and chills, and showcased state-of-the-art special effects. The effects in The Invisible Man are just extraordinary. You still watch them and wonder how some were done. You're crazy to know who I am, aren't you? All right/ I'll show you. There's a souvenir for you. And one for you. I'll show you who I am and what I am. How do you like that, eh? Whale directed some stylish non-horror films for Universal in the early '30s, including By Candlelight in the manner of Lubitsch, an adaptation of Galsworthy's One More River, and a screwball comedy mystery Remember Last Night? He always had very mixed feelings about his horror films. He liked them, but he wanted to be an A-list director. He wanted to make the big-money projects, like John Stahl at Universal did. And, curiously enough, who remembers who John Stahl was? But we all remember the movies made by James Whale. Junior Laemmle, who was the general manager at Universal, had enormous respect for Whale. I think that he felt that certainly what Whale had done with Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, with the other non-horror-genre films that he had done, showed a great stylist at work. Although Junior Laemmle himself was not a creative man, he had a very instinctive feel, I think, for something that was good. I think he felt James Whale was the director at Universal who probably had the best chance of putting Universal on par with MGM, and with Warner Bros, and with the big boys in Hollywood. So he really gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with the picture. After rejecting several scripts for the Frankenstein sequel, Whale took personal control over the screenplay's development. The fact that Whale didn't especially want to make the film, and then agreed to, prompted him to offer ideas for the script to the writers. Suggest things. At least, we have a very good indication that he did this. People such as Elsa Lanchester mentioned this, that this was his idea, that that was his idea. The little people in the bottles was his idea. He insisted that he have the opening prologue with Mary Shelley and Byron and Percy Shelley. That was essential, otherwise he wouldn't do it. Elsa Lanchester, for example, told me that Whale insisted that she be allowed to play Mary Shelley, and also the bride. It was either that or he wouldn't make the film. It was a great thrill to meet Elsa Lanchester. I met her in 1981. She said that it was Whale's intention to show that very pretty people, which is how Mary Shelley is presented in the film, actually inside have very wicked thoughts. Can you believe that lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein? A monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves? The money was available to him to make a much more elaborate film than the first one. Because of the success, they let him go with the sets, and go with the care and the time and the photography and the music, so that he could polish and refine and elaborate, in a way that the earlier films, which were made faster, wouldn't have permitted. It's an odd sequel in many ways. For example, after a brief glimpse of the monster in the beginning of the movie, he doesn't show up again for a half-hour, a third of the way into the movie. Meanwhile, you've spent most of your time with this odd character, Dr Pretorius. I think if you look at Dr Pretorius, that's an example of how the movie has changed so radically from the first one. In the first one, there was the boring Dr Waldman. And in this one, suddenly there's this full-blown eccentric, very, very gay and funny character, that was created by Whale in the development of the screenplay for the second film. Frankenstein. Yes, there have been developments since he came to me. Unlike the original film, Mary Shelley's novel featured a highly articulate monster. Bride of Frankenstein restored the monster's speech. Before you came, I was all alone. It is bad to be alone. Alone. Bad. Friend. Good. Speech was the essential difference between the original Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein. My father really objected to the monster being given speech. He felt it would take away from the original portrayal, and I think he was wrong. Cinema history has proven him wrong. It's one of the few sequels that really... most film critics regard as surpassing the original. Once more, Boris Karloff faced a gruelling and uncomfortable make-up, designed and applied by the legendary Jack Pierce. One of the changes in the make-up, besides the fact that Karloff had gained weight... He wasn't as cadaverous. I think success... He was able to eat more and unfortunately he had a little fuller face. But one of the biggest changes was the results of the fire. So they singed his hair off and gave him almost this crew cut, which through the film grows, which I thought was pretty neat. His make-up goes through four or five stages of regeneration, allowing him to grow both visually as well as spiritually as the film unfolds. They gave him a burn on his hand and a bit of a burn on this side of his face. But other than that the make-up was basically the same. The flat head, and they still had the electrodes in the brow. Just a slightly fuller face with a few little burn scars and the singed-off hair. A great make-up. Actually there was another change. In the original make-up, he only had one clamp on his head - this side actually. It was something they didn't notice for the longest time. You would see pictures from the Bride, and you saw the two big clamps, the little ones in-between and the ones on the side. I used to always assume that was the same on the original make-up. Later, when I started looking at it, I said "He only has one clamp." During the filming of Frankenstein, Karloff sustained a serious back injury, and suffered many discomforts due to the weighted boots and padded costume. For the sequel, efforts were made to lessen the ordeal. I'm sure they treated him more like a star, because he was successful with Frankenstein and some films after that. I think that, in the original, the top of his head was probably fabricated each day, built up out of cotton and collodion. In the Bride and the Son later on, there was a rubber forehead that went on, which probably sped up the process for Boris and Jack. I know they gave Karloff a slant board, because he still couldn't quite sit down. I have a picture in my office of him in this great slant board, drinking a cup of tea. The make-up posed technical challenges for cinematographer John Mescall, who required special lighting for the monster's skin tones. Jack Pierce's make-up for the monster essentially was a blue-green colour. This was not due to any belief in a colour aesthetic for the monster. But if the monster were photographed wearing this shade of greasepaint, on orthochromatic film, and if he was lit as Mescall lit him, with blue-gelled light, he would read as dead white. Mescall had red added into the make-up of those who had scenes with the monster and often trained warmer lights on them. The make-up for the Bride of Frankenstein is an absolute masterpiece. It's the only iconic female monster to ever come out of the movies. I mean, if you were to think of a classic female monster, it's the Bride of Frankenstein that comes to mind. The Elsa Lanchester make-up was very different from the Karloff make-up. I'm sure what they wanted to do was have her attractive. You didn't want to have a hideous woman monster. I don't know if it was an executive decision or what. "We can't have an ugly woman monster." So they came up with this... again, another icon. You think of the Bride of Frankenstein, everybody knows that wacky hairstyle. It had that Egyptian Nefertiti look to it. They had this wire cage on her head and that was really her hair mixed in with it. They probably filled it in with some crepe wool. And the white streaks, the crazy white streaks. Yet she was very made-up, almost wore basically a glamour make-up. If it wasn't for the scar around the neck, it would have looked like some glamorous woman with a wacky hairstyle. I heard that Elsa Lanchester wasn't too fond of Pierce, which I was sorry to hear. Someone who I idolise like Jack Pierce. I've heard from people that he was a crotchety old guy. Elsa Lanchester talked about Jack Pierce, and she said that he was an unusual personality. He really almost felt, in her opinion, that he was a god who created these horror characters that Universal marketed. In the morning, he'd be all dressed up in a surgeon's smock as if he were about to perform an operation. She said you went into his sanctum sanctorum to have the make-up done, and you waited for him to say hello. You didn't say hello first. He had to say hello first. So he was very, very much in control. He really was a divine presence within his own realm of creating these make-ups. She was very funny. She talked about the scar under the neck of the bride. She said that Jack Pierce took the longest time to do this, that he went through this incredible ritual of applying this scar, that she said hardly shows in the film. She said "I'm sure he could have bought a scar for ten cents in a joke shop." But he had his own way of doing it, and he lovingly and painstakingly applied this scar each morning to the bride. The idea of the hiss of the female monster came from she and Charles Laughton feeding the swans at Regents Park. She said "When swans would come up, if you went to feed them, that was all right, but if you got too near them or got near their young, they would hiss." So she thought of this incredible hiss of the swans and she incorporated it into the character. Frankenstein combined English and American actors, not always convincingly. Bride of Frankenstein was cast mainly with British players. Mae Clarke, the original Elizabeth, was replaced by the 17-year-old ingnue Valerie Hobson. Valerie Hobson gives an amazing performance, I think, as Elizabeth. Very stylised. She's like a Christmas angel, the way she appears with the dress and the flowing hair. I talked to her in 1989 and she had warm memories of making the film. She said the first time she saw Karloff, it was an extraordinary experience. There he was in complete Frankenstein monster make-up, and she said "I just was so amazed. All of a sudden he opened his mouth and out came this very gentle British accent with a lisp." She said that he was like the great clowns who make you cry. He really made you cry. This monster whose heart was just bleeding to get out of his monstrous self, to find somebody to love, to find somebody to love him in return. And he pulled it off. Remarkable feat of acting. She was very impressed by it. Valerie Hobson was very appreciative of James Whale. Not only was he a great director, but he was, as she put it, so English. Here she was, a 17-year-old British girl in Hollywood, and he made her feel very much at home. She said she was the victim of James Whale's rather bizarre wit, because the first time she met Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein, it was the scene where she becomes hysterical and falls into bed with him. As they rehearsed this scene and she fell into bed, James Whale said "Mr Clive, this is Miss Hobson." And she was in bed with him. So she said it was pretty strange, even for Hollywood, as an introduction. Colin Clive played Henry Frankenstein again in one of his last performances. Emotionally tortured and ravaged by alcohol, he died two years later aged 37. Frankenstein's mentor, Dr Septimus Pretorius, a role originally intended for Claude Rains, was played by James Whale's real-life theatrical mentor, Ernest Thesiger, an actor reportedly just as eccentric off-screen as on. To a new world of gods and monsters. Una O'Connor, who was in The Invisible Man, was another Whale favourite and a perfect choice for Frankenstein's twittering housekeeper, Minnie. Although Frankenstein's assistant, played by Dwight Frye, met a nasty end in the first film, James Whale combined several small parts to give the actor a memorable assignment. Fritz von Frankenstein of course had been killed by the monster in Frankenstein. Jimmy Whale - I say Jimmy Whale because that's what my father called him - liked my dad's work. What we need is a female victim of sudden death. Can you do it? If you promise me a thousand crowns. It will be well worth it, and the baron will pay. I'll try. Bride of Frankenstein is visually the best Universal horror classic, thanks to art director Charles Hall and cinematographer John Mescall. Expressionistic tricks, totally artificial lighting, these great painted skyscapes, and the way the tombs are all at weird angles. Magnificent stuff like that. One of the things that intrigues me about Whale's career, his work in general, is the background... the backgrounds that he had. That is, as a theatre actor and theatre director, but as a set designer in theatre, as well as a painter and so forth. One wonders to what extent he might have had input into the visual appearance, the look of the sets of his films, in a way that most directors at that time would not be likely to do. Elsa Lanchester said, when she was not actually needed on the set at one point, he took her to the studio and showed off the forest set. He was proud of his achievement here. I said "Was this his design?" This telephone-pole forest, where the tree trunks are just trunks and it's just bare and stark, in contrast to earlier, when there's a bucolic scene and it's a very attractive nature forest. She said "Yes, of course it was his idea." Not that he drew the plans for it, but he would give the ideas and maybe make little sketches and give them to the department heads and have them develop it. Cinematographer Mescall achieved new visual heights with Bride of Frankenstein, the result of a seasoned working relationship with Whale. John Mescall did a total of five pictures with James Whale. Bride is probably his best remembered. The film itself is probably the high-mark of Whale's late period at Universal. Mescall used a style of lighting he referred to as Rembrandt lighting, which was to use a central light and a cross-light about three-quarters through the scene, to provide illumination of the subject against a dark background. It's very much like Rembrandt's painting style, where there is light that is directional and gives contours and definition. The crowning touch in Bride of Frankenstein was the inspired musical score by Franz Waxman. You've got a first-rate cast in an extremely well-written script with a tremendous musical score. One of the most important Hollywood scores of the mid-'30s by Franz Waxman. For the opening sequence of Byron and Shelley on a stormy evening at the villa, Waxman wrote a very charming period-style minuet, which speaks of the life of ease and delicacy that we see depicted. As the flashback story is told by Byron... "A winter setting in the churchyard..." ...he evolves into a huge fugue to illustrate the horrors and terrors of the original story, before returning back to the minuet that sets us pretty much with period parlour music. There is an awful lot of commentary through the music. Sometimes impish, sometimes emotionally reinforcing, but, like so much that's in this film, heightened. The basic structure of Waxman's score is Wagnerian. He uses motives for each of the major characters or sequences. These are thematic building blocks which can introduce or herald each character's entrance or imply their presence off-camera when they aren't present. Almost operatically, isn't it? The leitmotif approach, where you have a particular phrase or melody associated with a person, one character or a different character. The monster has a four-note motive which seems to be patterned upon his growl. It's almost as if Waxman had observed the performance and deduced that from it. The bride herself has a very exotic high-flown three-note melody. It is very open-ended and that allows it to be utilised in many different forms. We first hear it, narrative-wise, when Pretorius speaks of her imminent birth. - Friend for you. - Woman? Friend. Yes. Dr Pretorius, who is the kind of Mephistophelean interloper. He's a figure both of humour and tremendous evil. He has a very mad, loping theme. It portends all kinds of things to come, usually resolved with a small coda, which is again open-ended and unresolved. You never know what Pretorius is going to do or where his actions will lead. There's a wonderful sequence, where he is slightly drunk in the crypt, dreaming of monsters to come, and is surprised by the Karloff creature. It's done in a very metric fashion, recalling the Danse Macabre of Saint-Sans. In fact Waxman called the cue Danse Macabre. Bride of Frankenstein attracted censorship, during and after production. The prologue was shortened, in part to eliminate all close-ups of Elsa Lanchester's dcolletage. That was just the beginning. The film had about 15 minutes of cuts made before it was nationally released. I think again Universal was trying to play it safe. The film was incredibly outrageous and in some ways almost subversive. I think they wanted to make sure it didn't get them in too much trouble. Like all Hollywood scripts, the script for the Bride had to be presented to the Breen office, the censorship board within Hollywood, to have approval and discussion of any objectionable issues. The script contained many religious references, some of which could be intended or construed as bordering on blasphemy. It may be that I'm intended to know the secret of life. It may be part of the divine plan. Henry, don't say those things. Don't think them. It's blasphemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things. The monster is man-made, not God-made, but he goes through a Christ-like orbit of misunderstanding and ultimate betrayal. The original script had the monster mistaking the figure on a crucifix for a suffering, persecuted creature like himself. The censors would have none of that, so now the Christus is a background prop and he instead - more blasphemously - topples the statue of a bishop, as though he's assaulting organised religion. That's a visual cue that was not in the script and therefore didn't receive objection. When Henry and Dr Pretorius speak about the possible mad plan to create new female life, the blasphemous Dr Pretorius invokes religious iconography and says "Follow the lead of nature, or of God..." It was scripted "...if you like your fairytales." Well, this is not how one speaks about organised religion. It's changed to "Bible stories", which is a statement of fact. Follow the lead of nature, or of God, if you like your Bible stories. The way Ernest Thesiger reads the line, "Bible stories" contains such invective and disdain that it's more offensive than if he'd said "fairytales". This is how one got around the letter of the censor and the spirit of intent. Bride initially had a fairly lengthy subplot involving the Dwight Frye character. It was probably a misbegotten script idea that was meant to illustrate the monster as victim. Carl had this uncle and aunt in the film, who he killed, and led everybody to believe that the monster had killed them. It was probably about a ten-minute sequence followed by a morgue inquest. It had no bearing on the narrative line and probably stopped the film dead in its tracks at the midpoint. Whale, probably wisely, removed this, and that narrative bridge was filled by a retake, where the monster is discovered in the woods, quite benignly trying to get food from some Gypsies, who of course react in abject terror. This leads us on to the monster and the hermit sequence. Every time I watch that scene with the hermit, the blind man, I'm struck by how sincerely moving it is. There is no overtone there of condescension or ridicule or making fun of either of those two characters in that scene, or of their relationship, of their need for each other, and their relief at finding a friend. It wasn't just "I'm going to play games with odd humour." It was sensitivity, and that sensibility of the warmth and mutual need that those people find, that he indulged himself with too. That wasn't in the first film either. Those kinds of feelings - both extremes - weren't in the first film. Humour has never been so artfully blended into a horror film as in the Bride. Very bizarre, this little chap. There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think? Or do I flatter myself? Hindsight tells us that Whale's sense of humour is sort of camp. I'm not sure that that's really quite how it was at the time. I think the camp and kitschy elements of his humour may be something... a gloss we're putting on it, some 60 years... 65 years after the picture was made. The humour in Bride of Frankenstein permeates much of the story line. It isn't in comedy-relief segments, but it is part and parcel with the characters and what they do in the main story line. Pretorius is a comic figure because of the way he stands outside of life, of the world, of Henry, of his own existence, and comments on it, if only in the irony of his perspective. He doesn't take existence seriously. So he makes comments about his creations of these little people, he makes comments about himself being like the devil or vice versa. He has an ironic twist to existence, which is, from what I can tell, something that he shares - that character shares - and the actor who played him, Ernest Thesiger, shared - with James Whale himself. Dr Pretorius is firstly an archetypal old queen. I think we should fess up about that right from the beginning. He is however also Mephistopheles to Colin Clive as Frankenstein's... Faust, I think. He's the one seducing Frankenstein away from, if I may say, the straight and narrow back into this very much more twisted vision of what he should be doing with his life. I gather we not only did her hair, but dressed her. What a couple of queens we are, Colin. Yes, that's right. A couple of flaming queens. Pretorius is a little bit in love with Dr Frankenstein, you know. The gay sensibility responds to outsiders. Bride of Frankenstein contains several. Pretorius is an outsider. Frankenstein becomes an outsider by being seduced away from marriage and the home to becoming the mad scientist again. And most obviously, most dramatically, and most poignantly, the monster is an outsider. It's very tempting to assume that Whale identified with an individual who is an outsider like this, that the average person does not understand. I'm sure James Whale knew what that felt like when he was a youth, as an artistically inclined person in a factory town, in a factory family. He knew what that was like probably well before he knew it as a homosexual. But it was also the artistry, being an artist, being a sensitive person, being somebody who people made fun of, for whatever reason. You find that in so many of the characters in Bride of Frankenstein. The film also makes a serious comment on the tensions, sometimes violent, between society and the non-conforming individual. The monster is... the unleashing of the id, that which must be kept under control, and when it's unleashed, this is a threat to stability of society, of human nature. So somebody must come and either kill or otherwise tame that monster that's been unleashed. And the villagers do that. The villagers in Frankenstein and in Bride are almost the villains of the piece. That's especially the case in the end of Frankenstein, where they're a lynch mob. He had the idea that, when people thought as a group, it could only lead to trouble. Somehow the mob mentality was a scarier thing to face than any monster could possibly be. With Show Boat, Whale had nearly achieved his dream of creative autonomy and prestige productions. But Universal was burdened with debt and in 1936 Carl Laemmle lost his studio. Whale had this amazing niche for five years, working under Junior Laemmle. He almost acted as an independent filmmaker today. He really had control. There was nobody - either a studio person or a producer - over his shoulder, telling him what to do. When the Laemmles lost control over Universal, that was gone. Whale suddenly found himself working for people who were not in sympathy with his methods at all. It was much closer to the factory assembly-line form of filmmaking that they were doing at MGM and the other studios. Whale worked very badly in those conditions. Whale's last stand at Universal was The Road Back, an uncompromising sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Under pressure from Germany, the studio regime severely cut the picture and it died at the box office. Whale retired from Hollywood in 1941. Although financially secure for life, he did not live to enjoy the critical acclaim his work finally received. Disabled and disoriented by a series of strokes, he took his own life in 1957. Without Whale's masterful touch, the later Frankenstein films were of little interest to their star. My father played the monster three times. The third time was Son of Frankenstein, and at that point he decided he would not do it again. He felt that the story line had been exhausted and the monster, as he had created him, had done all that he should be asked to do. He was afraid that it would become the brunt of bad jokes and bad scripts, and there are those that would agree with him. Bill Condon's Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters featured a reunion between the stars of Bride of Frankenstein and their director. Hey, you/ With the camera/ We got a historical moment here. This is Mr James Whale, who made "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein". And this - forget the baby a second - is the monster and his bride. Oh, Karloff. Right/ Don't you just love being famous? The figure of the bride is so iconic that she crops up in all kinds of films. There's this absolutely wonderful Bride of Frankenstein parody in Small Soldiers. The Bride of Frankenstein shows up in the Bride of Chucky in a very clever way. She's alive/ Alive/ We belong dead. You can do a little drawing of the bride and people will say "I know what that is." I remember building little Aurora kits of the Bride of Frankenstein when I was a little kid, way before I could see the movies, and being totally enchanted by these creatures lumbering across my desk when I went to sleep at night. It felt safe. Some of these youngsters - seven, eight, nine years old - they know the script backwards and forwards. Of course, with the advent of video, it brought it into everybody's living room, and now on DVD. It perpetuates the availability, and the appeal is long-lasting and multi-generational. It's a brilliant film, it's a work of genius. I think it's a picture in which the acting, particularly the performances of Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger, transcend anything you saw being done in Hollywood at that time. Brilliant, almost operatic performances. And if ever somebody needs to study a film to see how a director injects his own personality into a picture, Bride of Frankenstein is the perfect example. You can almost watch it and feel like you spent an evening with James Whale, listening to his wit, his ideas, and listening to his remarkable personality. It's all there in that movie. It's like an evening with Jimmy. 1935 was an incredible year for horror movies. In addition to Bride of Frankenstein, there was Werewolf of London, The Raven, Mark of the Vampire and Mad Love. All these are classics, but, almost 70 years later, Bride of Frankenstein towers above them. As a follow-up, James Whale was scheduled to direct Dracula's Daughter as a baroque black comedy even more outrageous than Bride of Frankenstein. But the script was too much for the censors. We missed the daughter, but we still have the bride, and that's something to be grateful for. I'm Joe Dante. |
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