"The Bride of Frankenstein" is so hypnotic in its eeriness, so intelligent in daringness and capable in wackiness that it had me puzzled for a while, caught in a long brainstorming in order to decide whether it was better than the original, as it's often said to be, or not.
To put it simply, it's better because it's not just brilliant but brilliant in the way it doesn't prepare you to its own brilliance. After the first fifteen minutes, I thought James Whale was parodying himself, I couldn't think of Una O'Connor as a comic relief but rather a symptomatic attempt to deconstruct in the most over-the-top way all the established notions of the predecessor. And when Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) showed his little squeaking 'homunculi', there was no doubt anymore, something was too outrageous about "The Bride" not to be intentional, and it took me some time to appreciate it.
Then the story slowly and confidently unfolds its most wicked twists with a score and a photography so penetrative we're immediately lured into it. The Monster saves a woman from drowning as to make up for his previous crime, he tries to make friends, making an actual friend out of a blind hermit in a touching and satisfying emotional interlude, then the Monster learns how to speak, longing for a mate and domesticating his own terror of fire, mirroring our own rooting process. And finally, twenty minutes before its conclusion, action rises up to an ultimate spellbinding ride, reminding us that the film was after all about "The Bride of Frankenstein", in case we forgot... I think I almost did. In fact, the film was so visually and narratively dense that it makes you easily forget how little screen-time the Bride has.
And yet she's still what makes the greatest impression of all, which says a lot about the movie and its status in the ghostly Pantheon. The image of the Bride, played by (but not credited as) Elsa Lanchester, with the towering hair and the trademark streaks, her robotic movements as if she was still infused with electric power and her unforgettable scream when her eyes meet Frankensteins', all these moments rival with the iconic "It's alive!" scene from the first. It goes even further than that, I mentioned in my review that the 'alive' scene was perhaps the most climactic non-climax scene ever, but here it's played for the climax and you can tell James Whale made the process even more heart-pounding with the apparatus and the lightning effects on the two professors' faces playing like Morse-like flashy allegories of the rhythm of our own hearts. As far as our ears and eyes were concerned, what a sequence!
Indeed, when you watch "The Bride of Frankenstein", you have the feeling nothing was left to chance and James Whale knew he had to outdo the original in every single department... and he miraculously did. We don't get the original disclaimer from Van Sloane but a surrealist discussion between Lord Byron and Mary Shelley played by a pretty and natural-looking Elsa Lanchester, the introduction uses flashbacks from the original film but the cast of Lanchester is a masterstroke in the way it points out that even the loveliest creature can have a monstruous counterpart. Van Sloane who played a rather bland tutor is replaced by Thesiger who, no pun intended, steals Clive's thunder and becomes a fascinating and unforgettable mad scientist figure, indulging to a few hammy and over the top dialogues, but indispensable as the foils to Frankenstein's retrieved sanity.
And Frankenstein, of course, played by Boris Karloff (credited as Karloff), like Garbo, finally talks and while it doesn't deprive him from his sensitive side, it highlights a new tragic dimension as he can put words in his needs but doesn't have them fulfilled for all that, and finally concludes the film with a line that represents his only possible existential impulse sealing his fate as a tragic movie figure... and only getting from his Bride a hiss magnificently ad-libbed by Lanchester like Hopkins would do a few years later to make the 'chianti' line even more memorable, some remember "We belong dead", I'll remember that hiss. And yes, she's only there for a few minutes but she marked horror movies forever, becoming the first female monster of cinema... created by two men, doesn't that ring a bell?
In "Interview With the Vampire", a male vampire sucked the blood out of a little girl's neck and his companion provided the taste of blood that would save her life albeit turning her to a vampire. While the homoerotic subtext between Louis and Lestat couldn't even escape from a numb attention span, the move was even more daring as it featured a conception of life from two men, as if only in the movies, the miracle could ever happen... and be plausible in its realm of fiction. If not directly based on Mary Shelley's book, "The Bride of Frankenstein", sixty years later, proved to be of similar boldness and it is a mystery whether James Whale intended it as a wink to his own sexuality.
But while in my first review, I insisted on the sexual innuendo more than the religious undertones, the sequel creates a fascinating parallel between Frankenstein and Adam with the two men creating an Eve-like figure. The religious aspect of Frankenstein is even more apparent in scenes where the Bible is mentioned in a disdainful way as if there was no difference between Mary Shelley's fiction, the one she's about to tell in the opening and the story of Frankenstein, making the whole film an even more revolutionary for its time, so daring and so magnificent in terms of special effects.
"The Bride of Frankenstein" is a landmark of the horror genre, fascinating to deconstruct but works even better as an entertaining flick.
To put it simply, it's better because it's not just brilliant but brilliant in the way it doesn't prepare you to its own brilliance. After the first fifteen minutes, I thought James Whale was parodying himself, I couldn't think of Una O'Connor as a comic relief but rather a symptomatic attempt to deconstruct in the most over-the-top way all the established notions of the predecessor. And when Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) showed his little squeaking 'homunculi', there was no doubt anymore, something was too outrageous about "The Bride" not to be intentional, and it took me some time to appreciate it.
Then the story slowly and confidently unfolds its most wicked twists with a score and a photography so penetrative we're immediately lured into it. The Monster saves a woman from drowning as to make up for his previous crime, he tries to make friends, making an actual friend out of a blind hermit in a touching and satisfying emotional interlude, then the Monster learns how to speak, longing for a mate and domesticating his own terror of fire, mirroring our own rooting process. And finally, twenty minutes before its conclusion, action rises up to an ultimate spellbinding ride, reminding us that the film was after all about "The Bride of Frankenstein", in case we forgot... I think I almost did. In fact, the film was so visually and narratively dense that it makes you easily forget how little screen-time the Bride has.
And yet she's still what makes the greatest impression of all, which says a lot about the movie and its status in the ghostly Pantheon. The image of the Bride, played by (but not credited as) Elsa Lanchester, with the towering hair and the trademark streaks, her robotic movements as if she was still infused with electric power and her unforgettable scream when her eyes meet Frankensteins', all these moments rival with the iconic "It's alive!" scene from the first. It goes even further than that, I mentioned in my review that the 'alive' scene was perhaps the most climactic non-climax scene ever, but here it's played for the climax and you can tell James Whale made the process even more heart-pounding with the apparatus and the lightning effects on the two professors' faces playing like Morse-like flashy allegories of the rhythm of our own hearts. As far as our ears and eyes were concerned, what a sequence!
Indeed, when you watch "The Bride of Frankenstein", you have the feeling nothing was left to chance and James Whale knew he had to outdo the original in every single department... and he miraculously did. We don't get the original disclaimer from Van Sloane but a surrealist discussion between Lord Byron and Mary Shelley played by a pretty and natural-looking Elsa Lanchester, the introduction uses flashbacks from the original film but the cast of Lanchester is a masterstroke in the way it points out that even the loveliest creature can have a monstruous counterpart. Van Sloane who played a rather bland tutor is replaced by Thesiger who, no pun intended, steals Clive's thunder and becomes a fascinating and unforgettable mad scientist figure, indulging to a few hammy and over the top dialogues, but indispensable as the foils to Frankenstein's retrieved sanity.
And Frankenstein, of course, played by Boris Karloff (credited as Karloff), like Garbo, finally talks and while it doesn't deprive him from his sensitive side, it highlights a new tragic dimension as he can put words in his needs but doesn't have them fulfilled for all that, and finally concludes the film with a line that represents his only possible existential impulse sealing his fate as a tragic movie figure... and only getting from his Bride a hiss magnificently ad-libbed by Lanchester like Hopkins would do a few years later to make the 'chianti' line even more memorable, some remember "We belong dead", I'll remember that hiss. And yes, she's only there for a few minutes but she marked horror movies forever, becoming the first female monster of cinema... created by two men, doesn't that ring a bell?
In "Interview With the Vampire", a male vampire sucked the blood out of a little girl's neck and his companion provided the taste of blood that would save her life albeit turning her to a vampire. While the homoerotic subtext between Louis and Lestat couldn't even escape from a numb attention span, the move was even more daring as it featured a conception of life from two men, as if only in the movies, the miracle could ever happen... and be plausible in its realm of fiction. If not directly based on Mary Shelley's book, "The Bride of Frankenstein", sixty years later, proved to be of similar boldness and it is a mystery whether James Whale intended it as a wink to his own sexuality.
But while in my first review, I insisted on the sexual innuendo more than the religious undertones, the sequel creates a fascinating parallel between Frankenstein and Adam with the two men creating an Eve-like figure. The religious aspect of Frankenstein is even more apparent in scenes where the Bible is mentioned in a disdainful way as if there was no difference between Mary Shelley's fiction, the one she's about to tell in the opening and the story of Frankenstein, making the whole film an even more revolutionary for its time, so daring and so magnificent in terms of special effects.
"The Bride of Frankenstein" is a landmark of the horror genre, fascinating to deconstruct but works even better as an entertaining flick.