Behind the Scenes: Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935) with Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester

It's one of the great American films. It's right up there with Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. And people, it's usually discussed as, oh, just a horror movie, but it's much more complex. Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is and who you are? Yes, I know. Made me from dead. The various story elements, the intellectual elements, the artistic and acting elements that came to bear in this film really kind of crystallized all the things that had been building in that genre at that studio at that time. I love dead. Hate living. You're wise in your generation. The Bride of Frankenstein, quite simply, is the most complex and most brilliantly achieved and conceived horror film ever made. And certainly the crowning jewel in Universal's initial series of horror films. You'll make man like me? No. Woman. Friend for you. It's a wonderful film. It's just delightful, and certainly there are some scenes where humor and terror are all beautifully blended. When you get into Bride of Frankenstein, you're making it all up. There are no rules. The only rules are the rules of the imagination, and Whale had an extraordinary imagination. There are some imaginations which are just best left to go do their own gothic thing. But this isn't science. It's more like black magic. When Universal Pictures unleashed the original Frankenstein in 1931, it found a new formula for box office magic. In a stunning pantomime portrayal, Boris Karloff was catapulted to international stardom. Director James Whale, well regarded for his British stage work, had been imported to Hollywood because of his ability to direct dialogue. Ironically, just as movies were learning to talk, it was an unforgettable silent performance that made the Hollywood careers of both Karloff and Whale. Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle, had objected when his son Carl Jr. first proposed making films like Dracula and Frankenstein. But there was no arguing with the runaway box office. No sooner was Frankenstein complete than the studio began making plans for a follow-up. This time it was the director who objected. James Whale didn't want to do a sequel to Frankenstein. He seemed to be trying to squirm out of it, as it were. You know, avoid it, bypass it, do something else instead. He'd said he'd gotten everything out of the first one. That he'd sort of wrung it dry, maybe that was the phrase, something like that. Whale directed several stylish non-horror films for Universal in the early 30s, including By Candlelight and The Manor of Lubitsch. An adaptation of Galsworthy's One More River. And a screwball comedy mystery, Remember Last Night. He always had very mixed feelings about his horror films. That he liked them, but he wanted to be an A-list director. He wanted to make the big money projects, like the way John Stahl at Universal did. And curiously enough, who remembers who John Stahl was? But we all remember the movies made by James Whale. I think that Junior Lemley, who was the general manager of Universal, had enormous respect for Whale. And I think that he felt that, certainly, what Whale had done with Frankenstein, with The Old Dark House, with The Invisible Man, with the other non-horror genre films he had done, showed a great stylist at work. And although Junior Lemley himself was not, I don't think you could say he was a creative man, he had a very instinctive feel, I think, for something that was good. And I think he felt that James Whale was the director that Universal had, who probably had the best chance of putting Universal on par with MGM, and with Warner Brothers, and with the big boys in Hollywood. And so he really gave him free reign to do whatever he wanted with the picture. After rejecting several proposed scripts for the Frankenstein sequel, Whale took personal control over the screenplay's development. The fact that Whale didn't especially want to make the film, and then agreed to, prompted him to offer ideas for the script to the writers, suggest things. At least we have a very good indication that he did this. People such as Elsa Lanchester mentioned this, that this was his idea, that that was his idea. That the little people in the bottles was his idea. That he insisted that he have the opening prologue with Mary Shelley, and Byron, and Percy Shelley. That that was essential, otherwise he wouldn't do it. Elsa Lanchester, for example, told me that Whale insisted that she be allowed to play Mary Shelley, and also the bride. That it was either that, or he wouldn't make the film. It was a great thrill to meet Elsa Lanchester. I met her in 1981, and she said that it was Whale's intention to show that very pretty people, which is the way that Mary Shelley is presented in the film, actually inside have very wicked thoughts. Can you believe that bland and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein? A monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves? The money was available to him to make a much more elaborate film than the first one. Because of the success, they let him go with the sets, and go with the care, and the time, and the photography, and the music, so that he could polish, and refine, and elaborate in a way that the earlier films, which were made faster, and so forth, wouldn't have permitted. It's such an odd sequel in so many ways. For example, after a brief glimpse of the monster in the beginning of the movie, he doesn't show up again until about a half hour in, a third of the way into the movie. And meanwhile, you've spent most of your time with this very strange character, Dr. Pretorius. I think if you look at Dr. Pretorius, that's an example of how the movie has changed so radically from the first one. In the first one, there was the sort of boring Dr. Waldman. And in this one, suddenly there's this full-blown, eccentric, very, very gay and funny character that was created by a whale in the development of the screenplay for the second film. Frankenstein. Yes, there have been developments since he came to me. Unlike the original Universal film, Mary Shelley's novel featured a highly articulate, even philosophical monster. Bride of Frankenstein restored the monster's ability to speak. Before you came, I was all alone. It is bad to be alone. Alone. Bad. Friend. Good. Speech was the essential difference between the original Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. My father really objected to the monster being given speech. He felt it would take away from the original portrayal. And I think he was wrong. History, cinema history has proven him wrong. It's one of the few sequels that really most film critics regard as surpassing the original. Once more, Boris Karloff would face the prospect of a grueling and uncomfortable makeup designed and applied by the legendary Jack Pierce. One of the changes in the makeup, besides the fact that Karloff had gained weight, he wasn't as cadaverous, I think success, he was able to eat more and unfortunately he had a little fuller face. But one of the biggest changes was the results of the fire. So they had singed his hair off and just gave him this almost like little crew cut, which through the course of the film actually grows, which I thought was pretty neat. His makeup goes through four or five stages of regeneration, allowing him to grow both visually as well as spiritually as the film unfolds. Also they gave him kind of a burn on his hand and a little bit of a burn on the side of his face. But other than that, the makeup was basically the same. You know, the flat head and still had the electrodes in the brow, just a slightly forward face with a few little burn scars and singed off hair. Again, another great makeup. And actually another change was you see in the original makeup, he only had one clamp on his head, on this side actually. And it was something I didn't notice for the longest time because you would see more pictures from The Bride and you saw the two big clamps and the little ones in between and the ones on the side and I used to always assume that that was the same on the original makeup. And it wasn't until later when I started looking at it and I said, he only has that one clamp. During the filming of the original Frankenstein, Karloff sustained a serious back injury. I'm sure they treated him a little more like a star because he was successful with Frankenstein in some films after that and Between the Bride. And I do think in fact that in the original makeup, the top of his head was probably fabricated each day, built up out of cotton and collodion. In The Bride and in The Sun later on, there was actually a rubber forehead that went on, which probably sped up the process for Boris and Jack. You know, I know they gave Karloff a slant board anyways because he still couldn't quite sit down. In fact, I have a picture in my office of him in this great slant board when he was drinking a cup of tea. The makeup posed technical challenges for cinematographer John Meskell, who required special lighting for the monster's unearthly skin tones. Jack Pierce's makeup for the monster essentially was a blue-green hue and color. This was not due to any belief in a color aesthetic for the monster, but for the fact that if the monster were photographed wearing this shade of grease paint on orthochromatic film, and if he was lit as Meskell lit him with blue gel light, he would read as dead white. As a result, Meskell had to have red added into the makeup of the normal players who might share a scene with the monster and often train warmer lights on them. The makeup for The Bride of Frankenstein is an absolute masterpiece. It's the only iconic female monster to ever come out of the movies. I mean, if you were to think of a classic female monster, it's The Bride of Frankenstein that immediately comes to mind. They came up with this, again, another icon. When you think of The Bride of Frankenstein, everybody knows that wacky hairstyle. It kind of had that Egyptian, Nefertiti kind of look to it. It actually had this wire cage on her head, and that was actually really her hair that was mixed in with it. They probably filled it in with some crape wool or something to do that in. And the white streaks, the crazy white streaks. Yet she was very made up, you know, almost wore basically a glamour makeup. If it wasn't for the fact that they had the scar around the neck, it would have looked like some glamorous woman with a wacky hairstyle. And I know, from what I've heard, Elsa Lanchester wasn't too fond of Pierce. Which I was sorry to hear. You know, as someone who I idolize, like Jack Pierce, I've heard from a number of people that he was a crotchety old guy. Elsa Lanchester talked about working with Jack Pierce, and she said that he was an unusual personality. He really almost felt, in her opinion, that he was a god who created these horror characters that Universal marketed. And that in the morning he'd be all dressed up in a surgeon's smock as if he were about to perform an operation. And she said you went in very timidly into his sanctum sanctorum to have the makeup done. And you waited for him to say hello. You didn't say hello first. He had to say hello first. So he was very, very much in control. He really was a divine presence within his own realm of creating these makeups. She was very funny. She talked about the scar under the neck of the bride. And she said that Jack Pierce took the longest time to do this. That he went through this incredible ritual of applying this scar that she said Harley really shows in the film. And she said I'm sure he could have bought you such a scar for ten cents in a joke shop. But he had his own way of doing it, and he very lovingly and painstakingly applied this scar each morning to the bride. The idea of the hiss of the female monster came from the fact that she and Charles Lawton used to feed the swans at Regent's Park in London. And she said when swans would come up on the side of the lake, if you went to feed them, that would be all right. If you got too near them or got near their young, they would hiss. And so she thought of this incredible hiss that the swans would give. And she incorporated it into the Bride of Frankenstein character. The original Frankenstein combined English and American actors, and not always convincingly. Bride of Frankenstein was cast principally with British players. May Clarke, the original Elizabeth, was replaced by the 17-year-old ingenue Valerie Hobson. Valerie Hobson, who gives an amazing performance, I think, as Elizabeth in Bride of Frankenstein. Very stylized. She's like a Christmas angel, the way she appears with the dress and the flowing hair. I talked to her in 1989, and she had extremely warm memories of having made the film. And she said that the first time she saw Karloff, it was such an extraordinary experience. There he was in complete Frankenstein monster makeup. And she said, I just was so amazed. And all of a sudden, he opened his mouth, and I came in this very gentle British accent with a wisp. She said that he was like the great clowns who make you cry. He really made you cry. And here was this monster whose heart was just bleeding to get out of his monstrous self, to find somebody to love, to find somebody to love him in return. And he pulled it off. Remarkable feat of acting, and she was very, very impressed by it. Valerie Hobson was very appreciative of James Whale because she said, of course, not only was he a great director, but that he was, as she put it, so English. And here she was, a 17-year-old British girl in Hollywood. And so he made her feel very much at home. And she said she was the victim of James Whale's rather bizarre wit, because the first time she met Colin Clyde as Henry Frankenstein, that it was the scene where she becomes hysterical and falls into bed with him. And she said that as they rehearsed the scene and she fell into bed, James Whale said, oh, by the way, Mr. Clyde, this is Miss Hobson. And there she was in bed with him. So she said it was pretty strange, even for Hollywood, that that was the basis of their introduction. Colin Clyde repeated the role of Henry Frankenstein in what would sadly be one of his last screen performances. Emotionally tortured and ravaged by alcohol, he died two years later at the age of 37. Frankenstein's mentor, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, a role originally intended for Claude Rains, was played by James Whale's real-life theatrical mentor, Ernest Thessiger, an actor reportedly just as eccentric offscreen as on. To a new world of gods and monsters. Una O'Connor, who would appear to the Invisible Man, was another Whale favorite, and a perfect choice for Frankenstein's twittering housekeeper, Minnie. Although Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant, played by Dwight Frye, met a nasty end in the first film, James Whale combined several small parts in the bride script to give the actor a memorable assignment. Fritz, from Frankenstein of course, had been killed by the monster in Frankenstein. Jimmy Whale, I say Jimmy Whale because that's what my father called him, liked my dad's work. What we need is a female victim of sudden death. Can you do it? You promised me a thousand crowns. It will be well worth it, and the Baron will pay. I'll try. Bride of Frankenstein is the most visually accomplished universal horror classic, thanks to the work of art director Charles Hall and cinematographer John Meskell. Expressionistic tricks, totally artificial lighting, and these great painted skyscapes, and the way the tombs roll at weird angles, I mean, magnificent stuff like that. One of the things that intrigues me about Whale's career, his work in general, is the backgrounds that he had. That is, as a theatre actor, and theatre director, but as a set designer in the theatre, as well as a painter and so forth. And one wonders to what extent he might have had input into the visual, the appearance, the look of the sets of his films, in a way or to an extent that most directors at that time would not be likely to do. Elsa Lanchester said, when she was not actually needed on the set at one point, he took her to the studio and showed off the forest set. He was proud of his achievement here. And I said, was this his design of this telephone pole forest, where the tree trunks are just trunks and it's just bare and stark, in contrast to earlier when there's a bucolic scene and it's a very attractive nature forest. She said, yes, of course it was his idea. Not that he drew the plans for it, but that he would give the ideas and maybe make little sketches and give them to the department heads and have them develop it. Cinematographer Meskel achieved ambitious new visual heights with Bride of Frankenstein, the result of a seasoned working relationship with James Whale. John Meskel did a total of five pictures with James Whale. And Bride is probably his best remembered because the film itself is probably the high mark of Whale's late period at Universal. Meskel used a style of lighting he referred to as Rembrandt lighting, which was to use a central light and a cross light about three quarters through the scene to provide illumination of the subject against a dark background. It's very much like the painting style of One Season Rembrandt, where there is light that is directional and gives contours and definition. The crowning touch in Bride of Frankenstein's artistry was the inspired musical score by Franz Waxman. You've got a first-rate cast in an extremely well-written script with a tremendous musical score, one of the most important Hollywood scores of the mid-thirties by Franz Waxman. For the opening sequence of Byron and Shelley on a stormy evening at the villa, Waxman wrote a very charming period-style minuet, which speaks of the life of ease and delicacy that we see depicted. And as the flashback story is told by Byron, what a setting in the churchyard, he evolves into a huge fugue to illustrate the horrors and terrors of the original story before returning back to the minuet that sets us pretty much with period parlor music. And there is an awful lot of commentary through the music, sometimes impish, sometimes emotionally reinforcing, but like so much that's in this film, heightened. The basic structure of Waxman's score is Wagnerian. He uses motives for each of the major characters or sequences. These are thematic building blocks which can introduce or herald each character's entrance or imply their presence off-camera when they aren't present. Almost operatically, isn't it? The leitmotif approach where you have a particular phrase or melody associated with a person, one character, or a different character. The monster has a four-note motive which seems to be patterned upon his growl. It would almost seem that Waxman had observed this in the performance and deduced that from it. The bride herself has a very exotic high-flown three-note melody, which is very open-ended and is allowing it to be utilized in many different forms. We first hear it narrative-wise when Pretorius speaks of her imminent birth. Dr. Pretorius, who is the kind of Mephistophelian interloper, he's a figure both of humor and tremendous evil, has a very mad, loping theme. It portends all kinds of things to come. It usually resolves with a small coda after that, which is again open-ended and unresolved. You never quite know what Pretorius is going to do or where his actions will lead. There's a wonderful sequence as well where he is slightly drunk in the crypt, dreaming of monsters to come and is surprised by the Karloff creature. It's done in a very metric fashion, recalling the danse macabre of Saint-Saëns. In fact, Waxman called the cue danse macabre. Bride of Frankenstein proved a lightning rod for industry censorship, both during and after production. For instance, the prologue was shortened considerably, in part to eliminate all close-ups of Elsa Lanchester's décolletage. And that was just the beginning. The film had about 15 minutes of cuts made before it was nationally released. And I think, again, Universal was trying to play it safe. The film was incredibly outrageous and in some ways almost subversive. And I think they wanted to make sure it didn't get them in too much trouble. Like all Hollywood scripts, the script for The Bride had to be presented to the Breen office, the censorship board within Hollywood, to have approval and discussion of any objectionable issues. The script contained many religious references, some of which could be intended or construed as bordering on blasphemy. It may be that I'm intended to know the secret of life. It may be part of the divine plan. Henry, don't say those things. Don't think them. It's blasphemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things. The monster is man-made, not God-made, but he yet goes through a Christ-like orbit of misunderstanding and ultimate betrayal. The original script called for the monster to mistake the figure on a life-sized crucifix for a suffering, persecuted creature like himself. The censors would have none of that, so the sequence as it plays now, the Christus is a demure background prop, and he instead, more blasphemously, topples a statue of a bishop as though he's assaulting organized religion. That's something that's a visual cue that was not on the script and therefore didn't receive objection. When Henry and Dr. Pretorius speak about the possible mad plan to create a new female life, the blasphemous Dr. Pretorius invokes religious iconography and says, Follow the lead of nature, or of God, as it's scripted, if you like your fairy tales. Well, this is not how one likes to speak about organized religion. It's changed to Bible stories, which is a statement of fact. Follow the lead of nature, or of God, if you like your Bible stories. Though the way Ernest Thatcher reads the line, Bible stories contain such invective and disdain that it's more offensive than if he had referred to them as fairy tales. This is how one got around the letter of the censor and the spirit of intent. Bright initially had a fairly lengthy subplot involving the Dwight Fry character. It was probably a misbegotten script idea that was meant to illustrate the monster as victim. Carl had this uncle and aunt in the film whom he killed and led everybody to believe that the monster had killed them. It was probably about a ten-minute sequence followed by a Morrigan quest onto the murders. It had no real bearing on the narrative line and probably stopped the film dead in its tracks at the midpoint. Well, probably wisely removed this, and that narrative bridge now was filled by a retake where the monster is discovered in the woods quite benignly trying to get food from some gypsies who, of course, react in abject terror. And this leads us on to the monster in the hermit sequence. Every time I watch that scene with the hermit, the blind man, I'm struck by how sincerely moving it is. There's no overtone there of condescension or ridicule or making fun of either of those two characters in that scene or of their relationship, of their need for each other and their relief at finding a friend. So that it wasn't just, you know, I'm going to play games with odd humor. It was sensitivity and that sensibility of the warmth and mutual need that those people find that he indulged himself with, too. And that wasn't in the first film either. Those kinds of feelings, both extremes, weren't in the first film. Humor has never been so artfully blended into a horror film as it is in The Bride. Very bizarre, this little chap. There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think? Or do I shatter myself? Hindsight tells us that the whale's sense of humor is sort of camp. I'm not sure that that's really quite how it was at the time. I think the sort of camp and kitschy element of his humor may be something, a gloss we're putting on it some 60 years, 65 years after the picture was made. The humor in Bride of Frankenstein permeates much of the storyline. It isn't in comedy relief segments, but it is part and parcel with the characters and what they do in the main storyline. Praetorius is a comic figure because of the way he stands outside of life, of the world, of Henry, of his own existence, and comments on it, if only in the irony of his perspective. He doesn't take existence seriously, so that he makes comments about his creations of these little people, he makes comments about himself being like the devil or the vice versa. He has an ironic twist to existence, which is, from what I can tell, something that he shares, that character shares, and the actor who played that character, Ernest Thatcher, shared with James Whale himself. Dr. Praetorius is firstly an archetypal old queen. I think we should fess up about that right from the beginning. He is, however, also Mephistopheles to Colin Clive as Frankenstein's faust, I think. He's the one who is seducing Frankenstein away from, if I may say, the straight and narrow, back into this very much more twisted vision of what he should be doing with his life. The gay sensibility response to outsiders, particularly Bride of Frankenstein, contains several. Praetorius is an outsider. Frankenstein becomes an outsider by being seduced away from marriage and the home to becoming the mad scientist again, and most obviously and most dramatically and most poignantly, the monster is an outsider. It's very tempting to assume that Whale identified with an individual who is an outsider like this, that the average person does not understand. I'm sure James Whale knew what that felt like when he was a youth, as an artistically inclined person in a factory town, in a factory family. He knew what that was like probably well before he knew it as a homosexual, but it was also the artistry, being an artist, being a sensitive person, being somebody who people made fun of for whatever reason. You find that in so many of the characters in Bride of Frankenstein. Beyond its humor, the film also makes a serious comment on the tensions, sometimes violent, between society and the non-conforming individual. The monster is the unleashing of the id, that which must be kept under control, and when it's unleashed, this is a threat to stability of society, of human nature. And so somebody must come and either kill or otherwise tame that monster that's been unleashed. And the villagers do that, right? The villagers in Frankenstein and in Bride are almost the villains of the piece. With his stunning production of Showboat, Whale had nearly achieved his dream of creative autonomy and prestige productions. But Universal was burdened with debt, and in 1936, Carl Laemmle lost the studio that he had founded. Well, you know, Whale had found this amazing niche for five years, working under Junior Laemmle, where he almost acted the way an independent filmmaker does today. He really had control. There was nobody, either a studio person or a producer, over his shoulder telling him what to do. When the Laemmles lost control over Universal, that was gone. And Whale suddenly found himself working for people who were not in sympathy with his methods at all. It was much closer to the factory assembly line form of filmmaking that they were doing at MGM and the other studios, and Whale worked very badly in those conditions. The director's last stand at Universal was The Road Back, an uncompromising sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Under pressure from the German government, the new studio regime severely cut the picture, and it died at the box office. Whale retired from Hollywood in 1941. Although financially secure for life, he did not live long enough to enjoy the critical acclaim his work finally received. Disabled and disoriented by a series of strokes, he took his own life in 1957. Without Whale's masterful directorial touch, the later Frankenstein films were of little interest to their original star. My father played the monster three times, and the third time was Son of Frankenstein. And at that point he decided he would not do it again. He felt that certainly the storyline had been exhausted, and the monster as he had created him had done all that he should be asked to do. He was afraid that it would become the brunt of bad jokes and bad scripts, and there are those that would agree with him. You could do a little drawing of the Bride of Frankenstein, and people would say, oh, I know what that is. I remember building little Aurora kits of the Bride of Frankenstein when I was a little kid, way before I could see the movies, and being totally enchanted by having, you know, these creatures lumbering across my desk when I went to sleep at night. It felt very safe. It's a brilliant film. It's a work of genius. And I think it's a picture in which the acting, particularly the performances of Carlisle and also Lanchester and Ernest Thesinger, transcend anything you saw being done in Hollywood at that time. Brilliant, almost operatic performances. And if ever somebody needs to study a film to see how a director injects his own personality into a picture, Bride of Frankenstein is the perfect example. I mean, you can almost watch that film and feel like you spent an evening dining with James Whale and listening to his wit and listening to his ideas and listening to his remarkable personality. And it's all there in that movie.