Although James Whale
directed some twenty odd movies during the eleven years he worked
in Hollywood, from 1930 to 1941, "he is best
remembered," in the words of Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia (1979), "for
his four stylish horror films" that he directed between 1931
and 1935: Frankenstein (1931); The Old Dark House (1932); The Invisible Man (1933); and The
Bride of Frankenstein (1935). As Katz
does, it has been customary to call these horror films, but the
label is a misnomer; only the two Frankenstein pictures belong to
the horror genre while The Old Dark House is a thriller
and The Invisible Man a work of fantasy. However, fairly
obvious thematic ties link these movies to one another which
collectively form a cycle within the larger context of
Whale’s career. But what brought Whale to Hollywood from
England was the film adaptation of R. C. Sherrif’s Journey’s
End which he had directed on the London stage; this was
followed by a screen adaptation of another play, Robert E.
Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge in 1931. Neither of these
movies is readily available for viewing but it is possible to get
some idea of his work in the pre-Frankenstein phase of his
career from Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels
(1930), on which he worked as dialogue director before shooting Journey’s
End. Strangely enough this was one moment when the careers of
Whale and George Cukor intersected in a certain way, since Cukor
was working as dialogue director on another famous World War I
epic, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Unlike Whale, who did receive credit for his work on Hell’s
Angels, Cukor got no screen credit for his work, but
it probably did more to improve his standing in the industry than
any of the pictures he worked on at Paramount during the first
phase of his career.
A few years later, working as director in
his own right in movies like Bill of Divorcement (1932)
and Dinner at Eight (1933), Cukor would have reigned in
the performers more tightly than he does in All Quiet on the
Western Front, but the emotional directness of their delivery
still remains one of the film’s strong points—for
example, when the soldiers wait in the crowded bunker to go over
the top or in the scene of Kat’s death. By contrast, Whale’s
direction of the dialogue in Hell’s
Angels is
excruciatingly pedestrian for someone who had worked as a stage
director. The picture is burdened
with a dreadfully melodramatic plot about a triangle involving a
good and bad brother, Monte (Ben Lyon) and Roy Rutledge (James
Hall), and a vamp (Jean Harlow), which reaches its climax when
the brothers are captured by the Germans and Roy has to shoot
Monte to prevent him from giving secrets to the enemy Yet all
that is memorable about Hell’s Angels are its action
sequences--it would be reassuring think that Whale was
responsible for the best of these, in which a German dirigible is
shot down over London, but James Curtis has decisively eliminated
this hypothesis—while its dramatic scenes pale in comparison
with the intensity Howard Hawks achieved in many passages of The
Dawn Patrol (1931). Nor is Frankenstein an improvement
in this respect.
Apart from the sui
generis performance of Boris Karloff, Colin Clive’s
effectively overwrought playing as Frankenstein, and Dwight
Frye’s memorable turn as Frankenstein’s assistant,
Fritz, the casting of Frankenstein is a holy mess which ranges from
the insipid (Mae Clarke as Frankenstein’s fiancee,
Elizabeth) through the banal (John Boles as Victor Moritz) to the
ludicrous (Frederick Kerr as Frankenstein’s father). Worse, this potpourri of inept acting is matched by
a cacophony of accents on the soundtrack: while Edward van Sloan
in a competent performance as Dr. Waldman appropriately tries out
an unobtrusive German accent, Clarke and Boles speak in nearly
uninflected American tones and Kerr carries on in the worst
tradition of the British stage nobleman, sputtering exclamations
every other moment he is on the screen. As the subsequent films
suggest, the tin ear here was probably that of Carl Laemmle Jr.
rather than that of Whale; however, in no case should this
shortcoming be chalked up to the limitations of early sound
recording. By 1931, films such as Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause
(1929), Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (1929), and
Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) had made a very
effective use of the new medium and contain soundtracks that
rarely grate on the ears as does Frankenstein’s. Like
the studio’s immediate predecessor in the genre, Tod
Browning’s Dracula, Frankenstein seems to have
been made in 1929 rather than two years later, although it makes
one striking use of sound when the audience hears the
monster’s footsteps--ascending the stairs to confront the
audience for the first time--before he appears on screen. Equally
surprising is the lack of music except behind the main and end
titles. It is unclear whether this indicates a lack of technical
facility or mere parsimony on Universal’s part, but the
latter seems likely since even many late silent films had been
released with synchronized musical scores.
Frankenstein has a history behind
its production nearly as complicated as that of Gone with the
Wind, one that by now has been studied not only by serious
critics such as Carlos Clarens and David J. Skal but by countless
collectors of movie trivia. In the first place, the film was not
directly adapted from Mrs. Shelley’s novel but by way of a
stage adaptation by Peggy Webling, revised in turn for Broadway
by John L. Balderston. Secondly, Whale was not the first director
assigned to the film. As Robert Jameson relates in The
Essential Frankenstein, Universal at first planned to shoot
the film with Bela Lugosi as the monster, to be directed by
Robert Florey. When Florey asked for total control over the
picture, however, the studio replaced him with Whale who, in
turn, eventually replaced the recalcitrant Lugosi with Karloff.
Although Florey received no credit for his contributions, he did
work in preparing the movie, and James Curtis’ account in
his biography of Whale, James Whale: A New Age of Gods and
Monsters, makes it clear that basic features of the
scenario—in particular, the finale in the burning
windmill—were in place before Whale took over as director.
Thirdly, it has long been recognized that older movies played as
significant a role in Frankenstein’s genesis as did
either the play or novel. (While the German silent films The
Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1926) are fairly obvious
sources, Jameson also proposes Rex Ingram’s 1926 production The
Magician.) Taking
all these facts into account as well as the literary sources that
stand behind the novel itself—including Milton’s Paradise Lost, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound—Whale’s movie presents something more
complex than a simple adaptation of a well-known literary work to
the screen.
Of all the famous horror films of the early
1930’s, Frankenstein is the most uneven.
Browning’s Dracula, with its slow pace and extended
sequences that take place in total silence, is often tedious but
the least that can be said is that its style is coherent. Not so Frankenstein
which wobbles back and forth indecisively between two quite
distinct styles. The straight dramatic scenes, like those in Hell’s
Angels, take place in indifferent, flatly lit decors, and
mainly employ static camera setups. On the other hand, what might be called the
effects scenes—not only those which employ special effects
properly speaking but which also make use of unusual set designs
and lighting—are so different as to seem the work of another
director altogether. The scene of
the monster’s creation, the film’s pièce de
résistance, takes place in a cavernous, labyrinthine set of
a ruined tower, traversed by a twisting stairway, that could
indeed have come out of a German silent production, a set which
Whale often shoots from a high angle to effectively cover the
preparations going on below. In one astounding uninterrupted
shot, the camera follows Fritz, who is going to shoo away
unwelcome visitors that have arrived downstairs, in a lateral
tracking shot, as he goes across the laboratory, all the way to
the passageway between the interior of the the tower and its
outer wall—and then follows Frankenstein in the opposite
direction, as he goes to the window. But many later scenes of
this kind contain equally impressive moments—for example,
when the monster comes to confront Frankenstein and Waldman
following his creation. In the most affecting episode in the
entire movie, Frankenstein opens a skylight above and the monster
reaches out towards the light in an inexpressibly pathetic
gesture. Already the contrast between the gloomy set, only lit by
splashes of light here and there, and the shaft of light that
falls from above, momentarily illuminating the creature, creates
a suitably dramatic effect, but Whale reinforces it by shooting
the monster from below as he extends his arms, and then perfectly
completes the sequence by cutting to a close up, photographed
from above, of the monster’s hands, still trying to grasp
the light after Frankenstein has again closed the skylight.
Another such moment occurs at the end when Frankenstein and his
creation confront each other in the burning windmill, separated
by a revolving mill wheel which passes across their faces as the
film cuts back and forth from the one to the other.
Mrs. Shelley's novel is, as Harold Bloom
makes clear, another version, albeit a negative one of the
Romantic myth of the artist. Frankenstein’s failure is not
so much an example of science run amok, as it is a failure of the
imagination at a high level of art. In Bloom’s words,
"Though abhorred rather than loved, the monster is the total
form of Frankenstein’s creative power and is more
imaginative than his creator." More than anything else,
Frankenstein’s rejection of his creation represents the
self-destruction of that same creative power. At this point, the
distance between the novel and the movie would seem to be
considerable. The film’s highpoint, the creation scene, by
literally filling in with all the paraphernalia of a twentieth
century laboratory what the novel only briefly suggests,
effectually pushes the story in the direction of science fiction
and away from that of Romantic allegory. Yet this aspect of the novel can
perhaps serve to cast some light on Whale’s own career. One of the themes that runs through all of
Whale’s mad scientist films is that of
"things-men-are-not-meant-to-know." As Griffin
pathetically confesses on his deathbed at the conclusion of The
Invisible Man, "I failed. I meddled in things that man
must leave alone." But how can all these dire warnings fail
to apply to the person who stands in the same relation to the
movie Frankenstein that the main character does to his
creation? Did Whale feel that he too had made himself culpable
when he rivaled the wrathful Jehovah by manufacturing images?
Moreover, if Whale thought that, would he not fear suffering the
same disastrous fate that befalls both Frankenstein and his
creation?