Category: James Whale

Hell’s Angels (1930)

Hughes magnificent folly has stunning scenes of aerial combat, among it’s more functional dialogue scenes

Director: Howard Hughes (& James Whale)

Cast: Ben Lyon (Monte Rutledge), James Hall (Roy Rutledge), Jean Harlow (Helen), John Darrow (Karl Armstedt), Lucien Prival (Baron von Kranz), Roy Wilson (Baldy Maloney)

There is an old line about Orson Welles calling a film set “the biggest train set a boy ever had”. A feeling no doubt shared by Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest men in America, who loved pouring his fortune into his private passions: fast planes and big movies. So, why not throw the two of them together into Hell’s Angels, the film which he planned to use to scoop recent Best Picture winner Wings title as the greatest fighter-ace film ever made. To get there, money would be no object at all.

Which meant Hughes didn’t think twice of reshooting most of the film over again when sound took over Hollywood. After all, why not put more money in: he had already spent millions on assembling a personal army of world-war-one planes, all of them frequently kept waiting on the ground for days on end (pilots and film crew sitting around collecting pay cheques) while he waited for the clouds to be perfectly positioned to best demonstrate the speed the planes flew at. Since he was waiting, why not bring in James Whale to re-shoot all the dialogue scenes with all the actual talking?

Whale came on board, fresh from directing Journey’s End on Broadway (after his work was finished, Hell’s Angels release was so further delayed he had time to shoot a film of that too and release it before anyone outside Hughes’ office saw a frame of Hell’s Angels), Whale first insisted the script be re-written. Hughes was more than happy with that, since I doubt he really gave a damn about the very-loose story used to join together the bits with the planes in. The cast was kept the same, bar one change: original female lead Greta Nissen’s Norwegian accent was judged impenetrable, so Jean Harlow was bought in to slip into something a little more comfortable in her place.

Not that it mattered particularly. The story of Hell’s Angels is simplicity itself. Two Brit brothers (though neither them or Harlow make any attempt to change their accents) join the flying corp at the outbreak of war. One brother, Monte (Ben Lyon), is a selfish, care-free rogue. The other, Roy (James Hall) is so painfully noble and dutiful (he even fights duels on behalf of the cowardly Monte) he’s nearly an idiot. Roy loves Helen (Jean Harlow) but is utterly unaware that she is nymphomaniac vamp who will do it with anything in a uniform – including Monte. Monte thinks war is a fool’s crusade, Roy considers it well-worth dying for – attitudes that will lead to a clash when they both volunteer for what turns out to be a suicide mission behind enemy lines.

None of this is particularly a surprise and, despite Harlow’s charisma, none of the three leads particularly stand-out on the acting front (though James Hall makes a decent fist of Monte’s big speech on the suicidal futility of war). Each of these characters is fairly thin in any case, and none of their actions carry any real surprise factor at any point. Whale shoots the dialogue scenes with a breezy competence, doing his best with material that on paper would hardly be winning any plaudits.

In fact, the most interesting thing about these scenes is how much it seems to subvert expectations of a martial flag-waver. It’s natural to assume the cowardly brother will either redeem himself or shown to be completely in the wrong, while the noble brother will be vindicated. In fact, Hell’s Angels ends up having more than a little sympathy with Monte who, while undeniably “yellow” (he looks terrified after his first solo flight and its downhill from there), is also given a fair bit of sympathy when he rants about war being murder and patriotism being just a word. It’s hard not to feel he’s right after watching the insane uber-nationalism of the German zeppelin crew who willingly fling themselves to their death to lighten their ship with cries of “Kaiser and Reich!” on their lips.

Just as it’s hard not to think Roy’s blind-nobility makes him less of a hero and more of a clueless buffoon. How he misses that Helen (who, at one point, staggers out of a bush immediately followed by an officer straightening his uniform) is as shallow as a puddle and faithful as a cat in heat is a complete mystery. It’s hard not to see him as a duped cuckold, cluelessly waiting for Monte in their digs (unaware Monte and Helen are currently going at it), or insanely obsessed with honour as he nearly gets himself killed fighting a duel in Monte’s place. It’s not surprising that (as Monte says) war is “like being drunk – it brings out who you really are”. It makes Monte increasingly wild and selfish, and Roy increasingly mule-like his in rigid following of form.

This subliminal interest is the best spark you can take from the otherwise fairly turgid dialogue scenes. The real interest is those dog fight scenes. And they remain outstanding today. There was no question Hughes wasn’t going to direct those – and he directed them from the sky himself, calling the shots from a plane amongst the action. These sequences are all stunningly assembled and genuinely compelling in their sense of speed and danger. There is also a real visual beauty to them: in particular a shot of a German zeppelin emerging from blue tinged clouds is awe-inspiring. The epic sweep of tight formation planes, swooping closely between each other, tailing each other, bullets flying and pilots whizzing by is brilliant.

And the film doesn’t shirk on the horrors. Flames – whether they come from machine guns or from burning planes – are hand painted yellow to make the destruction stand out. The human impact on the pilots is brilliantly captured. During these battles, pilots will burn or die with blood streaming from their mouth. Panicked flyers will gulp back shots of whiskey midair, or scream in agony as their bullet riddled planes and bodies crash to the ground. Planes ram into each other in fiery explosions, or streak bullets across each other. That’s not to mention the horrifying madness of that German zeppelin crew stepping into the oblivion of a long fall, pushed towards their fate by their fanatically insane captain (who has already sacrificed/murdered sympathetic German Karl – an old college friend of Monte and Roy – to lighten the zeppelin).

The dog fight sequences are compelling and if the drama on the ground never quite reaches these heights, in a way that’s only to be expected. For all the quiet subversion – and it’s up to you how much you think Hughes noticed or cared about that – they are functional moments to carry us to the drama in the skies. That’s what Hell’s Angels does best – and few have done it better.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Whale’s sequel is a masterclass in how more can sometimes be more, a delightful black-comedy

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff (Frankenstein’s monster), Colin Clive (Baron Henry Frankenstein), Valerie Hobson (Elizabeth Frankenstein), Ernest Thesiger (Dr Pretorius), Elsa Lanchester (Mary Shelley/The Bride), OP Heggie (Hermit), Gavin Gordon (Lord Bryon), Douglas Walton (Percy Shelley), Una O’Connor (Minnie), EE Clive (The Burgomaster), Dwight Frye (Karl), Ted Billings (Ludwig), Reginald Barlow (Hans)

What does every studio want after a mega hit? A sequel of course! Directors are never more powerful then when studios will let them do pretty much whatever they want so long as they get another shot at capturing body-sparking lightening in a bottle one more time. James Whale and gang came back for Bride of Frankenstein and produced a classic, more entertaining than the first film, a barmy, balls-to-the-wall piece of nonsense where logic is thrown out, sly jokes abound and the meter is dialled well up to camp. Bride of Frankenstein is exactly the “memorable hoot” Whale wanted to make, and proof that perhaps he had not “drained the well” after all.

Bride of Frankenstein kicks off pretty much where Frankenstein left off – requiring some fast thinking since the creature (Boris Karloff) ended that film incinerated in a burning windmill. Turns out he actually hid in the water-logged basement, emerging to stumble into violence from villagers terrified at this bolt-necked giant’s existence. Meanwhile, a chastened Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) swears he’s out of the reanimation game… only to be dragged back in by his old mentor (presumably a different one to the first film’s Waldmann) the creepy Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger). Pretorius has been experimenting with creating life, and he wants a whole race of these people – so he’ll need a bride for the creature, to get that ball rolling. While the creature fights and flies, Pretorius and Frankenstein fire up the generator and get ready to stitch.

There is more than a little bit of black humour to Bride of Frankenstein, a film Whale clearly never intended to be taken seriously. It’s combined with more than a touch of camp and sprinklings of the absurd with general utter indifference to any rules of time, setting or location. Whale’s gothic world is whatever and whenever he needs it to be at any point. If that means the creature is chucked in a medieval cell one minute and Dr Pretorius is using a telephone to call his underlings the next, that’s fine. Logic is already all over the place, since it opens with Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and Bryon in full period costume recapping the first movie, despite that film being littered with no-end of what would be to them unimaginable technical possibilities.

Whale buttresses his fantasia on Frankenstein by pruning out, probably, the last couple of elements of the book he liked but hadn’t used: the creature’s ability to speak, it’s time out at the secluded hut of a blind man and (of course) the concept of a bride being resurrected. But then Whale also pours all his love into Ernest Thesiger’s sinister and delightfully eccentric Dr Pretorius, the sort of larger-than-life character who leaves all reality behind. Thesiger has a whale of the time, sucking on the sarcastic dialogue like a lemon and delighting in playing the sort of amoral mad man (he even makes Frankenstein look sane) who brings a picnic to a grave-robbing and uses a tomb as a table.

Pretorius’ swiftly brow-beats Frankenstein into saddling back up. Colin Clive – who broke his leg shortly before filming, requiring him to do nearly all his scenes sitting down – is surprisingly restrained, with the old madness only coming to the fore in the Bride’s birthing scene. That birthing scene is a brilliant expansion of the first film, Whale using the increased budget to expert effect to take us up onto the roof of the laboratory, expanding the detail shown of the mechanics of the experiment (Whale uses Dutch angles to dial up the general air of creepy weirdness and clearly was inspired by Metropolis) and launching a creation even odder than the original. As before the design work is exquisite: the Bride – wonderfully played with a ear-piercing screech (based on the swans near her London home) by Elsa Lanchester, her white high-lit hair a masterpiece of memorable, blackly-comic imagery. The Bride makes such a lasting impression, it’s a shock to realise she’s in it for less than five minutes.

Did Whale intend anything to be taken seriously? He tips the wink with Una O’Connor’s opinion-dividing performance of shrieking, Oirish panic as the villager who discovers the surviving creature. Pretorius is introduced showcasing his collection of miniature living people in jars (a bishop, a devil, a mermaid, a queen and a randy Charles Laughton-channelling Henry VIII) the sort of head-turningly bizarre scene that leaves you both delighted and shaking your head in amazement. There is something hilariously odd about the creature being introduced to those human vices, smoking and drinking. Whale was surely chortling to himself at the thought of the creature contentedly blowing smoke circles with the blind hermit or eagerly knocking back a glass with Pretorius.

It’s remarkable that despite this strong leaning into comedy, Bride of Frankenstein still manages to find the humanity in the persecution of the monster. Chased down (once again) by a wild crowd, the creature is tied down to a pole and lifted up, his body unmistakenly in a crucifixion pose. The film’s emotional centrepiece is his sojourn with the blind hermit. It’s impossible not to see more than a touch of Whale’s experience of persecution for his homosexuality in the tender staging of these scenes, two men living contentedly together only to have their partnership condemned the moment the real world intrudes. The gentleness of these scenes becomes very affecting, not least since this is the first (and last) time the creature is treated like a person rather than a monster.

Karloff is, as before, excellent in the lead role – despite his worries about the creature’s mystery being sacrificed on the altar of his fumbling, toddler-like speech. He makes the creature, even more than before, someone reaching out for warmth and connection, disgusted at his own monstrous nature and whose delight at the idea of a bride is strangely touching. (Bride of Frankenstein – a title even name checked at one point by Pretorius – cemented the popular confusion about whether the creature or his creator is ‘Frankenstein’). It’s the monster who also emerges at the film’s conclusion as the closest thing we have to a moral force.

Really Bride of Frankenstein shouldn’t work as half as well as it does. It’s part horror, part black comedy, part farce with scenes that shift from tragedy to knock-about satire. But it’s superbly assembled by Whale – at the top of his game here – and barrels along at such speed (sustained by superb performances, in particular from Karloff, Lanchester and Thesiger creating a portrait of monstrously soft-spoken camp for the ages) and with such full-blooded commitment at every moment that the film never once sinks. It is such a gloriously entertaining, wildly committed piece of pulpy film-making that it’s hard to imagine it could have been done better. And it certainly was the last word in what to do with the monster on-screen, that saw him embrace fear, love, comedy and tragedy all in one go. He probably should have stayed with the dead.

Frankenstein (1931)

Iconic monster film, dark expressionist nightmare that totally reinvented the novel’s public image

Director: James Whale

Cast: Colin Clive (Henry Frankenstein), Mae Clarke (Elizabeth Lavenza), John Boles (Victor Moritz), Boris Karloff (The Monster), Edward van Sloan (Dr Waldman), Frederick Kerr (Baron Frankenstein), Dwight Frye (Fritz), Lionel Belmore (The Burgomaster), Marilyn Harris (Maria)

Has any film shaped the popular idea of a book more than Frankenstein? Ask anyone to describe the monster or the book itself, and you’ll not have to wait too long until you start to hear about bolts in the neck, thunder-struck gothic castles, hunchbacked assistants and labs stuffed with bizarre electrical equipment. Of course, none of that is actually in Mary Shelley’s The Post Modern Prometheus. But it is a key part of James Whale’s creative vision in this Hollywood hit. In fact, so much of a hit that it and its army of sequels led to whole generations convinced Frankenstein was the name of the monster, not his creator.

Frankenstein in fact bears almost no similarity to the original novel at all, checking off a few plot points and duplicating some character names. Other than that, it’s very much its own thing, a big expressionistic nightmare, with everything dialled up as high as those lightening-catching electrical machines can cope with. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) – you’ll note the film even changes his name to the more relatable Henry, with Victor given to his dull-as-dish-water pal Moritz (John Boles) – won’t settle down and marry fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke). Instead, he dreams of creating life, to become like God! And to follow that dream, he’ll dig up bodies, steal laboratory brain specimens from his mentor Dr Waldmann (Edward van Sloan) and stitch them together into a creature (Boris Karloff). But then misunderstandings and ill treatment leads to a series of terrible events.

James Whale’s film is a triumph of atmosphere; its images and visual creativity so haunting it’s not a surprise it effectively overwhelmed the novel. Inspired by German expressionist cinema – you can see the fingerprints of Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Fritz Lang all over it – Whale sets this monster tale in a world of towering, angular buildings, looming shadows and vast steampunk (long before it came into fashion) labs in damp-lined medieval castles. There is a strange timeless quality to Frankenstein: it opens with a shadow-laden graveyard dug up by Henry and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye), but the village feels like it is set in almost any time from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (the costumes in particular are a real hodgepodge). Perhaps this was part of Whale’s intention, to create a timeless metaphor for man’s reach exceeding what’s sensible, to disastrous consequences?

It’s also interesting that, for all the warning of the terrors to come the film opens with from Edward van Sloan (who also portrays Waldmann), we actually end up siding with the creature. A lot of this is due to Boris Karloff’s excellent performance. Without a word of dialogue, Karloff makes this lumbering result of stitched together bits and pieces, into something vulnerable, frightened and child-like, whose violent acts only emerge from tragic misunderstandings or gross provocations. Karloff’s physicality is frequently gentle and timid, the few strangled sounds he makes sound almost scared, and his awkward stumbling resembles a deadly, confused toddler. He needs parenting, not chasing down by a mob.

The film’s key moment is Frankenstein introducing the creature to the daylight – the camera following those towering vertical lines of the set up to into a skylight, with the enchanted creature reaching his arms up to try and touch this magic ball of light. Then Frankenstein smugly slaps it shut and Fritz shoves a torch into the poor creature’s face. The monster may be introduced with all the elements of dread – Whale’s classic introduction a series of striking cuts that pull us closer and closer to the reveal of his restitched head – but it doesn’t take long before you feel really sorry for it. Even if it does have a ‘criminal mind’ stitched into it (a development so out of tone with the treatment of the monster, it feels like a fig leaf to reassure the producers it must be the baddie).

Not least because Frankenstein himself is hardly that sympathetic. Colin Clive – a long-term collaborator with Whale – grabs this larger-than-life part and runs with it, oscillating from scenery-chewing self-aggrandizement (his celebratory screaming has rightly passed into cinematic legend) to self-pitying excuses. It’s telling he never takes a jot of responsibility for either creating the monster, or for his inattention and poor treatment of it directly causing the tragedy it unleashes. Unlike his book counterpart, his arrogance requires witnesses – Elizabeth, Victor and Waldmann – to his experiments, entirely due to his arrogant fury at Waldmann’s questioning his sanity. His first solution, as soon as the creature becomes challenging, is to euthanise it and he never confesses to the lynch mob that take on the creature in the film’s final act that he is its creator.

The lynch mob is responding to the creature’s accidental drowning of a small girl. Again, this killing stems from a misunderstanding. Young Marie – the only person in the film who doesn’t react with horror when she sees the creature, suggesting she instead sees a kindred spirit – invites the delighted creature to join her in a game, tossing flowers into the river. Clapping his hands in delight, the creature joins in for a scene directed with bucolic beauty by Whale – right up until the flowers run out and the creature tosses Marie in instead, only to find she doesn’t float artistically.

As the creature flees in confused panic, Whale cuts to the raucous wedding celebrations in the Frankenstein village, which comes to a crashing close as Marie’s father walks with her body through the crowd, that turns from joy to shock around him. It’s one of several striking moments of fluidic camera work in Frankenstein, Whale employing a tracking shot that follows and partially rotates around the father, while keeping him tightly central in the frame as he walks through the crowds. There are similar moments of dynamic camerawork throughout the film, Whale using every opportunity to make this gothic nightmare world as immersive as possible.

The hyper reality of Frankenstein means it doesn’t really matter that much of the skylines are all too clearly cloth (I like to think Whale deliberately kept the multiple points where the cloth has bunched up in shot to stress the artificiality), since everything about this is dialled up to eleven, from performances, to setting to the grandly staged windmill-finale, hugely impressive in its flame-licked excitement. In fact, it’s all so overblown and gothic, in its set design, shooting and performance that the most grounded, human thing in it is Karloff’s beautifully played creature himself. That feels like no accident and makes Frankenstein a surprisingly subversive film. And also perhaps, even though it strips the creature of much that makes him a character in the novel, made him a modern icon.