Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Directed by James Whale [Other horror films: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933)]

There is a sizable constituency out there that believes Bride of Frankenstein to be one of the best sequels ever made, and not only that, but believes the film to be better than the 1931 classic. I never understood this. The movie is okay, but I don’t think it even cracks average. It’s not a bad film, but it pales in comparison to the first movie.

So with that blasphemy out of the way, I’ll try to explain why.

For one, the first forty or so minutes of the film feel quite aimless. Frankenstein’s monster survives being burned down in the windmill, travels the countryside, gets caught, escapes, and travels the countryside again, while Henry Frankenstein, healing from his injuries sustained at the end of the 1931 film, is goaded into working with Doctor Pretorius after the good doctor shows him some small people in jars.

It’s at that scene, I should add, that my disinstest grew. I understand the mechanics, however impossible, of Frankenstein’s creation – just stitch together body parts of multiple dead people, and add electricity to make the heart beat and the creature live. I get it. Apparently Pretorius used cultures from a seed to grow those small people (or homunculi).

Do those homunculi have any self-awareness or agency? The king was lusting after the queen, and the clergyman was chiding the king for doing such, but is that actually the extent to what those people are? Can they write books? I understand the science, such as it is, behind Frankenstein’s creation of the creature, but I don’t get Pretorius’ experiment at all. Where did he get the seed he used for the cultures from? I just didn’t see any relation between what he accomplished and what Frankenstein accomplished – they created two fundamentally different things.

Is that nitpicky? I don’t know, but I can’t take Pretorius’ character seriously as I fail to see the science in what he did. Overall, he’s a fun character, and I got a kick of his using Frankenstein’s creation against him, forcing the scientist to work with him, but those fantasy/comedy homunculi always felt so damn out of place to me, and took me away from the movie entirely.

Of course, things do pick up with the final twenty minutes. Really, the finale is strong, and we also finally get to see the titular character (for all of a minute or so) and her interactions with the creature. It’s tragic, and it leads to a good conclusion, but it’s not enough.

The only part of the film that I’d say was nailed would be the creature’s slowly becoming more humanized after being socialized by a blind hermit (O.P. Heggie). I thought those scenes were quite touching, and I got a kick out of the hermit teaching the creature to both smoke and drink. The hermit was such a good character, and I loved him and his sequences.

O.P. Heggie in fact is my favorite performance in the film. No doubt I think Boris Karloff did great, and though I didn’t get his character, Ernest Thesiger was solid as Pretorius. It was nice seeing both E.E. Clive (Dracula’s Daughter, The Invisible Man) and Una O’Connor (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Invisible Man) not to mention Dwight Frye (The Vampire Bat, Dracula), but Valerie Hobson (replacing Mae Clarke as Elizabeth) and Colin Clive were just sort of there, and didn’t do much for me.

The 1931 Frankenstein is iconic in so many ways. Aside from the hermit and his growing connection with the creature, which was heart-warming, I don’t really see anything iconic here. I loved the design of the new female creature – those white stripes in the hair a nice choice – but she never got any time to really do anything aside from hiss and shriek, and overall, I can’t pretend I think this is anywhere near as good as the first movie.

6.5/10