It is not hard to discern behind the plots
of all four of these movies the presence of a paranoid scenario
which finds its most effective vehicle in Whale’s
blasphemous reproaches to the creator par excellence. Elements of
this scenario show up at the margins of The Old Dark House
in the person of Saul, the craziest of the Femm’s, who is
kept locked up in an upstairs room, who believes he is being
persecuted by the rest of the family and tries to burn down the
mansion at the movie’s climax; however, the scenario appears
most explicitly in the mad scientist pictures. Of all the
versions of the scenario Whale presents, perhaps the most
interesting is that of The Invisible Man. Here the
paranoid fantasy of being persecuted by invisible beings is
transmuted into the fantasy of being an invisible being with
unlimited powers. At the same time this transmutation occurs,
precisely the opposite change takes place on screen: Griffin
becomes the Invisible One and his presence is marked by the
absence of an image. Yet who if not the director is the true
Invisible One, lurking about unperceived, playing his own
"demonic pranks" upon the audience? At the same time,
in spite of the crimes committed by The Invisible One, it is not
difficult to see how Whale was moving away from the darkest
version of this paranoid scenario, the one he had presented in Frankenstein.
Never again did the
scenario manifest itself in one of Whale’s films with such
violence, in effect doubly so: not only the violence with which
the monster is persecuted by his creator and destroyed by the
enraged mob, but the violence with which the monster persecutes
his creator. If, in the subsequent
movies, he repeats the scenario, Whale renders its implications
increasingly innocuous. The movement from horror to fantasy in
this way becomes a flight from the forces he had unleashed in the
first movie and whose consequences he feared.
Viewed in this light, the de facto rivalry
between Frankenstein and Pretorius in The Bride of
Frankenstein seems more a strategy for simultaneously
ridiculing the Promethean figure of the earlier film and
ridiculing the whole enterprise of creation than anything else.
If the creator is not guilty of challenging God but is no more
than a charlatan, then what can the result of his experiments be
but the sterile union of a monster and his mate? Even without the
biographical data supplied by James Curtis, The Bride of
Frankenstein clearly represents Whale’s farewell to
fantasy. Are not the monster’s words--"We belong with
dead" --just before he blows up himself, his would-be
spouse, and Pretorius, Whale’s own valedictory to the
fantasy genre? (As first produced, the film would have been even
more explicitly a valedictory. According to Curtis, The Bride
of Frankenstein originally ended with the monster blowing up
Henry and Elizabeth as well. Whale only tacked on the present
ending just before the movie opened in San Francisco.) Yet was not Whale thereby
renouncing his own powers, which clearly flourished more in that
genre than anywhere else? Doctor
Faustus gives way to The Tempest. It is quite possible
that Whale’s career might have had a happier outcome had he
not fallen prey to the vicissitudes of studio politics, but at
least on the basis of these four movies it seems highly
problematic whether he would ever again have created anything as
imaginative or original, even had conditions been more favorable
to the production of works as unusual as The Invisible Man
and The Bride of Frankenstein than they were in Hollywood
after 1935. At its best The Invisible Man has something of
the märchenhaft quality of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus.
But Cocteau’s film ends not with a creator repenting his
sins and disavowing his vocation, but with the poet betraying
himself by returning to his expectant wife as his real love, his
death, and her companion Heurtebise are dispatched forever to the
realm of shadows. Cocteau, however, unlike his modern day
Orpheus, had sacrificed himself to the infernal deities long
before he made one of the greatest movies of this century. By all
evidence, such a gesture lay totally beyond the grasp of James
Whale.
Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, has written of Whale that
his "overall career reflects the stylistic ambitions and
dramatic disappointment of an expressionist in the
studio-controlled Hollywood of the thirties." If, as I assume, by
"expressionist" Sarris means the style of filmmaking
associated with the German silent cinema, then the label could be
applied with equal justice to Hitchcock, who was more deeply
indebted to the German cinema than Whale ever was. In particular, the two share in common the use of a
device that derives mainly from the Germans: the use of effects
in both a narrower and larger sense of the word. In the narrower
sense, effects means the use of all the technical resources like
trick photography, animation, superimpositions, distorting
lenses, etc., as well as unusual lighting and décor that serve
to visually punctuate the unfolding of a story on the screen. But
these effects can play quite different roles. On the one hand, as
in the films of Georges Méliès in the early days of movies or
of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron today, they can dazzle the
audience like a well-performed magic trick. In the German silent
cinema, however, effects had the function of creating a specific
psychological atmosphere, a Stimmung whose
significance Lotte Eisner has rightly emphasized in The
Haunted Screen but equally of providing a moment of
subjective revelation. In this sense, a paradigmatic example of
effects in the classic German cinema would be the scene in Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis in which Freder sees the factory
room suddenly transformed into the temple of Moloch.
But effects used in this way pass on beyond
being simply a device; they furnish the basis for a larger
effect, less easy to point to, that still permeates an entire
film. Trivially, if every film produces an effect in the loose
meaning of making an impression upon the spectator, in most
American films--whether directed by John Ford or Howard Hawks on
the one hand, or by George Cukor or William Wyler on the
other--effect in the sense I have just been using it is
subordinated to narration. Although such a use of effect shows up in a
number of late silent films, probably under the influence of
Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), and continues into the
early days of sound, the directors in whose work it occupies a
prominent place are Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles, and
certainly Alfred Hitchcock, whose pictures do not so much tell a
story as they plunge the spectator into a certain kind of tightly
enclosed universe fabricated by the director. In this way, moreover, it becomes possible to make
a valid comparison between Hitchcock and Whale, since not only
are effects in the narrower sense strewn throughout Whale’s
movies like the flashes of lightning that figure so prominently
in his most famous works, but his best movies, Frankenstein,
The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein,
succeed by skillfully fusing the Méliès tradition of effects
with the German one.
However, Whale’s attraction to effects
in both senses had a disturbing influence upon the aesthetic
economy of his movies. As noted previously, in Frankenstein,
the movie zigzags between powerful effects scenes--impressively
photographed by Arthur Edeson--such as the creation of the
monster and pedestrian dramatic ones. In the later three movies,
Whale clearly overcame this difficulty but at a high price. One
the one hand, he could choose a subject that lent itself to this
treatment; on the other, he could work within a limited time
frame conducive to sustaining the film’s effect. While
Universal’s notorious stinginess may account for the
surprisingly short length of the four films—the longest, The
Bride of Frankenstein, only lasts 75 minutes—their
brevity accords perfectly well with their effect-oriented
aesthetic. In this regard, Showboat which lasts two hours
is the exception that proves the rule since it peaks early on
with the "Ol’ Man River" sequence—which
contains images of imprisonment and brutality akin to those from
the fantasy movies—and never again reaches such a moment of
intensity. It is not hard to see how these conditions could
severely restrict an artist’s creative freedom unless, as
with Hitchcock’s use of the thriller, the director
consciously accepted this limitation and explored its
possibilities in depth. Yet is not what we see here a fascinating
formal parallel to Whale’s apparent uncertainties about his
role as a creator? The effects scenes, even if expanded to the
entire length of a movie, could only be conjured up momentarily
before being sent back to the underworld, just as the monster
sends himself, his bride, and Dr. Pretorius to perdition at the
end of The Bride of Frankenstein. Whale’s predilection for
effects was not so much a device as the sign of an unresolved
aesthetic problem.
Far different was Hitchcock’s use of
the device. In late films, he had reached a point where he could
produce an unbelievably intense effect almost in passing, as he
does at the beginning of North by Northwest, in a shot
that shows the Townsend manor through the window of a cab from
the point of view of Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), a shot
drenched in foreboding. But although it is the effects scenes
which often stand out in the viewer’s memory of a Hitchcock
movie—for example, in Notorious when Ingrid Bergman
collapses after realizing that the coffee she has just consumed
has been poisoned by her husband and mother-in-law—a careful
examination of the movies would reveal, I think, how rarely
Hitchcock used the story as merely a pretext for exploiting an
effect. In Whale,
everything leads up to effects scenes that explode and vanish; at
his best, he could make a brilliant movie like The Invisible Man out of a whole series of explosions, but it
remains difficult to see how much of a future this procedure
could have had. In Hitchcock, the
effects scenes come as the culmination of a dramatic arc that the
director has foreseen from the first frame. Already in Rebecca,
in a scene like the one in which Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson)
shows Rebecca’s boudoir to the new Mrs. de Winter (Joan
Fontaine), Hitchcock extracts more out of shots in which the
camera pans over the dead woman’s belongings than Whale was
ever able to do with the most spectacular effects in his best
movies.
In many ways, the history of Hollywood is a
history of unanswered and unanswerable questions. What would have
happened to D.W. Griffith if Intolerance had been as big a
success as Birth of a Nation ? What if MGM had not reduced
Greed to its present length ? What if The Jazz Singer
had bombed at the box-office? In the case of James Whale, the question is not
so much what would have happened to his career if Universal had
not ruined The Road Back as what would have happened if
he had not renounced fantasy. The
question is just as unanswerable as it is unanswered but anyone
intrigued by it should not expect to find any clues in Bill
Condon's Gods and Monsters. Go to see it for two
astounding performances, but to find out anything about its
subject go to the local video store and rent Frankenstein,
The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, or The
Bride of Frankenstein with Showboat as a chaser.