The Bride of Frankenstein

The Bride of Frankenstein – Although James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein is something that I memorized a long time ago, on each viewing, the film retains its capacity to astound.  A singular feature of the 1935 film is its thoroughgoing and almost complete stylization – there is not a single realistic frame in the movie and scarcely a line of dialogue that is not hysterically over-inflected.  Every aspect of the picture is subordinated to the film’s virtually indescribable atmosphere of gleefully camp, macabre ghastliness.  On this viewing of the film, I am struck by the fact that Colin Clive, as Baron Frankenstein, and his fiancée are just as crazy and bizarre as everyone else in the picture – there’s no normal anywhere in sight – and Clive’s petulant hysteria is designed as a counterpoint to the baroque and morbid homosexuality expressed by Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Septimus Praetorius.  The only discordant note that I perceived is a moment of gallow’s humor when one of the two gravediggers suggests to his bug-eyed buddy that they would be better off confessing their crimes and going to the gallows, then, persisting in the Praetorius’ necrophiliac endeavors – the sentiment is rational and, therefore, incongruent with the general ambience of lunacy embodied by the film.  Whale’s direction is abbreviated, clipped, and breakneck – he pays no attention to logic.  The way that Whale mistreats Baron Frankenstein’s rather pallid, and portentous, fiancée may be diagnostic of his the director’s homosexual contempt for Clive’s female love interest, but,  on a narrative level, embodies the picture’s weird illogical logic – if a plot feature is not integral to the movie’s gothic atmosphere it is simply ignored, given short-shrift, pitched aside:  the monster seizes the swooning female, drags her to some luridly lit cavern and, then, tosses her aside with a brusque gesture like a sack of potatoes.  When the phallic tower of the castle liquefies into rubble at the movie’s climax, Baron Frankenstein’s fiancée, having miraculously escaped, appears out of nowhere, signals to Colin Clive through a barred window like someone trying to gain admittance to a speakeasy, and, then, in a final shot we see the Baron and his girlfriend standing on a hillside in some undefined location gazing toward the horrific spectacle of the castle’s deliquescence.  In a normal film, the audience would be prompted to wonder what will become of this couple.  No such surmise is admissible with respect to The Bride of Frankenstein.  Nothing exists outside of the film’s gloomy and labyrinthine narrative; there is no conceivable intersection between the space defined by the picture and reality.  Every aspect of the movie, including its overpowering décor (all those vulva-shaped doorways, the maze of catacombs under the graveyard, the barrel-shaped hallways and vertical cistern of the laboratory), everything that we see is coordinated to create a single effect that has nothing to do with anything that anyone has ever seen in real life. Reality, of course, is over-rated – in the actual world, there is nothing so beautiful and strange as Elsa Lanchester’s Bride, her birdlike movements and the balletic sway with which she lunges and half-falls between the Monster and her creator, her bright eyes and weird hissing shriek.  When you see these things, you are amazed:  how in the world did they come up with this stuff?