by Ben Bussey
He was the first great horror director of the talkies era. Responsible for four of the very best 1930s Universal classics, horror cinema would be a very different place without James Whale. While he will of course always be most remembered for the Frankenstein films, he did a lot more than simply slap a monster in front of a camera as so many have done since. He crafted dark tales awash with compelling Gothic imagery, and gleeful undertones of subversive humour, identifying with the outsider whilst approaching society at large with suspicion and contempt, cementing the status of horror as the non-conformist’s genre of choice.
I realise that may seem a grandiose sweeping statement. It might also be deemed undue praise, given Whale is known to have taken the mantle of horror director with more than a little reluctance. He fancied himself at the helm of more upmarket films, and to a large extent his macabre efforts were to him little more than a quid pro quo for such later work as the musical Show Boat, and his highly personal World War I drama The Road Back (infamously re-cut by Universal, his anger at which most likely played a big part in his decision to take early retirement from filmmaking). Still, it seems fair to suggest that this hint of resentment at having to work in a genre he cared little for actually helped the films themselves; that it fed the sardonic tone, sly wit and flashes of antisocial rage that became his signature.
Of course, given that Frankenstein is our reason for commemorating him now, we should admit straight away that Whale’s signature humour is all but absent in his horror debut. While the film carries many of his hallmarks – Gothic production design with echoes of German Expressionism, impassioned performances from Boris Karloff, Colin Clive and Dwight Frye – there is also a great deal about it that reeks of compromise. Edward Van Sloan had already played the elder provider of exposition as the original Van Helsing and not long thereafter repeated the role in The Mummy, so to say that his performance as Dr Waldman now feels a bit by-the-numbers is putting it mildly. The film’s 19th Century European ambience is also soured somewhat by the presence of two unequivocally 1930s Americans, and bland ones at that: Mae Clarke as Henry’s betrothed, Elizabeth, and John Boles as Victor, the best friend/potential love rival/absolute fifth wheel of character that serves almost no purpose. Then there are the painfully unfunny comic relief scenes with Frederick Kerr as Frankenstein’s dithering father and Lionel Belmore as the bungling Burgomaster. Finally, there’s the feeble attempt at a happy ending, shot at Universal’s insistence. All these elements feel forced and stale, and are notable by their absence in the films that followed. After all, the massive success of Frankenstein meant that Whale was given considerably more elbow room to do his own thing next time around, and if he was more or less obliged to make horror then he was going to make damn sure he did it his way.
The Old Dark House (1932)
Naturally, Universal were eager for a Frankenstein sequel straight away, but Whale wasn’t going to give in that easily. His next horror work would be a very different story indeed. Adapted from a JG Ballard novel, The Old Dark House takes what is now the fairly standard Gothic set-up of the travellers marooned by car trouble during a storm, left with no option than to seek shelter at the less-than inviting abode of the title. (Oi, you at the back, stop singing “There’s a Light Over at the Frankenstein Place…”) Once inside, it inevitably transpires that the residents are not the most down to earth individuals, and a tense evening ensues with personality clashes aplenty, escalating to violence before the night is through.
While it is without question the least iconic and least widely seen of Whale’s work, The Old Dark House is the film in which Whale’s signature humour and love of colourful characters really comes to the forefront. In the place of Frankenstein’s nondescript supporting cast, here we have an archly theatrical ensemble. Again the nominal star, Karloff here plays a menacing butler, once again mute and shrouded in mystery, but the spotlight is hogged somewhat by Ernest Thesiger and Eva Moore as the bickering siblings who own the house. Moore is arguably the more attention-grabbing of the two here (though Thesiger would of course get his time to shine later), with her half-deaf roaring and her pious Bible-bashing. Witness the subtle nightmarish effect when, as she breaks into a particularly venomous Biblical rant, her face is shown in a series of distorted reflections; and all at once, a character who had initially seemed laughable suddenly becomes very sinister indeed. As we’ve seen many times since, the line between the horrific and the humorous is often very thin, and The Old Dark House is arguably one of the first films to really explore this.
When comparing the film to Frankenstein, perhaps the aspect of The Old Dark House which stands out the most is the quintessential Englishness of it all. With the exception of the American Gloria Stuart (who would later pop up as the love interest in The Invisible Man, and much later as Kate Winslet’s 1997 counterpart in Titanic), the cast is pretty much entirely English, and for once they’re not the unthreatening upper class twits Hollywood had so often portrayed before and has since, with Frederick Kerr’s Baron Frankenstein being a prime example. On top of the aforementioned Moore and Thesiger, we have a couple of loud-mouthed Northerners in Charles Laughton as the archetypal self-made man, and Lilian Bond as his trophy girlfriend. To this day it’s rare that actors from Northern England get all the way to Hollywood with their accents intact – just ask Sean Bean – so it’s a most refreshing change to have such a different facet of the English identity in an American-made film, particularly for a Northerner like myself.
The Invisible Man (1933)
This is an interesting one to consider in relation to Frankenstein. Whilst The Old Dark House seems wilfully deliberate in straying as far from the Frankenstein format as possible whilst remaining a horror, The Invisible Man is by contrast very close to Frankenstein in a great many respects. The central character is a scientist on the brink of a monumental breakthrough, anxious to be left alone to continue his work, teetering on the edge of madness. Equally anxious to intervene are his former mentor, his estranged fiancee, and his best friend who, unbeknowst to the scientist, also has feelings for the fiancee. Once the scientist’s work becomes known to the public, mass panic ensues, resulting in the subject of the experiment being systematically hunted down.
In this much, the narratives of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man are borderline identical. But where Henry Frankenstein created a monster, Jack Griffin made a monster of himself; where Frankenstein saw the error of his ways, Griffin remained unrepentant (a half-hearted deathbed lament aside); and where Frankenstein’s monster unwittingly created panic, Griffin revels in it, terrorising those he holds in contempt with outright glee. There is very little here of redemption or the inherent decency of people. This is a bleak, cynical, and in its own way quite sadistic tale in which pretty much everyone is out to serve their own interests, and the world en masse is not looked upon fondly.
I don’t want to paint The Invisible Man as nothing but misery, however. Quite the contrary, it’s probably the funniest of Whale’s horrors, often truly laugh out loud hilarious to this day, thanks largely to the supporting cast of small town English oddbods, most notably the wonderful Una O’Connor who would return in Whale’s next (and last) horror. And of course, the central performance from Claude Rains (like Karloff, another struggling British actor whom Whale launched into superstardom) is so wonderfully over the top, every line roared with theatrical relish. We can also scarcely forget that the film was an absolute tour de force of special effects for the time, and it’s wonderful to see that – unlike so many of today’s FX-oriented blockbusters – the technical aspects did not swamp the film, but rather served the overall vision, working perfectly in harmony with Whale’s world view. Really, I can’t think of a moment that approximates James Whale’s directorial identity better than the woman running screaming in terror, chased by a skipping pair of trousers as Claude Rains sings “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May.” Horror, spectacle, and dark hilarity all at once; that pretty much wraps Whale up, I think.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Superlatives at the ready; here is the one film that all discussions of James Whale come back to, and indeed most discussions of the Universal horror film. (It’s not too surprising, then, that Marc chose to write about it for our Frankenstein 80th Anniversary celebrations, as you can read here.) Having long resisted studio pressure for a sequel to his breakthrough hit, Whale finally relented on the condition that he be allowed total creative control. The result, as I’m certainly not the first and won’t be the last to remark, is the greatest of all the Universal monster movies, and one of the very best films ever made in the genre. In his horror films since Frankenstein, Whale had revisited the general format whilst filtering out that which had been unsatisfactory; we might see The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man as dry runs for this, his crowning achievement in horror.
Just about everything that worked about the original is back in force: Karloff’s towering central performance, Pierce’s unforgettable make-up, the gloriously creepy set design. Even Dwight Frye returns, despite having died in the original and subsequently he has to portray a whole new impish homicidal maniac in this one. Meanwhile, everything about the original that required improvement is indeed improved upon. The camerawork and editing are considerably more fluid, and the music is far more prominent and distinctive. The acting is also of a uniformly higher standard (with the possible exception of Colin Clive, who gives a more restrained and subsequently rather less interesting performance here). Replacing Mae Clarke, Valerie Hobson makes for a much more convincing and compelling Elizabeth – astonishingly she was only 17 at the time – whilst John Boles’ Victor and Frederick Kerr’s Baron are simply omitted with no explanation (though, in fairness, Kerr had died in 1933). With Edward Van Sloan’s Dr Waldman having been offed by the monster last time around, this time an elder mentor for Colin Clive’s Henry comes in the infinitely more entertaining form of Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius. Where Waldman had done nothing but try to dissuade Henry from his work, Pretorius anxiously persuades Henry to take his work further; and this, after all, is what the audience wants to see. A close friend of Thesiger, Whale custom designed the role for him, and what a tremendous role it is. In his unabashed ambition and disdain for convention Pretorius is in many respects similar to Claude Rains’ Griffin, but with a glorious delight in his devilishness that is all Thesiger.
Whilst Frankenstein and Pretorius collaborate on a female monster, the original Monster himself is finding his humanity, or lack thereof. The first film touched only briefly on how the outside world reacts to the Monster; this becomes one of the core themes of the sequel, as he meets fear and persecution wherever he goes, save the home of the blind man which, for a time, grants him shelter and friendship. The scenes with O.P. Heggie’s hermit have been so widely spoofed since (perhaps most notably and brilliantly in Young Frankenstein, as Marc remarks) that it can be tricky now to take them entirely seriously, but they’re still wonderful moments. The brief taste of humanity and happiness that the Monster experiences here surely only further feeds his rage at the harsh treatment he receives so soon thereafter; and his ultimate despair when even the Bride, created specifically to keep him from being alone in the world, also rejects him.
I’ve tried to avoid getting too psychoanalytical about Whale himself when discussing his films, but given that The Bride of Frankenstein concludes with the Monster destroying himself, the Bride and Pretorius – the film’s three outsiders, whom the Monster declares “belong dead” – it’s hard not to relate this to Whale, who would of course take his own life twenty-two years later. The reasons for which Whale might identify with such outsider characters are well documented: he was a war veteran and former POW; he was of working class origin, which he would be forced to conceal when working in the typically upper-middle class territory of the theatre; and, most famously, he was openly homosexual in a time of even greater intolerance than the present day. Whether or not we choose to read this as informing his work is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Considerably less open to debate is the impact of his work. Once again, he may not have cared too deeply about horror himself, but his work within it played a major role in shaping the genre into what it is today, even if it was by accident rather than design.