Mysteries of the Bride

Last week a much-reduced Crack Team of moviegoers went to the endearingly ramshackle Greenfield Garden Cinema to watch a special showing of the original The Bride of Frankenstein. It's still my favorite of all the classic Universal black-and-white monster movies. Maybe The Invisible Man is in the same league, but the rest of the pack is well behind them both.

Two things struck me while watching this showing. The first is how rushed the movie seems. There's no slow buildup, no rising tension, no mysteries to be resolved. It almost feels like James Whale wanted to blow past all the boring townsfolk-with-pitchforks parts and get to the big Animating the Bride set piece at the end as quickly as he could. Despite this, the beginning scenes of the movie are a little boring, especially since Una Merkel isn't as funny as James Whale apparently thought she was. But once Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius shows up, the movie rolls right ahead on rails and is a joy to watch.

The second thing which struck me is when the movie is supposed to take place. We begin with a frame story of Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester, who of course is also the titular Bride), telling her story to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron (played by Gavin Gordon hamming it up to the nth degree). Now, we know that this literary evening took place in 1816, and the actual novel Mary wrote is set some time in the previous century.

But the movie . . . isn't. It's hard to pin down when it's happening. The police have revolvers (post 1850s), there are recognizable electric filament bulbs in Frankenstein's laboratory (post 1870s), and the one date mentioned is the plaque on a coffin from the 1890s. But it's not 1935, nor is it any time during or after World War I. There are no telephones (except for an experimental device Pretorius uses to keep in touch with the Monster), no motor vehicles, no battling gangs of veterans. I'll tentatively place it in the Edwardian era, maybe 1910 or so. 

So how is Mary Shelley in 1816 telling a story which takes place a century later? Well, she's not called the First Science Fiction Writer for nothing. I don't know if this was a deliberate choice by the moviemakers or a happy accident, but the film The Bride of Frankenstein is literally a movie about a science fiction story. This even means any anachronisms can be explained away as Mary Shelley's fault, since she couldn't predict the dawn of the 20th century with perfect accuracy. 

Anyway, it's a cracking good movie, perfect to watch on Halloween. Highly recommended.