Father of Horror

The Lethal Blooms of James Whale

Mae Clarke remembered James Whale demonstrating how he wanted Boris Karloff to move as the creature in Frankenstein (1931). “I remember all the gestures the monster did were Whale’s—I saw him do them,” Clarke said. At his best Whale knew exactly what he wanted his films and his players to look like, for he had been an actor himself on stage during the 1920s, and he had also been a set designer for plays. He loved stylized movies and movements, and he was influenced by directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Paul Leni, particularly Leni’s horror-comedy The Cat and the Canary (1927).

Whale’s overpowering instinct as an artist was to sneer, laugh, and blow things up, and he had a contempt for most of humanity so strong that it can sometimes be hard to take. He came from a working class background and served time in a prison camp during World War I, and he made his name as a director with Journey’s End, a war play by R.C. Sherriff that Whale adapted into a stylistically cautious film in 1930. “I’m different from the others, you don’t understand!” cries a frightened soldier at one point in this picture, but the feeling of an all-male brotherhood here is strong, even if it thrives on repressed emotion.

The figurehead of Whale’s first movie is Captain Stanhope, a man whose nerves are shot, and Stanhope is played by Colin Clive, a very handsome and very tormented actor with an expressively raspy speaking voice that he can charge with the most hysterical anger and grief. The homoerotic device in Journey’s End is that a young soldier named Raleigh (David Manners) is the brother of Stanhope’s fiancée back home, and it is said that Raleigh looks a lot like this fiancée. Whale chose Manners for this part, and he gives him several close-ups where he looks beautiful in a highly feminine way. There is a moment late in this movie when Stanhope helps Raleigh to look over a trench where Clive briefly puts his hand on Manners’s ass, a fleeting bit of surreptitious contact that alerts us to the physical pull between them.

Whale next chose Kent Douglass to play the innocent soldier in his romantic wartime follow-up Waterloo Bridge (1931), and he had a lot of trouble with Douglass, who was physically clumsy and couldn’t seem to get anything right, so that Whale finally shut down filming and just rehearsed him for a few days. Douglass is just as beautiful here as Manners is in Journey’s End, and in exactly the same way, and so it is likely that Whale had a specific male type that he was drawn to: pretty and fragile.

Whale had been called upon to direct the dialogue sequences for Howard Hughes’s epic Hell’s Angels (1930), and he was exasperated by the inexperienced Jean Harlow, but she comes across delightfully in the finished film. Whale directed Mae Clarke very well and very carefully in Waterloo Bridge, and she is excellent until her big scene of hysteria at the climax, where she gets forced and over the top, alas. So Whale was inconsistent with actors, and he seems to go out of his way to ignore a young Bette Davis in Waterloo Bridge, shooting the back of her head and having her dialogue come from off-screen.

Whale came into his own with Frankenstein, which was visually inspired by German Expressionist silent films, especially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with its warped set design. The settings here are extremely expressive, from the famous laboratory of Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) to a classroom where we see one set of venetian blinds is pulled up crookedly while the other two are fairly straight. There is an ever-so-slightly camp feeling to the tone of this movie, and a kind of longing expressed in the plaintive, helpless hand movements of Karloff’s creature.

Clive is at his handsomest here as he neglects his fiancée (Mae Clarke) in order to be off with his hunchback assistant (Dwight Frye) digging up dead bodies in an attempt at reanimation. It was Whale’s lover David Lewis who suggested Karloff to play the creature after seeing him in a play, and Karloff brings just the right touch of slow-minded poetry to the part, even if he and Whale sometimes disagreed about interpretation.

In the nightmarish scene where the creature drowns little Maria (Marilyn Harris), Karloff wanted to place her gently in the water, but Whale insisted that he fling her in. Whale had been in a war and had seen savage things, and so his flippant attitude toward death and horror can still be shocking. Also shocking, but in a very different way, is his snobbery and the way he indulges the character of Henry’s father Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr), who at one point orders his servants be given a lesser grade of champagne at a celebration because he thinks that as members of a lower class they won’t appreciate the best champagne.

Whale could do nothing with The Impatient Maiden (1932), an assignment for Universal where he had yet another pretty young male lead in Lew Ayres. But The Old Dark House (1932) is a high camp horror classic, done in a queer and morbid style that was entirely Whale’s own. “No beds, they can’t have beds!” cries Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) when several stranded travelers need to shelter at her home for the night, and there is something about this line and this vehemently absurd line reading from Moore that encapsulates Whale’s slant on family as a kind of hell.

Rebecca’s religious fanaticism is seen as life denying and grotesque, but it has a peculiar strength, too. Looking at the beautiful young Margaret (Gloria Stuart) in her white evening gown, Rebecca grabs the material of the dress and says, “That’s fine stuff, but it’ll rot!” Poking her finger at Margaret’s bosom, Rebecca says, “That’s finer stuff still, but it’ll rot, too, in time!”

Her gloating is visually underlined when Whale shoots Moore’s face in a distorted mirror and shoots Stuart’s face in the same way, smashing in her loveliness so that we can see it won’t last and making us aware that there might be something ugly underneath it. Whale was in his early forties at this point, and he loved the money and sunshine in Hollywood, and the beautiful young guys. But he was not a romantic. He was wised-up to the point of cynicism, and he saw the humor in everything.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) is Whale’s least-known major film. He lavishes attention on a very stylized opening where Gloria Stuart rushes to see her lover (Walter Pidgeon) but stops to stare at her own reflection in a rippling pool of water surrounded by flowers. This is the first Whale movie where enormous flower arrangements start to dominate his compositions. “Flowers are so conceited, you know,” Pidgeon tells Stuart here. “Your beauty must have humiliated them!” The tone here is pure Whale: camp, sophisticated, insincere, but shot through with menace, or shot down, for Stuart’s husband shoots her and kills her off early. An intricate courtroom drama follows, given juice by Whale’s love for camera movement, which can feel nearly promiscuous, but not quite.

He used very Expressionist images for The Invisible Man (1933), a showy movie with lots of sharp edges and angles. Whale films Stuart again against a huge flower arrangement and uses elegant camera moves to enliven scenes that might seem like just exposition, and he delights in the roaring misanthropy of Claude Rain’s invisible madman, especially the way he breaks up and torments an English countryside much like the one Whale grew up in. There was an anarchist in Whale, and an anti-social attitude that took delight in upsetting the status quo. He hates groups and mobs of people and he loves seeing them thwarted and routed and disrupted, and he also loves the dandy-ish hand movements of Rains in his bandages.

Whale took over By Candlelight (1933), an ill-cast high comedy with an incessant musical score, and he showed little interest in One More River (1934) apart from his doting over the performance of stage diva Mrs. Patrick Campbell. But then he made what many people consider his masterpiece, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a sequel that takes lots of chances with switches in tone. We see the creature kill both of the parents of little Maria from the first film, and this is followed almost immediately by some low comedy screeching from Una O’Connor. That juxtaposition can feel heartless, but death was a joke to Whale, who had seen so much of it in the war.

Whale wants our sympathy to be with the creature in Bride of Frankenstein and not the townspeople with their torches, even to the point of using Christ imagery several times when the creature is tormented, yet the creature murders quite a few of them, including another young girl whose body is found by her schoolmates; this murder happens off screen, which makes it even more unsettling. “I love dead…hate living,” the creature says famously here.

Whale was fond of Remember Last Night? (1935), a brittle comedy mystery in which it only gradually becomes clear that we are meant to dislike the drunken society people at its center. George Cukor, who was Whale’s gay arch-rival socially in Hollywood, would have loved these characters, but Whale hates them, and he makes sure that we see how much their servants hate them, especially in a close-up of a very angry-looking African American gardener.

This social awareness flowered in Show Boat (1936), a lavish and exquisitely handled film of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical. Whale admired and respected Paul Robeson, and he makes sure that Robeson’s Joe is our identification figure; the story is explicitly seen through his eyes. After Magnolia (Irene Dunne) does a very offensive blackface routine, Whale cuts to an image of actual African American people sitting together outside in silence, oppressed, brutalized, and ignored.

Whale came to grief on The Road Back (1937), a war story that foundered on script weaknesses, last-minute cutting and re-shooting by others, and the crucial miscasting of the inexperienced but very good-looking John King in the lead. Whale chose King himself, and he was unable to do anything with his inadequacies as shooting progressed. But he made one more major film, The Great Garrick (1937), where he mixes his distinctive moving camera style with some very theatrical proscenium-like staging and has the men posturing in a very dandy-ish way.

A highly rarified costume picture, The Great Garrick has complex things to say about acting and about being convincing as what you pretend to be, and it cost a lot of money for Warner Brothers and lost a lot of money, and so this marked the end of Whale’s time as a prestige director. Studio head Jack Warner disliked Whale and didn’t like that Warner Brothers producer David Lewis lived with him, and this didn’t help matters.

Whale made six more features after The Great Garrick, but his energy and talent were not in them. It’s especially distressing to see the very cheap-looking sets in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), which sometimes look like painted backdrops, after Whale had taken such time and care with his settings in the past. He went into reluctant retirement during World War II and only emerged for an unreleased short film of William Saroyan’s one-act Hello Out There (1949), which features very Expressionist warped prison bars and a final moment where the two main characters reach out to each other like Whale’s creature reaches out to us and to God.

By the 1950s, Whale had become a hedonist who threw pool parties for attractive young guys and kept a pornographic diary. After a period of ill health, he drowned himself in his pool in 1957, and the time before this suicide was imaginatively and sensitively dramatized by Christopher Bram in his novel Father of Frankenstein in 1995, which in turn was made into the very enjoyable Gods and Monsters (1998), where the older Whale was played with camp sexual swagger by Ian McKellen.

Writer-director Bill Condon continually frames McKellen in Gods and Monsters against flower arrangements of all kinds, a visual nod to Whale’s own love for flowers that might be jealous of human beauty, exemplified here by Brendan Fraser’s sexy, confused, but decent gardener character. So Whale has lived on, and not just as a man who was a pioneer of the horror genre but as a tough-minded gay artist who had experienced horror himself. He delighted in smashing things and sending up conventions, perhaps with the hope that after everything is destroyed a new order might grow up in its place, a new world set into motion by cockeyed, sex-loving, humorous outcasts like himself.