Director James Whale and an expert team of cinema artists defied the odds in creating a memorable sequel to one of the most famous monster movies of all time.
To a new world of gods and monsters!" toasts the mad Dr. Pretorius, triumphantly raising a beaker of gin. It is a legendary moment in Bride of Frankenstein.
On January 2, 1935, when production on the film began at Universal Studios, director James Whale should have offered the same toast to his collaborators the writers, actors, cinematographers, designer, editor, makeup artists and composer. These were key figures in crafting this Citizen Kane of fantasy films.
Bride is a sequel to Universal's 1931 hit Frankenstein. The axiom that sequels are never as good as the originals generally holds true, but there are exceptions: Tarzan and His Mate, After the Thin Man, From Russia With Love, The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back, for example. It is widely conceded that Bride is one of these successes, although not everyone agrees. Even Whale and his star, Boris Karloff, preferred the original, which represented a crucial turning point in their careers. Karloff argued that it was a mistake in the sequel to have the Monster speak, that too much sympathy was built up for the Monster, and that the use of musical scoring was intrusive. (Frankenstein has often been criticized for its lack of music by modern writers who fail to consider that in 1931, background music was considered an outmoded artifact of the silent film era.) Some lovers of horror films prefer their horrors unleavened by humor.
After the success of Frankenstein, Universal quickly announced The Return of Frankenstein for the 1932-33 season. Whale was adamant that he wanted no part of the project. The New Adventures of Frankenstein, a treatment by a Frankenstein scenarist, Robert Florey, was rejected in February of 1932 by the youthful studio chief, Carl Laemmle, Jr. In 1933, director Kurt Neumann, a Laemmle protege from Germany, was put in charge of developing the project as a vehicle for Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Scenario editor Tom Reed wrote another treatment, and Philip MacDonald, Edmund Pearson and Lawrence G. Blochman were among the distinguished authors who became involved. Playwright John L. Balderston, author of Berkeley Square and co-author of Frankenstein, created a prologue involving Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The bulk of Balderston's treatment, in which the Bride is created from the oversized head of a circus freak and women's body parts rifled from train wrecks, was deemed too gruesome for consideration.
Meantime, numerous writers were trying unsuccessfully to deliver a satisfactory screenplay of H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Whale persuaded Laemmle to offer the assignment to a friend of his in London, R. C. Sheriff, an Oxford don who had authored the successful play Journey's End. As planned, Whale asked to direct Sheriff's adaptation (arguably the finest fantasy script of the decade) instead of the Frankenstein project. He insisted that Junior Laemmle take the script home, and, after a good dinner, read it in its entirety. He was aware that this request would irritate Laemmle, who never worked after his evening meal. In his autobiography, No Leading Lady, Sheriff writes that Whale told him, "If they score a hit with a picture, they always want to do it again. They've got a perfectly sound commercial reason. Frankenstein was a gold mine at the box office, and a sequel to it is bound to win, however rotten it is. They've had a script made for a sequel, and it stinks to heaven. In any case, I squeezed the idea dry on the original picture, and never want to work on it again."
Whale would eventually relent, however. By early 1934, having made six successful movies (The Impatient Maiden, The Old Dark House, The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Invisible Man, By Candlelight and One More River), the director had a change of heart. Assisted by Sheriff, he began preparing the Frankenstein sequel from scratch. Sheriff became homesick, and soon returned to Oxford. Whale then worked with Balderston and William Hurlbut, author of the play Lilies of the Field. Whale began casting the picture while the script was being written, and had alterations made to accommodate his actors of choice. Balderston angrily demanded that his name be removed from the screenplay, but was still given credit (with Hurlbut) for the adaptation.
The script met with severe opposition from Joseph Breen, administrator of the Production Code. Whale wrote a solicitous letter assuring him that any depiction of necrophilia, gruesomeness and religious images would be modified to suit the demands of the Code.
Universal planned to reunite the principals from Frankenstein, but only the indispensable Karloff, Colin Clive and Dwight Frye were called. Frye was supposed to resume his role as Fritz, Dr. Frankenstein's half-witted, hunchbacked assistant. However, Whale departed from the script and cast Frye as Karl Glutz, the village murderer, and later sent Karl on Fritz's horrid errands. English actress Valerie Hobson, then 17, was given the former Mae Clarke role as Elizabeth. For the role of the blind hermit who befriends the Monster, Whale wanted Australian actor O. P. Heggie so badly that he rescheduled Bride so Heggie could finish a picture at RKO.
Karloff had reservations about reprising his most famous role. He rarely complained about the physical ordeals the part demanded, but in a 1958 radio interview with Clive Edwards in Carmel, California, he recalled the rigors of making the first film: "The makeup took about four hours to put on I worked every day on the film, the film took eight weeks to make, and I remember one awful occasion when I got into the makeup shop at half past three in the morning, to be ready to go out on locationWe worked in the hot sun at the edge of the lake, the scene with the little girl. We came back to the studio in the evening to have some supper, and we went out onto the backlot and I worked all night until five in the morning. I had the makeup on for 25 hours! That was a long pull. The carbon lights were dreadful. They hurt your eyes. The boots weighed about 16 pounds apiece. All told, the outfit weighed between 40 and 45 pounds." Acting in the costume further damaged Karloff's back, which he had injured years before as a laborer loading cement for Eastman Building Supply in Hollywood.
Claude Rains, Whale's star discovery from The Invisible Man, owed the studio a picture and was slated to play an eccentric new character, Dr. Septimus Pretorius. Instead, Rains was assigned to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, whereupon Whale sent word to England for an old friend from the London stage, Ernest Thesiger.
Phyllis Brooks, Arletta Duncan and international star Brigitte Helm were considered for the title role, but Whale brought in another Britisher for the part: Elsa Lanchester, the redheaded wife of Charles Laughton. A small but voluptuous woman with a fey kind of beauty and a ribald sense of humor, she also played the fragile Mary Shelley in the prologue. This was Whale's way of showing that even sweet Mary harbored a monster within. Whale and Thesiger designed the makeup for the Monstress, basing the idea upon the famed sculpture of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, with long hair streaming upward. Jack Pierce brought the concept to life. The Bride initially seems beautiful, but her eccentric animation, stitched-together neck, and uncouth screams and hisses quickly dispel this impression.
From Dublin's Abbey Players came tiny, birdlike Una O'Connor, whose piercing shrieks echo through The Invisible Man, to play the even noisier Minnie.
The sequel uses its predecessor as a springboard in bringing forth several latent ideas from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's original 1818 novel, and develops unpredictable new angles. Whale's penchant for black humor, which surfaced sparsely in the 1931 film and was developed with increasing sophistication in The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933), is pushed to the limit in Bride, transforming what could have been a downbeat narrative into a multilayered entertainment.
[ continued on page 2 ]