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It appeared, at the end of the epochal 1931 horror movie Frankenstein, that
the monster had perished in a burning windmill. But that was before
the runaway success of the movie dictated a sequel. In Bride of
Frankenstein, we see that the monster (once again played by Boris
Karloff) survived the conflagration, as did his half-mad creator
(Colin Clive). This remarkable sequel, universally considered superior
to the original, reunites other key players from the first film:
director James Whale (whose life would later be chronicled in Gods
and Monsters) and, of course, the inimitable Dwight Frye, as
Frankenstein's bent-over assistant. Whale brought campy humor to the
project, yet Bride is also somehow haunting, due in part to Karloff's
nuanced performance. The monster, on the loose in the European
countryside, learns to talk, and his encounter with a blind hermit is
both comic and touching. (The episode was later spoofed in Mel
Brooks's Young
Frankenstein.) A prologue depicts the author of
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, being urged to produce a sequel by
her husband Percy and Lord Byron. She's played by Elsa Lanchester, who
reappears in the climactic scene as the man-made bride of the
monster. Her lightning-bolt hair and reptilian movements put her into
the horror-movie pantheon, despite being onscreen for only a few
moments. But in many ways the film is stolen by Ernest Thesiger, as
the fey Dr. Pretorious, who toasts the darker possibilities of
science: "To a new world of gods and monsters!"
Absolutely. --Robert Horton
