o it turns out that neither the Monster nor his crazed creator perished in the burning windmill after all. On a dark and stormy night, Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester) is beseeched by husband Percy and fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron to concoct a sequel to her horrifying Frankenstein fable. Mary obliges with a tale that improves upon the original. This time around, the Monster learns rudimentary speech from a blind hermit he befriends, though any hope for alleviating loneliness on either of their parts is shattered when the villagers capture the Monster. Imprisonment is short-lived, however, as the Monster escapes into the care of yet another mad scientist—Dr. Pretorius (Thiesger)—but who is funny and less over-the-top melodramatic than Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein. Then there is the marvelous climax in which the attempt to fix up the Monster with a dead ringer for Mary Shelley (Lanchester) in an electrifying hairdo proves that maybe lightning shouldn't strike twice.
The immensely popular 1930s celluloid versions of Mary Shelley's novel enthroned Frankenstein's Monster as a major cultural icon in a world that was soon to witness the unleashing of atomic power and a slew of scientific discoveries that brought into question whether humanity's technological creations would ultimately prove its source of destruction. Even those who somehow have managed to miss either the countless television re-broadcasts or the video versions of both the original Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, as well as the less worthy sequels, instantly recognize the ghoulishly square-headed, stitched-together and electroded visage of Boris Karloff.
It is even harder to avoid now that Universal Pictures has released as part of its "Classic Monster Collection" on DVD one of the few sequels that is critically considered superior to the original. Which makes it particularly interesting to learn from the accompanying "She's Alive: Creating the Bride of Frankenstein" documentary that director James Whale initially resisted studio pressure for another version of a flick that was "the Jaws and Star Wars of its day." But once persuaded, Whale became intimately involved in the creation of what documentary host Joe Dante terms "the most complex horror movie ever made." Whale's legendary reputation stems in large part from The Bride of Frankenstein, which turned out to be his last horror film.
There's seemingly only a tenuous link between the horror of The Bride of Frankenstein and today's "gore and guts" flicks. What little physical violence there is amounts to nothing more than tossing someone into a river or causing a building to collapse. The horror here is psychological, with Whale's sympathetic depiction of a Monster misunderstood for his strangeness, and whose subsequent destructive actions are thereby almost justified, explained as rooted in the director's homosexuality. As a range of commentators, including, among others, Clive Barker and Scott MacQueen, point out, The Bride of Frankenstein deserves classic status not only for its innovative set design and makeup, but for its effective mix of subversive social commentary, bathos and humor.
The only iconic female monster
Indeed, the underlying criticism of religion got the movie into trouble with censors. One example: While the depiction of the Monster strung up in an obvious crucifixion allusion was left intact, a graveyard scene in which the Monster topples over a statue of Jesus on the cross had to be changed. The Christ figure was moved to the background, while the Monster instead topples the form of a bishop instead. That this might be symbolic of the overthrow of organized religion by a technological creation was evidently too sophisticated a concept for the censors.
For the sequel, Whale dreamed up Dr. Pretorius, whose gay demeanor is all the more ironical since this is the character who convinces Frankenstein to create a mate for the Monster. Equally ironical is that in Shelley's novel, Dr. Frankenstein's refusal to make a mate out of fear of creating a race of Monsters capable of reproduction incites the Monster to violence against Frankenstein's friends and family; in The Bride, the mate is actually created, but her rejection of the Monster results in their self-destruction, while allowing for the safe deliverance of their creator. In addition to the opening prologue, which pays tribute to its source material, other elements from the novel that Whale transposes to the screen include the Monster's bucolic relationship with an unseeing peasant and that the Monster learns to speak (though not as eloquently as in the book). According to Sarah Karloff, her father initially objected to a "talking" Monster, though he later admitted to being wrong.
Of course, the crucial figure here is the Bride herself, though she is only on screen in the last few minutes. Again, it was Whale who insisted that Lanchester play the dual roles of Shelley and the Bride, such a brilliant concept that it's hard to believe anyone would have questioned it. For it is Lanchester's portrayal of an actually very sexy creature confused by her resurrection and repelled by her intended mate that has attained classic status. The famous scene in which the Bride screams in terror at the Monster was inspired by the geese that used to honk at Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton when they strolled by the Thames.
Now, provided with that piece of information, it'll be difficult ever to look at those birds the same way again.
