Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein arrives ninety years after its release still wearing its reputation like a borrowed coat. James Whale, who had already squeezed the idea dry, returned to the material only on the condition that he could make a hoot of it, and the result is a sequel that improves on its predecessor by refusing to take it seriously. The Mary Shelley prologue, in which the author reminds Byron and Shelley that her novel was meant to impart a moral lesson about playing God, is a framing device of real literary ambition. It also happens to be the only stretch of the picture where a woman holds the floor without being carried off by a monster.

Elizabeth spends the running time foreseeing death, weeping, and being kidnapped to compel her husband's cooperation. The Bride herself, the titular attraction, is unveiled, hisses, and is destroyed inside four minutes of screen time. She is a plot device with a Nefertiti hairdo. That Whale was an openly gay man working inside the 1935 studio system has produced decades of retrospective reading, and the Monster's exile among people who fear him invites it. The film offers nothing explicit, only the loneliness of an outsider who learns the word friend and then loses the friend.

The concerns here are theological and Gothic: creation, responsibility, the price of ambition. There is no interest in race, class, capital, environment, or the body as a site of social meaning. The Monster is feared for his scars because this is a horror film, and horror has always understood that ugliness is cheaper than argument. What lingers is a melancholy, beautifully lit tragedy that lectures no one and preaches nothing. It watches a made thing ask for company and be refused. By the standards of contemporary cultural instruction the picture is nearly silent. By any other standard it is close to perfect. The classification stands at a modest figure, and the film survives it without difficulty.