She's Alive! Creating the Bride of Frankenstein Page #4

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I think again Universal

was trying to play it safe.

The film was incredibly outrageous

and in some ways almost subversive.

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 goes through a Christ-like orbit of

misunderstanding and ultimate betrayal.

The original script had the monster

mistaking the figure on a crucifix

for a suffering, persecuted creature

like himself.

The censors would have none of that,

so now the Christus is a background prop

and he instead - more blasphemously -

topples the statue of a bishop,

as though he's assaulting

organised religion.

That's a visual cue

that was not in the script

and therefore didn't receive objection.

When Henry and Dr Pretorius

speak about the possible mad plan

to create new female life,

the blasphemous Dr Pretorius

invokes religious iconography

and says "Follow the lead of nature,

or of God..."

It was scripted

"...if you like your fairytales."

Well, this is not how one

speaks about organised 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.

The way Ernest Thesiger reads the line,

"Bible stories" contains

such invective and disdain

that it's more offensive

than if he'd said "fairytales".

This is how one got around the letter

of the censor and the spirit of intent.

Bride initially had a fairly lengthy subplot

involving the Dwight Frye 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,

who he killed,

and led everybody to believe

that the monster had killed them.

It was probably about a ten-minute

sequence followed by a morgue inquest.

It had no bearing on the narrative line

and probably stopped the film

dead in its tracks at the midpoint.

Whale, probably wisely, removed this,

and that narrative bridge

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.

This leads us on to the monster

and 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 is 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.

It wasn't just "I'm going to

play games with odd humour."

It was sensitivity,

and that sensibility of the warmth

and mutual need that those people find,

that he indulged himself with too.

That wasn't in the first film either.

Those kinds of feelings - both extremes -

weren't in the first film.

Humour has never been so artfully

blended into a horror film as in the Bride.

Very bizarre, this little chap.

There's a certain resemblance to me,

don't you think?

Or do I flatter myself?

Hindsight tells us that Whale's

sense of humour is sort of camp.

I'm not sure that that's really

quite how it was at the time.

I think the camp and kitschy

elements of his humour

may be something...

a gloss we're putting on it,

some 60 years... 65 years

after the picture was made.

The humour in Bride of Frankenstein

permeates much of the story line.

It isn't in comedy-relief segments,

but it is part and parcel

with the characters

and what they do in the main story line.

Pretorius 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 he makes comments about

his creations of these little people,

he makes comments about himself

being like the devil or 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 him,

Ernest Thesiger, shared -

with James Whale himself.

Dr Pretorius 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 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.

I gather we not only did her hair,

but dressed her.

What a couple of queens we are, Colin.

Yes, that's right.

A couple of flaming queens.

Pretorius is a little bit in love

with Dr Frankenstein, you know.

The gay sensibility responds to outsiders.

Bride of Frankenstein contains several.

Pretorius 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, 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.

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.

So somebody must come and

either kill or otherwise tame

that monster that's been unleashed.

And the villagers do that.

The villagers in Frankenstein and in Bride

are almost the villains of the piece.

That's especially the case in the end of

Frankenstein, where they're a lynch mob.

He had the idea that, when people thought

as a group, it could only lead to trouble.

Somehow the mob mentality

was a scarier thing to face

than any monster could possibly be.

With Show Boat,

Whale had nearly achieved his dream

of creative autonomy

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