If you had to ask me, James Whale is one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever walked the Earth. With today marking his birthday, it feels like a good time to remind the world of his many accomplishments, to understand what makes him a director of high repute that deserves to be mentioned alongside the other Hollywood giants of 1930s cinema like Frank Capra and George Cukor. Sure they released more widely recognized masterpieces, and I wouldn’t fault them for any of their timeless accomplishments, but I’d argue that what Whale did was on another level.
The story goes that Whale got his start in British theater. With positive buzz for his various productions, it makes sense that he was one of the few who could translate the theatrics into the cinematic landscape that honestly elevated it into an art form. In 2020, there’s a near 90 years since this period has passed and with it the many warts that cinema couldn’t help but escape. To cite a popular movie, it was like in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) when silent films went to talkies. The idea of trying to capture the same appeal of cinema was changing rapidly. What once could only be expressed through pictures could now be given audio, components that both elevated the medium and put a whole lot of physical actors out of commission.
There is a good reason that the bigger offenders have been forgotten over time. While Hollywood knew how to make a movie look compelling, their shift to an audio medium is frankly lacking. Some early examples include Broadway Melody of 1929 (1929), which was an early form of musical theater that is impressive if judged chronologically, but as entertainment works like the early form of music videos. It’s more experimental and odd, where the sound isn’t quite layered right and the close-ups no longer have the resonance they did when Greta Garbo did it years before.
Don’t get me wrong. There are tons of great early talkies that I’d recommend. The issue is that some of them are so of their time that they’re either slow or find actors like Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935) not quite meeting their full potential. By the end of the decade, the story would be much different. But for this period, it’s a rough ride where nothing was quite landing in the talkies transition. Only the true auteurs had any luck making art that could stand the test of time.
That is where Whale comes in. Because of his experience with theater, he understood how to produce art that would convey the thrills that audiences wanted. There was a reason that his early-30s films became box office hits, demanding audiences to see it over and over, constantly talking about the visuals that felt so real. There was something timeless about Whale that puts him on par with the more sentimental counterparts, and yet he often got ignored because he was one of the first major genre filmmakers, working alongside directors like Tod Browning in an industry that would define horror for the next near-century.
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To put it simply, Frankenstein (1931) is one of my all-time favorite movies. I could dedicate this whole piece to the personal impact that it’s had on my life (I can even go long on the immediate franchise, but that’s a moot point), but for now, I want to talk about what it says about Whale as a filmmaker. While I haven’t seen his biopic Gods and Monsters (1998), I am well aware of his life story.
He was a flamboyant homosexual whose work was informed by both his time in the theater and his feeling of being an outsider. If you had to ask me, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) have a queer subtext that can be read as the subconscious becoming real. Penny Dreadful creator John Logan has even gone so far as to suggest that LGBT kids are attracted to horror because they feel different, incapable of connecting to the world around them. Considering that The Monster speaks in a series of unintelligible grunts, it’s easy to read into his youthful nature, being misunderstood by a society that fears his presence.
I’m not saying that this is solely what draws me to his work, but it informs so much of what makes him far more interesting as a filmmaker. With his Universal Horror movies, he found these protagonists who were eccentric outsiders, grappling with different forms of humanity. How do you not see Colin Clive’s performance as Dr. Frankenstein as a man pained by something deep inside of him, needing to be properly expressed? For instance, I see The Bride in Bride of Frankenstein as his inability to become heterosexual and, due to the time it was made, having to be punished for it.
But that’s the thing. Whale made them sympathetic in a way that clearly struck a chord with audiences. Frankenstein was considered horrifying, and you have to ask why some still think that. By modern standards, it’s tame. The sequel is more of an outright farce. What are they seeing in Boris Karloff’s phenomenal performance that makes them jump in their seats? What do they see in The Invisible Man (1933) where the bigger horror comes from being invisible to the world?
I think it was that Whale shifted our understanding of horror. If you go to earlier Universal Horror movies like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the scare comes from him being an ugly doofus. It’s juvenile, even if the story around it is superb. The reason we’re scared is because The Monster in Frankenstein has a familiarity, that he’s ALMOST human enough to be recognizable. We see The Invisible Man and notice our own inability to always feel seen by the world around him. Browning is arguably the only other significant horror director of the time to understand that, though it’s also because he worked in the carnival lifestyle that he helped make into sympathetic soap operas.
Whale honestly had another thing from the theater that made him stand out. Not only did he have a strong grasp on character and motivations, but he was a master set designer. When watching The Old Dark House (1932), we’re taken in just as much from the titular house as we are the central story. We spend the whole movie wandering around these halls, entering different rooms that hide with it secrets. And yet, they’re all so captivating, managing to be a haunted house movie without any of the conventions you’d expect from a Vincent Price movie. Everything has a naturalism to it, a build that once again makes the familiar into something subliminal and haunting.
In one of the greatest details that I’ve seen in a Whale movie, the house has a dining quarters whose backdrop is this large grey wall. A nearby fire is constantly roaring as a dramatic conversation is unfolding. When it cuts to a wide shot, we get to see how the fire is clashing with the set, working in something akin to German Expressionism where the flames are shadowing onto the walls, making it look like everything below is in the bowels of hell. It’s a subtle detail, but one that helps to create something implicit in the viewer, making you see paranoid details where there probably wasn’t any.
That’s the thing. Whale knows how to pack a frame with so much meaning. He knows when to let actors linger on a moment, giving in to their dramatic motivations. In Bride of Frankenstein when The Monster befriends a blind man, he lets the moment play out as this chummy meal between friends. It’s funny in part because The Monster smokes a cigar before saying “Good! Good!” but it builds to a painful reality that The Monster feels alone. The blind man is the closest he’s ever had to a friend, and as the moment shifts into something somber, you understand what he’s doing. This isn’t just camp. It’s a deeper understanding and control of emotional understanding.
While I haven’t seen all of his movies, his work in horror has set a bar that is unsurpassed for the era. I’d argue that in the decades since nobody has really matched it. Maybe it’s because Universal Horror existed in a more censored time, but it found ways to imply its fears instead of adding gruesome and sadistic images that scar generations. There’s nothing inherently graphic about Frankenstein, and yet it’s terrifying. We buy into it because of this rich character depth that makes these characters feel real enough, that we’re engaging in a cinematic form of vaudeville.
That is also what makes me love his adaptation of Show Boat (1936). If you know Show Boat for any reason, it’s because of Paul Robeson’s cover of “Old Man River” in this version. His voice is so deep and immediately echoic that you feel every note. Not only that, but the way that he uses editing and montage within this reflects his gifts, finding ways to elevate cinema into a visual art form. It’s easy to see in the type of performances he got out of Karloff, where his acting came largely from his physical movements. He knows how to control sound as well as visual in ways that others were unfairly trying to compensate during the same time.
So honestly, Show Boat is not the greatest narrative musical in the world, but I’d argue it set a template for how movie musicals should be filmed from this time. They needed to be more than vapid spectacle like The Great Ziegfeld (1936). They needed to convey movement and story within each note, managing to convey the potential of a narrative to grow with voice-over music and fast cutting between moments. Whatever Whale achieved in horror (which was a lot), he brought with him to Show Boat and makes me skeptical to watch the other adaptations, if just because I doubt anyone will sell me on “Old Man River” quite like Robeson.
For me, Whale is a filmmaker that needs to be remembered for his many accomplishments as a filmmaker. You can argue that he was marginalized for working largely in horror, but what he did was apply dramatic layers that made monster movies more empathetic, capable of being more complex than jump scares. There’s a reason that we can look at Frankenstein and still feel some emotional response while The Phantom of the Opera has a chintzy quality to it. Both are great in their own right, but the former makes you care and see The Monster as human, or someone you can persuade to better himself.
Maybe it’s because it was the most indicative of how I see Whale’s personal life. In a time where everything remotely controversial needed to be coded, he found ways to make his own social struggles into mainstream art. He brought theater to Hollywood in ways that became universal (no pun intended). He was an outsider, but one who was more in line with Charles Chaplin. Someone who saw the medium as a way to play with technique as well as the story. In the process, it’s not just cringe-inducing relics where the audio is off and the acting has somehow regressed to something unnatural. If anything, it’s the most convincing dramatic work of its time set to some of the most astounding set design and technical achievements as well.
If you’re someone who thinks that early cinema is “boring,” I’d suggest at least comparing your experiences to Frankenstein or any of Whale’s major works. To me, they’re capable of transcending any dated feel and are just works that entertain. It’s as timeless as the novel it was (VERY loosely) based on. This is what early cinema was capable of achieving, and few directors would catch on right away. It took some time to recognize that he wasn’t making stories about scaring people but making them see themselves in more humane and empathetic ways.
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