The scientist refuses to create a female helpmate for his melancholy monster. It is only at this point, on seeing all his hopes of companionship crunched, that this late Romantic forerunner of the cyborgs decides to kill the family and friends of his creator. Having had to watch Frankenstein dismantle the half-finished female monster and sink her remains in the lake by his laboratory, he now drives his own father into the open countryside, pursuing him to the North Pole, far from all civilization, so that he, too, can feel the deadly consequences of solitude.
– Elisabeth Bronfen on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (published in 1818)
“Woman – Friend – Wife!” A melancholy Monster, a culprit at the bar – both horrendous and Christlike – in a world that remains the same towards its involuntary outsiders; a crude and clumsy anthropomorphic vessel in agony; betrayed, misunderstood, accused of being human, almost; burdened by a vague understanding that he will never become a real human being since he was brought to life in a lab by a mad scientist; a Monster with a rotten man’s heart and nonetheless with the drives and longings of a better man; a very lonely Monster looking for a woman to court and spark.
“The artificial human being comes into the world in the condition of division and longing for unity,” argues Georg Sesslen in his essay in Artificial Humans: Manic Machines and Controlled Bodies, echoing the philosophical, talkative Monster in Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein novel, in which he describes himself as “miserable beyond all living things”. As Schwarzenegger much later concluded as Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, “It is not pleasant to discover you were invented.”
The second Frankenstein movie is the unsurpassed masterpiece of Universal Studios’ many monster movies from this new world of gods and monsters, the “Universal Horror” era. Once again directed by James Whale, the terrifyingly sad and beautiful and likewise perversely entertaining The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which was shot in 46 days, is in itself a laboratory of highly daring cinematic sensibilities, furnished by this infidel from Dudley, Worcestershire, England.
Boris Karloff was 47 when he gave the greatest performance of his career in The Bride of Frankenstein. “The Monster is a faithful interpretation of Shelley’s literary creation, but the cinematic character does not rely on the author’s lengthy and weighty dialogue to express himself eloquently,” writes Scott Allen Nollen in his very fine biography about the only man who could fill Dr Frankenstein’s hideous creature with real human life. “Relying upon few words, Karloff expands upon his original 1931 performance by creating yet another moving, and wholly convincing, work of pantomimic wonderment.”
In 1815 Indonesia’s Mount Tambora exploded in the largest eruption ever known to man. It put the sun away for a very long time. The dark and chilling veil that had suddenly been thrown upon the world and which had caused a volcanic winter across the globe was only beginning to disintegrate at the time when the 19-year-old Mary Shelley put the finishing touches to her novel in May 1817. (Frankenstein was published anonymously the following year in London.)
With his foppish manners and versed R’s – “Frightened of the thunder fearful of the dark. And yet you have written a tale that sent my blood into creeps” – that’s how Lord Byron addresses Percy Bysshe Shelley’s new missus in the film’s great prologue. Elsa Lanchester made a comment in 1979 why director Whale decided to cast her in two roles in The Bride of Frankenstein, in which she begins as Mary and ends up as the electrifying Bride: “James’s feeling was that very pretty, sweet people, both men and women, have very wicked insides … evil thoughts [...] So, James wanted the same actress for both parts to show that the Bride of Frankenstein did, after all, come out of sweet Mary Shelley’s soul.”
The origin of Mary Shelley’s story stems from a cold and rainy summer eve in Switzerland, 1816, when Lord Byron entertained a party of guests in his Villa Diodati at the slopes of Lake Geneva. The host was engaged in reading horror stories for his friends – writer and doctor John William Polidori, writer Matthew Lewis, Percy Bysshe Shelley and, of course, the accomplished poet’s wife-to-be, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, along with her older stepsister Claire Clairmont – and when the evening was over he prompted them to start writing their own little piece of horror.
The prologue with the three literary figures takes place after Shelley had completed Frankenstein, and she speaks confidently with Byron about her novel and that it will surely find a publisher soon – and as the thunderstorm roams around the villa she reveals that there is a continuing story to the novel. James Whale also uses the prologue to reintroduce the original Frankenstein movie with a flashback composition of 24 two-second shots, bringing us back to the windmill inferno and the inhuman lynch mob leaving the hunted, human Monster confined by the flames. And this is where Shelley carries on with her story, The Bride of Frankenstein.
The Monster falls into a body of water and survives. He is withdrawn from the film after the dramatic introduction, and almost forgotten by the shouting villagers, until the start of the second act (the film consists of three parts, each of them 25 minutes long). “If the power-craving, insane, necrophilic Pretorius is a despicable character, the ‘average’ citizens who surround him are even worse,” is Scott Allen Nollen’s remark on the brainless actions of God’s chosen ones in this nameless Germanic small town, starkly reflecting what was going on both in the Third Reich and in the States with the KKK when the film was made.
Elizabeth, Dr Frankenstein’s wife, has an ominous inner vision about an apparition of death the same night as the mill burns down, followed by the heavy thumpings on the Gothic castle’s door by a priestly figure that appears to have way more than a healthy little dose in common with the devil. The funnily uncanny Dr Septimus Pretorius has come to see his old student baron Henry Frankenstein on, as he puts it, “a secret grave matter”. Pretorius’s boldly artful antics become evident when the Monster’s creator follows him back to his cryptlike cellar, a laboratory for evil ideas and experiments beyond the sacrosanct.
Toys in the attic, gin in his system and those fabulous little people in the jars that he toys with like a disturbed child playing wicked games with her dolls. “Our fantasy of the artificial human being seems to aim above all at a reading of the Bible from beginning to end in the fast-forward mode,” writes Georg Sesslen. “The father who creates a child without a mother is the ’scientific’ answer to the religious fantasy of the mother who bears a child without a father.” Dr P (Ernest Thesiger) and Dr F (Colin Clive) are to work together to emulate the heavenly Maker, give the finger to the endless monopoly on creation.
The Pretorius character was James Whale’s own concoction, voicing the director’s penchant for oddities and wit loaded with blasphemies. Thesiger was Whale’s mentor, a trouper that is said to have been just as wacky in private. In The Bride of Frankenstein we have two non-heterosexual men, directed by the homosexual Whale, that join forces to create a female out of dead flesh and by pseudo-scientific means, without the help of copulation, conception and the Holy Bible, amen. Only Whale’s ingenuity and wonderful storytelling could make this elaborate filmwork tiptoe past the censors without really waking them – “only” a quarter of an hour of the film was corked.
Pursuing the Monster in a forest with those apocalyptic dark skies looking like marmalade Weimar, and trees as straight as the flagpole trees in the sickly groomed Schorfheide forest around Hermann Göring’s country estate Carinhall northeast of Berlin – the villagers manage to capture the Monster again by some kind of mob-rule crucifixion; a pig on a stick, brought to the town dungeon for his “murder” of a little girl he figured would float as lovely as the flowers they threw into the lake together, smiling.
Escaping the chains of the dungeon, the Monster sets out on a hopeless walkabout, a crusade to find a friend. He soon becomes aware of why everyone he tries to encounter darts by the sight of him, screaming: when the Monster kneels to drink from the river, he’s immediately taken aback by the frightful manifestation surfacing him beneath; growling in pain while he is wiping out the awkward mirror image in the water, trying to erase his own sad being. But unlike Narcissus, he will never turn into a beautiful flower.
The original Frankenstein movie was an early talkie with a mute Monster. Karloff disliked the notion of the creature speaking in The Bride of Frankenstein, but since the Monster grows in consciousness as the film unfolds, some kind of human voice only becomes his rough-hewn grace and utter loneliness. He does find a friend in a blind man of a very kind and gentle disposition, a welcoming loner in a solitary retreat. Like the Monster he too lives outside of human society – a saintly figure that knows how to appreciate the simple pleasures of life, and how to pass it on to the Monster: “friend – good”, “wine – good”, “music – good”, “cigar – good” – “fire – bad”. Whale directs this with all the humbleness in the world, while simultaneously mocking the simplistic laws of religion and Disney.
“I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of – the formula of life. Think of the power – to create a man. And I did it. I created a man, and who knows, in time I could have trained him to do my will.” Dr Hernry Frankenstein, an AC/DC figure in a laboratory crammed with apparatuses that need electricity to work, and the heavenly contribution – after all – of thunder and lighting to reinstall life again in a human carcass. The Monster he created refused to serve his purposes, he’s back and he demands a mate!
With Pretorius assisting his old pupil in creating a Bride for his Monster, matters are set to go berserk. The female thing that the two men manufacture for the keenly awaiting Monster indeed comes alive, but she is just about as inviting as a surly swan. Elsa Lanchester – in her erratic hairdo, neck scars and glammy make-up – got the swan idea when she walked around Regent’s Park in London trying to feed the ill-tempered birds. (Her iconic Bride became an Aurora model kit in the late 1960s.) The Monster tries to take her hand, “Friend?” he asks, but she rejects his courteous attempts. “She hates me. Like others,” he says. And then he pulls the lab’s doomsday lever, urging Mr and Mrs Frankenstein to hurry out of the exploding castle, to continue their life together.
James Whale adapted Mary Shelley’s refined Gothic story about the dread of weird science, he made it come alive again with so much more art, humour and terror. And most of all, he showed us that the spirit of love is in truth sacrosanct, that it cannot be manufactured or infused in a lab or anywhere else but in a human heart drumming for love. Without it we are only bound to be miserable beyond all living things. Monsters.
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
– John Milton, Paradise Lost (the epigraph to Shelley’s Frankenstein novel)
