Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Dir: James Whale
Lately I’ve been re-watching the Universal horror classics
and in thinking which was my favorite I came to an easy solution. Many of them
have not aged too well. Bela Lugosi’s "Dracula" works better today as
a sleep aid than as entertainment, "The Invisible Man" still
impresses with its effects but it’s rather silly, "House of Dracula"
is terrible and "The Wolfman" is too melodramatic to take seriously.
The first three Frankenstein films, House of Frankenstein and The Creature from
the Black Lagoon are still outstanding and out of these, Bride of Frankenstein
is the best.
The film directly follows the first, starting just a few
moments after the end of the original. But not before subjecting the viewer to a
terrible prologue in which Mary Shelley herself tells us that the monster
survived the burning of the mill. It’s a really stupid moment and sometimes it
is better to simply skip it and go straight to the story.
The story begins with Henry Frankenstein, who has abandoned
plans to create living beings composed of body parts, only to fall back into
temptation and ultimately be forced by the monster itself, which is under
control of Henry's old mentor, Dr. Pretorius, to build him a mate.
The monster hasn’t had it easy, he barely survived the
attack of the townspeople and from the beginning we can see just how brutal it
has become, killing a man (the father of the girl it drowned in the first film)
and his wife. Seeing the monster wiping out an entire family and that the movie
is not afraid to kill off young people is something of a surprise considering
the time it was made, but it’s these moments that make the monster more
menacing.
However, as the story develops, the monster is given a lot
more personality than in the first film. Here the talents of Boris Karloff are
not reduced to grunts and screams, the monster becomes a much more
compassionate and likeable character.
After the monster is attacked, burned, tied up and
imprisoned, it escapes into the woods and finds an old blind man living in a cabin.
This part is important because the man teaches it to speak (or at least express
himself better), these moments are both comic and tender, making us more
attached to the monster, something that rarely happens in horror movies.
Ernest Thesiger gives an amazing and daunting performance as
the mad scientist, Dr. Pretorious. He easily steals the show by being more evil
and fascinating than any other mad scientist in the history of horror movies. His and Karloff’s are the best performances of
the film. The rest of the performances vary from mediocre to just
plain terrible. There are a few characters that barely do anything but annoy
the living hell out of the viewer and most of the secondary cast tends to
overact a lot, which takes a bit of the seriousness away from the movie. But
this is easy to ignore.
The ending is just excellent, one of the best in film
history. The only really disappointing is that the bride appears for only a few
minutes and doesn’t really do much at all, which is rare since the second half
of the film is based entirely on search for her creation. Yet her presence is
still iconic.
The production values are top notch, with huge, menacing
sets, stylish camera angles, incredibly detailed makeup for both the monster
and the bride, amazing special effects for its time and a musical score that is
memorable and haunting.
It's not a perfect film, there’s dialogue that is completely
ridiculous, secondary actors tend to overact and they are really annoying and the
pacing and editing is a bit rough. Still, the decision to give the monster
dialogue and an emotional side makes it more interesting and it’s entertaining
from beginning to end. Quite simply a masterpiece.
