Back in the mid-1970s, ITV used to show a horror film every Friday night. One week it would be a still relatively contemporary Hammer release. The next it would be a classic from the 1930s or 1940s. I have shared sweet memories with the League of Gentlemen comedy team about first setting eyes on Bela Lugosi in Dracula or Lon Chaney jnr in The Wolfman. They were watching Tyne Tees in England. I was, at the same time, watching UTV in south Belfast. You can sod your blue remembered hills, AE Housman.
My contemporaries used to be a bit snitty about the older films. In the age of The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – not that we’d yet seen either – the classic Universal releases seemed, to them, quaint and unthreatening. Not to me. From the moment I first saw James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein I was obsessed, and it has, ever since, remained my favourite film.
These recollections are spurred by the release, this week, of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious, divisive The Bride! Despite the best efforts of a reliably dedicated Jessie Buckley, the film can’t quite find its tone, but, if it is good for nothing else, The Bride!, a giant riff on Whale’s film, might send audiences back to that imperishable 1935 classic.
[ Jessie Buckley’s brash new Bride of Frankenstein film leaves no artery unslicedOpens in new window ]
A few years ago, Reece Shearsmith of the League and I had a lengthy chat about Denis Gifford’s essential (though long out of print) Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Like me, he would have the book open at the relevant still, waiting for that image to appear on screen. I have it open again now. At the bottom of page 105, Colin Clive as the intense Frankenstein, Boris Karloff as the childlike Monster and Ernest Thesiger as the arch Dr Pretorius huddle around a bandaged Elsa Lanchester as the recently created Bride. How ineffably strange and yet, even in a still, how weirdly comical.
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Writing in 1973, Gifford concluded that “Bride of Frankenstein remains the biggest-budgeted, best dressed, highest polished, finest finished horror film in history; a first-class Hollywood product made with all the artistry and technology a top studio normally lavished upon only its most commercial ventures.”
Bits of that remain true. Horror has always existed on the border of respectability, but, after an enormous hit with Whale’s Frankenstein in 1931, Universal was prepared to offer a budget comparable to those others put, in the same year, the way of Top Hat and Mutiny on the Bounty.
There has rarely been a better example of a director making the best of a blank cheque. Whale, an urbane gay man from the English west midlands, never believed the sequel could live up to the original and, so freed up, elected to make the new film an absolute “hoot”.
With its looming Gothic interiors, its macabre grave hunting and its unsettling central premise, there is little question that Bride remains firmly in the horror genre, but, even if you think it the best film ever so categorised, you would have trouble arguing it was particularly scary. It is, rather, as fine a comedy as Hollywood released that decade.
Gifford contends that Bride “came closer to the original novel than did the original film”. Maybe. But it was worth remembering, as so many Wuthering Heights fans got in a tizzy at Emerald Fennell deviating from their sacred text, just how little of Mary Shelley’s story remains in either of these horror classics.
Whale and Karloff essentially created an alternative orthodoxy to that in the source. But, yes, the Monster does talk in Bride (albeit rather less verbosely than Shelley’s whiny beast) and we return to the notion, briefly proposed late in the book, of a female creation.
Neither Shelley’s novel nor the first film would prepare anyone for Dr Pretorius. Thesiger, a legend of high camp, is, among many accomplishments, perhaps best remembered for two things: this performance and his alleged reply when asked about his impressions of life in the trenches during the first World War. “Oh, my dear, the noise! And the people!” we choose to believe he replied.
It is Pretorius who persuades – via blackmail – Frankenstein to repeat his experiments with a woman. It is he who delivers all the best lines. “To a new world of gods and monsters,” he famously toasts. It is Pretorius who best represents a dichotomy that drives many of Hollywood’s greatest creations: Bride is at home to the highest and lowest culture. It is exquisitely written. It is beautifully designed. It has a wonderful ironical score by Franz Waxman. Yet it is perfectly happy to embrace hokum of the silliest hue.
“We belong dead!” Karloff’s Creature says at the close. Well, tough luck. You and Pretorius and Frankenstein and the Bride might just live forever.
