The Gift of Life

Finest Christmas gift this year was the Universal Monsters Blu-Ray, which got slapped into the Maidstone player as soon as decency allowed. While Fiona was out and her brother was dozing, I previewed THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, a snoozy film but a very fine transfer, with super-saturated Technicolor seeping from every frame.

Then, in the evening, FRANKENSTEIN! Roddy enjoys this one very much, and Fiona and I are big Whale fans. I’ve owned it on VHS, DVD, and now Blu. I’m not sure I’d watched it in the last ten years, though, so it all seemed quite fresh, helped by the munificent new detail…

Had we seen that the bouncy skeleton at the medical school has something clenched between his teeth? I don’t think so, and I’m still not sure what it is he’s got there: Fiona proposes a rubber surgical glove, I thought it might be a rolled-up piece of paper. You would need a screen as wide as Victor Buono’s ass to be sure, and we only have the James Coco model.

We saw the little dust-clouds stirred up by Karloff’s feet as he tries to escape. We laughed hysterically at Dwight Frye’s mood swings, his tiny walking stick which makes movement more difficult, and the way he pauses to pull up one sock before hurrying to assist at the monster’s birth. We gazed in wonderment at the sheer majestic scale of John Boles’ big dull head. We marveled at the fact that Edward Van Sloan, a Dutchman from Minnesota, choose to play a German doctor with a prissy Scottish accent.

Maybe it was the new clarity of the image, or the fact that I’d forgotten the original experience of viewing the film, or my arguable greater maturity, but the emotional arc of the movie, which is all Karloff’s, though smuggled in as a subtext beneath the romantic sufferings of Colin Clive and Mae Clarke (eyes scanning fearfully in search of approaching grapefruits) , hit home with greater clarity. I had remembered the sublime reaching for the light, and the scene by the lake with the little girl, but in isolation. I also remembered that Karloff spends a lot of the time snarling in an almost feline manner. But putting the famous moments in order and experiencing them again meant seeing how the monster moves from innocence through fear to anger. And realizing that the moment when the little girl offers him a flower inspires his first ever smile brings a lump to his throat.

Clive and Karloff stare at each other through the windmill’s central cog, and it resembles a giant wooden zoetrope: their POV’s blur into each other as the rotating timber flashes by — monster and maker become one, and mad science and cinema are conflated.

There’s also the horrible nastiness of the monster’s fate, burned to death in that windmill (he’s created in a mill too), when fire is his greatest fear. I’m glad Whale was to revive him, only slightly singed, to meet a death of his own choosing, blown to atoms. Of course Karloff played the part again, and the monster continued to lumber about after Boris kicked off his tar-spreader’s boots, but Whale’s diptych is a self-contained thing of beauty, and the characters are all finished with when he’s finished with them.

All images come from the old DVD, I’m afraid.

Buy: Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection [Blu-ray] [1931][Region Free]

The Bride

My crappy photo doesn’t do justice to Guy Budziak’s lustrous print of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, but I wanted to show it off: Guy made a present of it when we met in New York recently. Check out his Film Noir Woodcuts here.

Elsa is modeling a hairstyle copied from Queen Nefertiti, and for variety make-up designer Jack Pearce and director James Whale decided to give her throat-scars rather than forehead scars — in his initial research, Whale had reportedly discovered that there were two ways to get at the brain. I don’t quite follow the anatomical reasoning, nor see why Boris Karloff’s head would necessarily be flat, but it’s cool that there was research. The audience gets that there’s a reason for something happening, even if they don’t understand what it is.

Bluebottle Rocket

  

Ivor Montagu, who helped shape THE LODGER into Hitchcock’s first triumph, was reunited with the portly auteur when Hitch joined Michael Balcon at British Gaumont, and immediately became his collaborator on the scenario of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, which is a good enough excuse to link to Montagu’s stylish, Hitchcockian silent comedy, BLUEBOTTLES, which stars Elsa Lanchester and is an utter delight. Lanchester is a superb visual comedian, it turns out. There’s also Montagu’s intriguing and titillating decision to introduce her in ECU kissing her girlfriend goodbye in front of a cinema showing an Ivor Novello movie. 

Couldn’t embed this one, but I urge you to follow the link and watch it — maybe it’s a little overlong, but it has style, innocence and the electrifying Elsa, a truly unique talent — as great as she was as a character actor, I deeply regret that she didn’t play more leading roles, particularly in comedy.

With her stick figure body, twitching from place to place as if operated by a puppeteer bothered by wasps, her beautiful but oddly-assembled face (not easy to take being cast as the monster’s bride as a compliment, but she was entitled to) and her eccentric, childlike approach to any situation, Elsa was an unnatural natural, a machine for generating surprises, an instinctive oddball with a keen analytical mind, sneaking up on a script crab-fashion then pouncing like a thin baby from a wardrobe. Her way with line readings is equally doo-lally: remember BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN again, where she imbues the line, “It will be published — I (!) think (!)!” with an excess of invisible punctuation I can only hint at here. When she turns up as a mad medium in THE GHOST GOES WEST, I want to hurl the entire movie, charming though it is, over my shoulder and simply follow her character into a kind of alternative GHOSTBUSTERS world of supernatural intrigue, possibly featuring Alistair Sim as Alastair Crowley.

The other underrated genius here is Montagu, who shows serious chops, both as a Hitchcockian/Langian expressionist and as a comic filmmaker. Either of those courses would have seemed suitable for him, but he seems to have been content to settle as the studios’ resident intellectual, helping out on a range of films and then becoming a contributor to books on cinema in the ’50s. He was good at it, but there was more to him than that. He put in a lot of time to helping Eisenstein get a foothold in the west, which came to very little.

It’s also possible that Montagu’s arduous duties as a Russian spy kept him from advancing his filmmaking career as much as he should, but this has never been proved. If true, it puts an interesting new perspective on his contribution to Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers…