There are other monster movies and there is Bride of Frankenstein.
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THE monster movie. There are other monster movies and there is "Bride of Frankenstein." Director James Whale brought the creature back in this 1935 sequel to "Frankenstein," a sequel that's even better than its predecessor. And Universal have done it up proud with a new black-and-white print, flattering monaural sound, and a good assortment of bonus goodies. Movie buffs owe it to themselves to purchase this disc.
Novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's creations return with Boris Karloff again the monster and Colin Clive as Baron Henry Frankenstein, both taking up where they left off in the previous film. The monster, you'll recall, had been presumed dead when a burning windmill collapsed on him. But you can't keep a good monster down. Now he's scorched and scarred and madder than ever. To help pacify him, the good Baron, recovered from his own near-fatal fall from the mill, is persuaded by a genuinely weird colleague, Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), to build the monster a mate, a bride (Elsa Lanchester, who also plays Mary Shelley in the prologue). Needless to say, when the new creature meets the old creature, she finds him less than attractive. Which ticks off the old monster even more! You want to see mad? Look at a monster scorned.
The movie is scary, creepy, funny, and touching by turns. Indeed, sometimes all at once. The monster's unpleasant disposition is established the first time we see him. When two peasants investigate whether the monster is really dead, he murders them both. Then the monster charges around the countryside stirring up further trouble and killing the occasional bystander, like a little girl! Is nothing sacred? The film can be interpreted seriously or tongue-in-cheek; take your pick. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein has taken on a new bride, Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson), which seems to annoy the monster no end, he being alone in the world. Given the enormous success of the first "Frankenstein" movie, director Whale was provided a much larger budget for the second effort, producing a film with elaborate and ever-more peculiar sets, like the inside of the doctor's mansion with its oddly beamed ceilings and curiously shaped rooms or a sterile forest of leafless, limbless trees.
The most eerie scene, though, is probably one in a cemetery crypt, made all the more bizarre by Pretorius eating his lunch atop a huge sarcophagus. Several other amusing touches include Ms. Lanchester's electrode-zapped hair and birdlike movements as the bride; a daft and twittering housekeeper (Una O'Conner); a miniature King and Queen, inventions of Pretorius, who are so lascivious they have to be kept apart in separate jars; and a tiny, ever-sermonizing Archbishop, another of Pretorius's mistakes and only one of several sly jabs the movie takes at organized religion. The tiny creatures, by the way, remain excellent special effects.
Perhaps the most remarkable quality about the film, however, is the poignancy it engenders despite its comedic interludes. In "Bride" Whale turned what had started in the first film as a standard horror story into an effective allegory for all suffering, persecuted peoples of the world. The poor, misunderstood monster becomes a symbol for anyone who is "different" and rejected by thoughtless, closed-minded barbarians. This is especially evident in the famous scene with the blind hermit (O.P. Heggie), a man who accepts the monster because he can't see what he looks like. Additionally, the hermit teaches the monster to speak, something Karloff was later to declare "stupid." Karloff preferred keeping the monster mute (even though in Mary Shelley's novel the creature was quite articulate).
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