She's Alive! Creating the Bride of Frankenstein Page #3

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Frankenstein monster make-up,

and she said "I just was so amazed.

All of a sudden he opened his mouth

and out came this very gentle

British accent with a lisp."

She said that he was like

the great clowns who make you cry.

He really made you cry.

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. She was very impressed by it.

Valerie Hobson was very

appreciative of James Whale.

Not only was he a great director,

but he was, as she put it, so English.

Here she was, a 17-year-old

British girl in Hollywood,

and he made her feel very much at home.

She said she was the victim of

James Whale's rather bizarre wit,

because the first time she met

Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein,

it was the scene where she becomes

hysterical and falls into bed with him.

As they rehearsed this scene

and she fell into bed,

James Whale said "Mr Clive, this is Miss

Hobson." And she was in bed with him.

So she said it was pretty strange,

even for Hollywood, as an introduction.

Colin Clive played Henry Frankenstein

again in one of his last performances.

Emotionally tortured and ravaged by

alcohol, he died two years later aged 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 Thesiger,

an actor reportedly

just as eccentric off-screen as on.

To a new world of gods and monsters.

Una O'Connor, who was in The Invisible

Man, was another Whale favourite

and a perfect choice for Frankenstein's

twittering housekeeper, Minnie.

Although Frankenstein's assistant,

played by Dwight Frye,

met a nasty end in the first film,

James Whale combined

several small parts

to give the actor

a memorable assignment.

Fritz von 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?

If you promise me a thousand crowns.

It will be well worth it,

and the baron will pay.

I'll try.

Bride of Frankenstein is visually

the best Universal horror classic,

thanks to art director Charles Hall

and cinematographer John Mescall.

Expressionistic tricks,

totally artificial lighting,

these great painted skyscapes,

and the way the tombs

are all at weird angles.

Magnificent stuff like that.

One of the things that intrigues me about

Whale's career, his work in general,

is the background...

the backgrounds that he had.

That is, as a theatre actor

and theatre director,

but as a set designer in theatre,

as well as a painter and so forth.

One wonders to what extent he might

have had input into the visual appearance,

the look of the sets of his films,

in a way 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.

I said "Was this his design?"

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 he would give the ideas

and maybe make little sketches

and give them to the department heads

and have them develop it.

Cinematographer Mescall achieved new

visual heights with Bride of Frankenstein,

the result of a seasoned working

relationship with Whale.

John Mescall did a total of five pictures

with James Whale.

Bride is probably his best remembered.

The film itself is probably the high-mark

of Whale's late period at Universal.

Mescall 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

Rembrandt's painting style,

where there is light that is directional

and gives contours and definition.

The crowning touch in

Bride of Frankenstein

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-'30s 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.

As the flashback story is told by Byron...

"A winter 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 parlour music.

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's almost as if Waxman had observed

the performance and deduced that from it.

The bride herself has a very exotic

high-flown three-note melody.

It is very open-ended and that allows it

to be utilised in many different forms.

We first hear it, narrative-wise, when

Pretorius speaks of her imminent birth.

- Friend for you.

- Woman?

Friend. Yes.

Dr Pretorius, who is the kind of

Mephistophelean interloper.

He's a figure both of humour

and tremendous evil.

He has a very mad, loping theme.

It portends all kinds of things to come,

usually resolved with a small coda, which

is again open-ended and unresolved.

You never know what Pretorius is going

to do or where his actions will lead.

There's a wonderful sequence,

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-Sans.

In fact Waxman called the cue

Danse Macabre.

Bride of Frankenstein attracted

censorship, during and after production.

The prologue was shortened,

in part to eliminate all close-ups

of Elsa Lanchester's dcolletage.

That was just the beginning.

The film had about 15 minutes of cuts

made before it was nationally released.

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