Bride of Frankenstein

"To a new world of gods and monsters." Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) has the recap during a stormy night, Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) puts up with his condescension and resumes the tale. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) hopes to put the ordeal behind him and settle down with his fiancée (Valerie Hobson), his creation (Boris Karloff) rises out of a charred windmill and into a hostile world. The scientist doesn't quite regret profaning death, "for what a wonderful vision that was," enter Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) to pick the experiment back up. (The cadaverous mentor augustly pulls bottles out of a casket to showcase squeaking miniature specimens, including a horny king and a cowering queen and a disapproving bishop who might be the censor.) Meanwhile, the Monster endures a Calvary in the woods and receives bread and wine from a sightless hermit (O.P. Heggie): "Perhaps you're afflicted, too." The full flower of James Whale's art—simultaneously a full-bodied tragic fantasy and its own perverse parody, a heartfelt paean to mutants and the richest vein of expressionism in Thirties Hollywood. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis hold sway, unmistakably.) Karloff's brute of sorrows is the solitary sympathetic figure in this cavalcade of Daumier caricatures, his soulful grunting contrasts with the daft shrieking of Una O'Connor's desiccated biddy. Wizards at play, a picnic in the crypt. "Our mad dream is only half realized." The symphonic delirium builds to a climax set to the metronome of a freshly-carved ticker, the unveiling of the stitched mate gives Lanchester's priceless pantomime of a thunderstruck ostrich hissing at her forlorn bridegroom, the poignant and the grotesque melding in an indelible travesty of marriage. "Love dead, hate living," Whale accordingly spares the normal couple and detonates the misfit family. One cracked Brit recognizes another, and thus Russell's Gothic. Cinematography by John J. Mescall. With Douglas Walton, E.E. Clive, Dwight Frye, Reginald Barlow, Lucien Prival, Ted Billings, Mary Gordon, and John Carradine. In black and white.