Day 20: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

Watching James Whale's 1935 follow-up to the hugely successful FRANKENSTEIN (1931), one is astonished to discover just how many classic elements of Frankenstein lore derive from this film and not the original. The girl thrown in the lake and the torch-carrying villagers chasing the monster to his doom were all there from the beginning but the remainder did not arrive on the scene until four year years later. The infamous white streak, the blind old man and grunting monster with the Hulk's vocabulary, among others, make their first appearance here. Like Frankenstein's eponymous monster itself, the film was not truly complete until it met its bride.

For this reason, and more immediately because the film begins at the moment the original ends, it is impossible to view either in isolation. (The brilliant manner in which GODS & MONSTERS [1997] weaved threads from both into the life of their director & the way in which Mel Brooks took them as an interchangeable whole from which to mine comedy gold also add to the inseparability.) Together, the first two Universal Frankenstein films form what may be the perfect horror film.

This meta-film has everything one desires in a creature feature, late at night when your house starts making odd noises and all the lights are off: Mad scientists! Deformed assistants! Monsters! Defiance of the Gods! Villagers chasing people or things with torches! Unrequited love! Evil doppelgangers! Thunderstorms bellowing outside a spooky old castle! Germans!

The prologue, depicting the origin of the novel and also acting to recap the previous film, gives away the game: Mary Shelly admits it is a story about a man who dares to play God. (And you said I was just making this up as I go along...)

This film, working through an alternate version of that theme, introduces an evil twin to Baron Frankenstein (Colin Clive) in the form of Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger).

While Frankenstein seeks to play God by first creating Adam/the monster (Boris Karloff), then Eve/the monster's bride (Elsa Lanchester) with Doctor Pretorius' urging and assistance. Notably, Doctor Pretorius plays God at firsy by recreating contemporary society in its imperfect whole. They are not an innocent childlike brutes like Frankenstein's monster existing in a state of nature, but rather kings, queens, archbishops and preening ballerinas, replicating the vices of modern societies. He attempts to seduce Baron Frankenstein to the sordid, tyrannical side of this role by displaying miniature human beings in glass jars, whom he taunts like a cat dangling a mouse. One imagines that Frankenstein was in the God business with much better intentions than that, or at least he possessed a misguided adherence to science over faith.

Doctor Pretorius first enters the film dressed in black and lurking in the shadows, a foreboding presence. Perhpas I make too much of the fact that he enters this appearance immediately after Frankenstein's fiancee declares these expiriments in tinkering with life and death as the work of the devil but Pretorius himself declares that these two scientists are meant to be taken by the audience as a modern God and Satan, dueling over a new dawn of man represented by the monster. The doctor is definitely a villain in this film, and Frankenstein an ambiguous, if not redeemed figure.

OVERALL: ****/5 on its own or a perfect *****/5 as a double feature with FRANKENSTEIN (1931). Not including the bonus points for implied necrophilia, which... how did that get past the censors? I would definitely like to see that memo.