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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 10/11/2025

James Whale

James Whale should get as much credit as any other individual for both the elevation and fall of Universal Studios' ownership in the 1930s. His four horror features for Carl Laemmle Jr., Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein represent the pinnacle of the studio's efforts at bringing literary-sourced horror to the screen. Four films that were so successful that they set the financial path for the studio for almost twenty years.

And yet, right after Bride of Frankenstein, he made Show Boat in 1936, a cinematic adaptation of a Ziegfeld musical that was a major box office success but which had been so expensive and went over-budget during production that the producing father and son pair were forced to give up control of the studio to their creditors. That change in studio executive backing ended up leaving Whale without anyone to support him leading to post-production on his next film, The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front based on the source sequel by the original novel's author Erich Maria Remarque, which Universal massively reshot to soften it, hoping to get it past Nazi censors to sell in Germany. (It didn't work. The film bombed horribly everywhere.)

And Whale was essentially homeless creatively after that. He had a contract with Universal to work out, so he made a handful of small films (a couple of them pretty good) while lending himself out to other studios like MGM, Warner Brothers, and Columbia for individual picture deals (which was how Howard Hawks made his entire career) until he just grew too tired to make any more movies and quit in 1941. He invested well, lived off of that and with his partner, producer David Lewis, and eventually committed suicide by drowning himself in a pool in 1957 because of health issues.

Watching his films, though, it was obvious, early, what drove him, and it wasn't the fact that he was gay.

The Great War

Here's the page on Wikipedia about Bride of Frankenstein, specifically the Interpretation section that includes a more than 500 word section about the Gay reading of the film. It is a nearly endless litany of how every little thing in the film, from the Monster's calling both the hermit and the bride "friend" to almost everything else, coded as being about the gay experience. And then it ends with quotes from Whale friends who call the entire interpretation bunk. Why include the section anyway? (Oh, wait, Wikipedia, I get it now.)

Actually watching all of his movies, especially in order, the only thing one can come away with as an animating experience in Whale's life that fed his creativity is World War I. And it's not some kind of remote, "war is hell" thing from an intellectual. Second Lieutenant James Whale of the Worcestershire Regiment was commissioned in July of 1916 and was in the trenches in Flanders in August of 1917 when he was captured in the fighting with the German Army. He was held as a prisoner of war until December 1918.

I actually didn't know this slice of his biography until after watching his first two films and reading a brief summary of his third, Waterloo Bridge right before watching it. I was curious because all three, his adaptation of the stage play he had originally directed on the stage, Journey's End, the sound segments of Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels, and Waterloo Bridge were all stories of soldiers dealing with emotional effects of The Great War (well, Whale's parts of Hell's Angels, Hughes' parts were pew-pew flying).

And that knowledge fed directly into my latest viewing of Frankenstein. When I do these lists of films, I always make sure to rewatch the films I'd seen and even reviewed before because the new context of the films around them provide a different framing that can inform the films differently. I don't think there's a more potent example of me getting a completely different thematic read of a film on a second review than with Whale's Frankenstein. It completely recast the film in my mind, making Henry Frankenstein and the Monster into scarred men who couldn't communicate with anyone who hadn't shared their experiences, something that was intimately related to the characters in Journey's End, a connection made all the stronger by the presence of Colin Clive as Captain Stanhope in the earlier film and Dr. Frankenstein in the latter.

Even the film made in the 90s about Whale's later years in life, Gods and Monsters starring Ian McKellen as Whale, Brendan Fraser as a fictional gardener who befriends him, and directed by Bill Condon, (a film I assume, like all movies about real events, to be roughly 90% fictional) leaned heavily into the WWI element as foundational (though the film takes a different approach than my meager analysis).

However, this thematic line grows increasingly frayed afterwards. I think it's fair to see some strains of it in The Old Dark House, The Kiss Before the Mirror, a film about a lawyer who decides to kill his wife when he represents another man who killed his own wife, and even up through The Invisible Man (the main comparison I make is to Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films, especially the second, but the idea from the earlier Whale films is still there in a form), and Bride of Frankenstein, but By Candlelight shows that Whale was not monomaniacally interested in talking about the war.

Lubitsch and the Studio System




I bring up Ernst Lubitsch pretty much whenever I can because his Hollywood films were absolute joys of formalistic technique, light humor, and masquerade, and it's easy to bring him up because Hollywood loved him and loved to imitate him. Whale was no different, and By Candlelight, the film he made after The Invisible Man and before Bride of Frankenstein, is an entertaining trifle in the vein of Lubitsch (it's about the servant to an Austrian prince who pretends to be the Austrian prince to win the heart of a girl).

I bring it up to highlight how I could probably stretch the film thin to the point of breaking to fit it into the WWI, soldiers can't speak to people who haven't been part of the conflict, line that's extremely evident in most of Whale's earliest films, but it would only be worth it to justify an analysis and say almost nothing about the film itself. The film is purely an entertainment in the vein of a popular filmmaker at the time, and it's a great place to highlight the fact that Whale, for all the talk people make about his German Expressionistic influences in Frankenstein, was actually a chameleon director. He changed his style from film to film, depending on the film. There are a couple of flourishes he retains across them, mostly a singular and long dolly shot from the furthest reaches of a set to highlight the space, but ultimately Show Boat looks almost nothing like Frankenstein because Whale obviously knew that he didn't need to make Show Boat look like Frankenstein. He was an accomplished studio director who could take assignments and modify his own methods to the material.

And that becomes important because it explains so much of his later films, those after The Road Back when he became the journeyman, riding out his Universal contract and getting individual jobs with other studios. He was well-practiced at setting aside his deepest artistic desires to just do the assignment, and when he was stripped of most creative power and just managed sets to film often subpar scripts, he just did it. There's precious little of Whale as an artist after The Road Back because he just no longer had the power, or perhaps even the inclination, to push for it. There's good stuff back there. Wives Under Suspicion, a remake of The Kiss Before the Mirror, is worth some attention, and there's also his ornate production of The Man in the Iron Mask.

But what made Whale interesting and unique, able to really breathe life in Frankenstein with all of its changes from the book, got smothered by the realities of studio filmmaking and falling out of favor.

The Road Back


The Road Back was the final half of Whale's downfall in the system. The first half, of course, was the success that was Show Boat which led to the Laemmle family losing control of Universal to its creditors. The Road Back was just Universal throwing Whale and his film under the bus to appease literal Nazis in Germany who hated the source book, calling the author Erich Maria Remarque a traitor and unpatriotic for his anti-war stances. The existing film is so butchered with reshoots done by another director that it's hard to see what the film could have been.

I was reminded of John Huston's adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, a film that MGM cut down to the bone but one can still kind of see the film that Huston was trying to make through all of the rash editing decisions. It's hard to that with The Road Back because so much was reshot. The big stuff remains, obviously, like some large crowd scenes around unrest over the economic situation in Weimar later in the film, the more serious stuff in general, is obviously from the original shoot. But it's all undone by so many frequent cuts to lighter scenes that obviously don't fit.

It's such a compromised film that if someone were to list The Road Back as a lost film, I wouldn't begrudge the label. And it's obvious that it was supposed to be something big for Whale personally. A big, $1 million, film about The Great War and the soldiers' experience coming home. It's perfectly in his wheelhouse. Adapted from a celebrated, best-selling author like Remarque? A book so controversial is got banned in Germany? And Universal butchered the final cut so much that no one liked it and there's almost nothing of it left.

No wonder he ended up walking away from the industry.

Legacy


Whale's legacy will always be his four horror films, mostly the three that fall within the umbrella of the monster movies. I go into these runs with an eye towards finding the filmmaker away from his better known work, like how I found that the "real" Fritz Lang was much more than Metropolis and that, in fact, Metropolis wasn't reflecting of Lang overall that much at all. That's not the case with Whale, though.

He is his horror films. It's something like 75% of him as a filmmaker. You can see the major WWI elements in most of them in some form, so the more overt expressions in movies like Journey's End, Hell's Angels, Waterloo Bridge, and even the reduced form of The Road Back become almost redundant (to continue with the numbers, this would be about 24% of who he was as a filmmaker with the final 1% being studio hatchet man).

The horror movies are his best films. They are his most complete expressions of what he wanted to say in the cinematic form. They are most of his best made stuff. They are him at the peak of his power with the least interference from studio heads. There's more than just those, but they end up being supporting elements rather than defining ones.

He probably hated that, but it's true.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

TRON: Ares

Roofman

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Wives Under Suspicion (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It wouldn't last too much longer, but it's still nice to see that he was still trying in his diminished professional state." [Amazon Prime]

The Man in the Iron Mask (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not great cinema. It's a solid entertainment. It's Whale's last big success in his career. It's a fine, light entertainment that does its job and ends without much fuss. I've seen much worse efforts." [YouTube]

They Dare Not Love (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "His legacy will always be the monster movies, but They Dare Not Love and others of his work showed that he was more than that." [Library]

Black Sunday (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It really could have used another writer, but Bava made the absolute most of what he could." [Amazon Prime]

Erik the Conqueror (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's obvious that Bava wasn't really operating in his comfort zone in these more plot-driven exercises, but I don't think he was that far from making them work. He probably needed a better sense of structure, though." [Library]

Black Sabbath (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Solid, entertaining, and stylish, it's Bava precisely where he should be." [Plex]

The Whip and the Body (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not some great piece of horror cinema, but it's solidly entertaining and showing that Bava could disappear a bit into gothic horror, subsuming his more outrageous stylistic flourishes in favor of a more muted visual tone. I'm kind of glad that Bava didn't rewrite it, is all." [Plex]

Planet of the Vampires (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's all style and no substance, but the style is a good time at the movies. This is Bava in his element. I can wish all day that he worked from better scripts, but this is nothing to sneeze at." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 11/1, and it will be about the directing career of Mario Bava.