Journey’s End: Remembering Colin Clive on His Birthday

“I’m no Clark Gable in the matter of looks; I require a good dramatic play before my fatal charm is discernible.” —Colin Clive

Fatal, indeed.

On this date in 1900, Clive Clive came into the world. In 1937, he died alone and unhappy in an oxygen tent, succumbing to alcohol-exacerbated tuberculosis. He didn’t stay here for long, but in some ways he never left.

He lives in a thousand imitations of his broken-reed voice, in horror movies that he hated making, in the dormant celluloid of films not available for distribution, and in my cinephiliac obsession. He always seemed to be a bundle of nerves—even beyond the diegetic gallery of tightly-wrapped characters he played, from the alcoholic Captain Stanhope to the blasphemous Dr. Frankenstein to the traumatized Stephen Orlac.

The twitchy, overblown energy of Clive’s performances, his harnessed panic, makes you somehow more aware of what the film critic Laura Mulvey has called death at 24 frames per second, the poignant passage of time as captured by the camera.

There are many things that I would like to say to Clive, but someone else pretty much wrote it all down and actually sent it to him when he was still around to read it:

“I want to thank you for the little bit of rare beauty you have given me, a real spark of something which does not exist in the world today. I am not speaking of your great acting nor the great part you brought to life so expertly. Others have done great acting before, and there have been many great parts written. I am speaking of something which, probably, was very far from the mind of the author when he wrote Journey’s End, and from your own when you acted it. Perhaps that which I saw in you exists only in my own mind and no one else would see it, or care to see. I am speaking of your achievement in bringing to life a completely heroic human being.”

This is an excerpt from a beautifully written fan letter by no less than Ayn Rand (!) who saw Clive perform in a stage revival of Journey’s End in 1934. She was herself a successful playwright at the time. Clive replied that her praise meant a lot to him. I hope that he internalized some of it. Whatever anyone may think or feel about Ayn Rand, I must admit that she seized on a key aspect of Colin Clive.

It’s ironic that Rand, who championed iron wills and inner strength, should have so admired a man whose weaknesses and insecurities destroyed him. And yet, Clive was not just a downward spiral, but an aspiration towards something higher.

All of his performances have a grace and beauty to them, as if even the most loathsome characters could have been better people—should have been, but were cut off by some cruel twist of fate.

When Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein delivers his speech about clouds and stars and eternity, he becomes my personal definition of the heroic in mankind. In this case, I know exactly what Rand was on about.

Some actors have fans, and that’s just fine. Colin Clive has a cult. I wonder what he would have thought of us, the endless Googlers of his image, holding vigil over his memory. I’m not entirely sure that he would have been pleased. He may well have been a trifle freaked out.

But I would like to remember him on his 113^th birthday with a few words about his first film, in which he recreated his signature stage role: Captain Stanhope, a part he seemed born to play.

The cast of Journey’s End and James Whale listen to the radio on the set.

Directed by James Whale, Journey’s End reminds me a lot of Das Boot: quite long, claustrophobic, and character-driven. After two hours, confined almost entirely to the trench set, we feel as though we’re really in there with these damned, laughing fellows. We come recognize and cherish their foibles and mannerisms through the intimacy of the camera.

I must confess, though, the first time I saw this, I found myself disappointed by how terribly uncinematic it seems. Then again, overwhelmingly stationary shots are par for the course in an early talkie.

Whale matter-of-factly plunks us down in the trench and lets most of the action unfold in medium long shots, with the occasional significant close-up—a yucky blancmange, a box of candles, hands opening a letter. Apart from the striking chiaroscuros of a few bombardment scenes and some muddy tracking shots, we get little sense of the innovating flair James Whale clearly had for making horror jump off the screen.

However, trench warfare isn’t cinematic, is it? It’s not a sweeping crane shot. It’s not lyrical in the least. It’s creaky, stale, and soggy. Journey’s End manages to convey these qualities aptly, while still mobilizing the force of our bond with the characters to hold our attention. By about ten minutes in, we like these unfortunate chaps. We wonder which ones of them are going to die. We hope that the causalities will be minimal.

The cast works remarkably well together. David Manners, in particular, will surprise you if you’ve only seen him play juvenile romantic leads. As Raleigh, he transforms from the fresh-cheeked schoolboy soldier into a mortified, disillusioned young man. Returning from a raid in which most of the men died, Raleigh collapses onto a bed; Whale gives us a close-up of Manners who really did pull out all the stops. He looks shattered, hollow-eyed, sweaty, and broken—a far cry from his wooden pretty boy reputation.

Whale does occasionally oblige us with moments of conspicuous filmic brilliance. For instance, at the very end, when the cowardly Hibbert hesitates to join the front line, we get a shot of the doorway to the top of the trench, where a body is being carried past on a stretcher in silhouette. It borders on allegory: the doorway to death. The image shifts towards abstraction, like the famous reaper shots in Dreyer’s Vampyr. A WWI veteran himself, Whale knew how to reduce trench warfare to a bare, razor-sharp grisaille. This touch foreshadows the morbid, metaphysical resonance of Frankenstein.

Just as Frankenstein begins before it starts with the sounds of weeping that precede the opening images of the funeral, the deep, booming bass of exploding shells begins over the credits of Journey’s End—and keeps banging away through the film until the audience’s nerves have gone to pieces, too. Pretty astute use of sound for 1930.

Returning to our leading man, Clive became Stanhope. Or perhaps Stanhope became Clive. One can understand why Whale insisted that Clive be imported from England immediately, as no other actor would do.

This was rather unusual, that a stage actor unseasoned by cinema experience be brought thousands of miles for a single part only. Well, from the moment Clive enters the dugout set—his face half-hidden from the camera by his metal helmet, brushing briskly by, trying to drop his knapsack on his bunk, then pulling the strap off where he caught it on his shoulder with a weary tug—his every movement rings utterly true. We never feel that he’s playing for the camera, which I consider a small miracle, since he had never acted for one before.

Drunk parts are notoriously hard and perhaps Clive wasn’t faking drunk. Whatever Clive’s consumption of whisky was during production, though, Stanhope’s state of inebriation varies through so many shadings of prickly, dreamy, and cheerily garrulous that we’re watching a person shot through a prism—all the emotions that usually coexist in diluted form come through in vivid contrast. He portrays a man fractured and fragmented into pieces, pieces that some central, guiding insight is trying like mad to hold together.

The thing that nurtures Stanhope, his perspicacity, his ability to understand the point of staying strong in the midst of pointlessness, is also the thing that makes him need to numb himself out with alcohol. Like a plant which, when its growth upwards is blocked off, twists around but keeps on growing, Stanhope’s passion for life has been stunted by war into the desire to die like a man—the only option left. Part child and part old soul, Clive’s Stanhope shines with the feverish glow of the actor’s own incandescent torment.

I consider Stanhope the flip side of Clive’s Frankenstein. Both are individuals attuned to some higher significance. Stanhope delivers a marvelous speech about giddy stars and mortality that almost certainly inspired the famous monologue from Frankenstein (which was not in the shooting script, incidentally). We recognize in Stanhope, as in Frankenstein, a brutal hubris that holds everyone to a high standard—but himself to an almost impossible standard.

Perhaps most importantly, Whale shows both men (Stanhope and Frankenstein) to be rather childlike. Remember how Frankenstein, seeing Elizabeth, takes a few steps and collapses in his laboratory when his father comes for him? That moment echoes a scene in Journey’s End when, consumed by worries and heavily inebriated, Stanhope falls into his bunk and partially out of frame. His head and shoulders are off-screen as the fatherly Sergeant Osborne puts a blanket on him. It’s as if he disappeared for a moment, regressed into a place where he’s no longer trapped in the trenches, but he then calls pathetically, “Tuck me up!” In both films, Whale and Clive deliver moving depictions of men returning to helpless boyhood on the brink of exhaustion.

In one of the most moving scenes of the film, Osborne reads a letter from Raleigh, who happens to be the brother of Stanhope’s fiancée. Stanhope fears that Raleigh will unmask him as a drunkard and ruin his reputation with the girl he loves, but instead, as Osborne reads the letter, Stanhope hears nothing but kind words for his spirit and leadership. The play of emotions on Clive’s face is, as usual, extraordinary. We spot relief, yes, but also anguish, sadness, an attempt to gather his courage, as though he were facing down German machine guns. I have to commend Clive on this unique interpretation, but a very genuine one, as I believe that praise is the most humbling thing in this world. Praise frightens Stanhope more than criticism, because being a fine fellow is an ideal he has to live up to. Heroism is his curse.

Clive exuded a borderline ludicrous modesty in his interviews, claiming that anyone could have done his parts well, that it was the writing or the directing that did most of the work. This quote, from a 1932 issue of Picture Show magazine, characterizes his attitude towards fame and his obvious talent:

“It took me ten years to learn my job on the provincial stage—of course, I’m still learning now; but I’m afraid it will take me a lot longer to learn anything really worthwhile about films. The technical side is so interesting, and if ever I do master this part of making pictures I would like to produce pictures and give up acting altogether. 

“You see, I’m little more than a puppet really as far as film work is concerned. The director does all the brain work. He is the man who makes the picture.”  

I think that praise frightened this self-deprecating man as much as it scared Stanhope. Well, that’s too bad. I want to praise how he ruffles a dying friend’s hair, while looking away from the body in horror. I want to praise how disobligingly nasty and snappish he acts at times in the film, yet still makes us care for him. I want to praise him for “the little bit of beauty” he bequeathed to us with his performance.

Watch Journey’s End and I think you will too.

(Note: I refuse to post screenshots of this film because the print on YouTube, as well as the one on my DVD, look like they’ve been dropped in the mud at the Battle of Ypres. You can watch the full movie by clicking here, although it’s a crime against humanity that someone has not restored this magnificent film about the tragedy of war. Since no one has, I’ve decided to include a lot of publicity stills and materials in this post which I gleaned from the fantastic Tumblrs of missanthropicprinciple, sullivanstrvls, and, of course, colincliveforever. Do give them a look. They post terrific movie-related images and reflections and they have my gratitude.)

The Grand (Guignol) Finale: Mad Love and Film as Amputation

“He seemed to be present, and yet he did not seem to be present. No wonder a scientist the next day called it: ‘the nearest thing to a resurrection.’”

—Fitzhugh Green on the debut of synchronous sound in a short recorded speech by Will Hays

“Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he’s dead. Sometimes I feel that these records are all that’s left of Stephen Orlac.”

—Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) in Mad Love

To get us warmed up, it’s trivia time, people. Who is the father of modern intelligence testing?

Alfred Binet, the brain behind the Stanford-Binet IQ test? Yes! Correct.

Okay, now for the tough one: what was his hobby?

No takers? Alright then.

It gives me great pleasure to inform you this eminent psychologist spent his spare time cowriting ultra-violent thriller plays for that notorious Paris establishment, le Théâtre du Grand Guignol—a famous horror theater which served as the inspiration for the macabre theater in Karl Freund’s 1935 Mad Love.

Really, chew on that for a while. I mean, what if you found out that, say, B.F. Skinner wrote torture porn scripts in between experiments? You must admit, that little fact does rather re-contextualize psychology.

I offer this factoid in order to suggest how deep and scientific terror really is, and how closely fear (and the perverse fascination with things that scare us) intertwines with other facets and phenomena of human psychology—like intelligence, genius, love, and hate. There’s something to be said for works of horror that don’t rely upon the supernatural, but rather sets out to examine the infinite cruelties which the mind inflicts upon itself… and on others.

Mad Love breathes life into the essence of sadism and lurid erotic fixations. This grisly tale focuses on Dr. Gogol, a gifted surgeon who falls in love with a horror actress, Yvonne. He initially tries to win her love when he saves Stephen Orlac, Yvonne’s famous pianist husband, by grafting on the hands of a guillotined murderer. That fails to get him the girl, so Gogol changes tactics and decides to try to drive the aforementioned pianist hubby bat-shit insane. It’s a quirky movie, full of weird, silly diversions, but isn’t that just like the brain of a madman?

Oh, the beloved bizarreness of this movie!

As I watch and rewatch this movie, feeling slightly dirty, like the Daughter of Dr. Gogol, I’ve come to notice the abundance of clever, mordant parallels that stitch the film together.

For instance, the opening credits end not with a simply dissolve, but with a hand punching through the glass on which the cast members’ names are written. Before Orlac even loses his hands, we get a terrific backstage scene where we see a prop severed arm in the foreground…

And then there’s this marvelous foreshadowing shot of Orlac using his fingers to wipe away the frost from his train window. It’s the moment he catches the first glimpse of the man whose hands he’ll soon be wearing…

Hands recur again and again, like hallucinatory iterations of a fevered ideé fixe.

Another sick joke: the knife-throwing murderer whose hands Orlac inherits gets guillotined… and Yvonne’s wedding cake bears a quaint toy version of this infernal contraption.

All of these gleeful patterns pop up as though reality were submitting to the delirious reasoning of a lunatic. When a man grows obsessed, he sees the object of his obsession, his mad love, everywhere. These neat visual echoes weave in this sense of inescapable fixation.

Mad Love was really decades ahead of its time. You see, it makes us conscious from the first that we the viewers are watching a horror show. The film begins with the spooky, caricatured façade of the Grand Guignol-esque Théâtre des Horreurs where Yvonne works. The camera pans from a hanged man dummy (rather reminiscent of Frankenstein, which Karl Freund shot) to a ghoulish arch, then goes to one of the costumed goblins that runs the box office.

It’s not only welcoming us into a place where people go to get scared within the film, but also knowingly beckoning us into the realm of terrors that is the cinema.

The camera then follows a young couple on a date. The girl balks at the idea of a horror show, implying that any man who wants to watch such things must be a pervert. (Well, I bet that didn’t go over too well for all of the 1930s guys who brought their dames to the movie palace for some low-impact snuggling!)

Really, although I’ve articulated my dislike for the coy term “meta” elsewhere, I’m forever impressed by how Mad Love serves up a horror show within a horror show, a Grand Guignol play within a Grand Guignol movie.

As for that play within the movie, the horror show that Yvonne stars in, it’s a Grand Guignol period drama about infidelity and torture that would deliver the requisite thrills on any stage.

But Karl Freund makes us see how the camera can actually enhance the horror. Especially a camera in the hands of brilliant cinematographer Gregg Toland, who shot this agonizingly beautiful and shadowy film.

(Digression: Pauline Kael has theorized that director and legendary cameraman Karl Freund’s expressionist influence on Toland came into full bloom with the noirish deep focus look of Citizen Kane, made just a few years later. So, in a way, Mad Love helped to shape one of the most influential films of all time. Think about that as you look at these gorgeously lit screencaps.)

During the theater sequence, close-ups and intercuts between a frightened audience and Yvonne’s torments revise and reframe stage horror as cinematic horror.

Staged horror: a static long shot

Movie horror: dynamic editing and the power of closer shots

The power of the camera and editing can intensify the rhythm of fear, kneading it into suspense or whipping it into a frenzy. It’s a great and awful power, and Freund wants us to recognize it—and examine the pleasure we derive from horror, from sadism and voyeurism, even as we experience those pleasures.

The villain of the piece, Dr. Gogol, comes across as the forefather of the modern-day “crazed fan” type—although Lorre’s performance trumps any imitations with his substance and subtlety.

Gogol consumes horror. He loves it. He’s creepy as hell in that audience, as he solemnly watches his muse Yvonne squeal in agony. His spooky half-moon face forces us as spectators to think, “Oh, dear God, I hope that’s not me…”

The dark side: track-in + stark shadows = movie stalker material.

After all, less than 10 years before Mad Love was made, a young man in London strangled his girlfriend in Hyde Park, and based his defense (in part) on the fact that he’d just seen Lon Chaney in London After Midnight, which had, he claimed, deranged his mind and spurred him to violence. As much as horror seeks to capitalize on hidden fears and fantasies that lurk in all of us, many people working in the genre had become aware by 1935 that the reactions unleashed by watching horror are a liability.

Indeed, this film both creates and breaks down illusions, as if to say, “Enjoy yourself, dear viewer… but not too much.” I love the introduction of Yvonne, with a dissolve from her screaming portrait on a poster, to her real, smiling, normal face. What a joyful demystification of the scream queen!

And yet, we feel the seductive force of images, too. Gogol falls in love with an image, not a real woman, as shown by the affection he devotes to her wax effigy. Freund simulates Gogol’s obsession, since, all close-ups of the wax figure actually are close-ups of actress Frances Drake. For us, the viewers, as well as for Gogol, Galatea comes alive.

Mad Love explores this idea of replacements, parallelism, and swapping: Gogol confuses the real Yvonne with his schema of her. A stage play transforms into a cinematic event. Freund cuts between a “high art” performance of Chopin at Fontainbleau to a “low art” cheap thrill show in Montmartre.

Amputation and then grafting presents the purest expression of this paradigm: something lost and something introduced in its place. It’s acquiring something foreign and taking it into oneself. It’s unremittingly weird to have something on you that’s not quite yours or, even if it is, doesn’t “live” where it’s supposed to, almost like a doppleganger you can wear. It’s always an “it,” an entity, an integrated other.

Sort of like a film of yourself? It’s you, but then again, it’s not.

Now, I’m about to go out on a limb here, but cinema is a violent art, it’s an art of scarring and replacement. You shoot it, you cut it, you take the skin off reality, chop it up, then put it back together. Even the whole negative-positive aspect of cinema recalls the concept of amputation and grafting. I think that the makers of horror movies in the 1920s and 1930s understood the uncanny nature of the cinema better, on average, than any other genre filmmakers. Rather than just trappings of terror, amputations, stitched-up beings, walking digests of other parts serve as the centerpieces of their films—driving the plots and evoking pathos.

And, no, I don’t think that every film coils up on itself to probe the nature of the cinema. I just happen to believe that, at the dawn of talkies, horror films and the people who produced them, like James Whale and Karl Freund, were highly attuned to the aspects of all and any cinema that shocked, scared, and moved people like nothing else ever had before.

These visionaries decided not only to use the disquieting resemblance of film to reality to spook us, but also to jolt us into consciousness of the death and fragmentation that nags at man in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Film is a monster of transplants. This spliced-up juggernaut can augment fear and it can seduce. It can conjure false visions then dash them to pieces. But it also confers eternal life. Remember the moment when Colin Clive as Orlac listens to one of his recordings and remarks on what amazing things they are—“keeps a man alive long after he’s dead.” If you know anything about the brief, tragic life of Clive, this moment resonates far beyond the framework of the diegesis.

Yvonne and we hear music playing… but we see that piano remains ghostly still. The recording makes possible this eerie juxtaposition.

Now, this film was made in 1935. Clive was dead less than two years later and, if I believe what I read (Frances Drake told a story about him practically passing out in her garden), pretty much anyone could’ve seen that coming. In a way, this film could serve as an elegy for him and for that ghostly life that he forever possesses.

He, by the way, was horribly creeped out by his fake hands, “almost a quarter larger than normal size,” and lamented in an interview: “All day and everyday I felt that I would give almost anything to be able to wash away the whole ghoulish mess and forget the rest of the picture.”

He claimed that looking down at the crude, bulky, built-up makeup made him “quite sick,” which certainly contributed to his rattled, haunted performance. He hated horror and he hated acting in film—perhaps because both of them abide in the realm of the uncanny.

When you act in theater, the past is past. On to the next! With film, you get to see another version of yourself. Part of you no longer belongs to you, but to anyone who watches the movie. It’s as though an appendage has been chopped off and preserved in a vault. Every film performance confers a kind of “wax figure” double, an extraordinarily lifelike replica to posterity.

But, then, film also cuts into the time of our lives. For the space of an hour or so, the movie replaces our normal existence with another world. The movie is ours, for we “recut” it again in our heads, and not ours, for it might affect us in ways we do not expect.

And no movie I know does that better than Mad Love.

Modern Myth: Frankenstein (1931)

I need to rein myself in when writing about Frankenstein. God knows, I could easily concoct a series of blog posts about Colin Clive’s hair alone. So, I’ll isolate one moment that has always fascinated me and try to bring it ALIVE!

Recognize the scene? This is a pristine publicity still, I believe, but you can still get the gist (and some extra angst!) from my slightly murky screenshots.

The monster has dragged his maker to the windmill. Henry Frankenstein wakes up and tries to run away, but the creature stops him and they take up positions on either side of a turning wheel in the mechanism of the mill. In shot-reverse-shot, we get Frankenstein looking at his creation and the thing looking back, as the gear continues to turn between them. There’s just so much in these two shots. They conjure up a multiplicity of meanings.

Following a pretty intense chase sequence, this pause in the action, almost like a fermata, really sticks in your memory—or at least mine. Karloff, for his part, communicates a rising rage against the only person whom he can hold responsible for putting him into this situation of pain and chaos.

For once, Clive’s character isn’t a ball of nerves. He really looks at what he’s made, as though he’s seeing it for the first time. I also think that I detect a certain amount of perverse pride in Henry Frankenstein’s eyes. Remember that scene where Waldeman and Frankenstein double-team the monster, trapping him while trying to administer a sedative? Well, now the tables are turned… Henry’s trying to get away from his monster and his creature clearly has the brain capacity to trap him. One can sense just a little undercurrent of ironic accomplishment. Not only has Clive’s Frankenstein made a man, but a man who can hold his own with his maker.

Frankenstein’s monster shows the capacity to learn and get the upper hand. He thus becomes his master’s greatest achievement and his greatest nightmare.

There’s also an odd “tag you’re it!” aspect of this scene. How many comedies give us this kind of scenario, with two characters faking each other out as they run around a desk or something? It’s a child’s game, really, and both Frankenstein and his creation are like children, causing harm and acting willfully without fully comprehending the ramifications of their actions.

To put a revolving series of bars between the camera and the character also adds a visual flamboyance to the stare-down and draws the viewer in with hypnotic movement. The cyclical motion is like a model or a concretization of the reciprocal gaze. With sound and image working in conjunction, the creaky, yet steady rhythm of the turning mill wheel both grounds the scene in a set pace and makes it uneasy, unsteady, in motion. Now, this turning wheel separating the creator and the creation suggests a perpetual tension and, at least to me, suggests the idea of the monster and maker inscribed in a dialectic relationship.

What an angle! Stunning visual means of conveying the collision-of-universes aspect of this death struggle.

The philosopher Hegel wrote about this concept of dialectic, of a pair of opposites (not just binaries, two things that are just at different ends of a spectrum) but opposites that are forever clashing—as epitomized by the master-servant relationship. The servant wants to rise and become the master and make the master his servant. The master wants things to stay just as they are. Even if you flip the positions, somebody’s going to be unhappy, because each wants “to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being.”

It’s a perpetual cycle of conflict, upheaval… and conflict again. It goes ’round and ’round. After all, why else do we, in English, say revolution for both upheaval and turning?

The mill wheel, interposing between the camera and the faces of the Frankenstein and his monster, drive home this tension of seeing oneself in the other and of trying to extricate oneself from that other. Creator and creation can’t really be separated though—they are mutually defined. The wheel connects them to each other on this visual level and allows us to feel this ineffable link, this potent, mythic moment of the pair tragically recognizing themselves in each other and recognizing that they recognize it.

On another, perhaps more obvious, level, the decision to set the conclusion of the film in a windmill also recalls Don Quixote. After all, the mad Don tilts at the most famous windmill in Western Civilization, because he believes it to be a monster. Robert Florey, who wrote the script for Frankenstein, added the windmill. It doesn’t appear in Mary Shelley’s novel, and, although the initially scripted scenes were heavily reedited, Whale clearly made the decision to make the gears of the building quite prominent. Now, I would certainly apply the adjective “quixotic” to Dr. Frankenstein and to his quest. In his character, the romantic and scientific traditions intersect to form an impractical genius who makes things he can’t cope with.

Highs and lows: extreme angles emphasize the fragility and volatility of Frankenstein’s genius. 

This turning windmill also makes us as viewers aware of a churning, orderly edifice in which Frankenstein and his beast suddenly find themselves. Now, I’m dancing on the jagged edge of symbolism here, but the mill creates the feeling that the movie is now inside a working, mechanical system.

Indeed, as the bars of the mill wheel pass between the camera and their faces, this interposing object recalls the zoetrope—one of the first pre-cinema moving image devices which gave the appearance of life by parading a series of images through a tiny peep-hole slot.

(Evidently, I’m not the first person to make this observation. After I pressed publish on this one, a rabid horror fan friend of mine directed me to a similar point in the work of Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr, The Flying Maciste Brothers. Well, Newton and Liebniz developed calculus independently…)

Now, what does Dr. Frankenstein want most of all? He craves to know how things work, what mechanisms of nature rule the world. The windmill reminds me of the suite of laws that hold together the universe—and continue to do so, in spite of whatever strange dreams man might dream.

“If I could discover any one of these things… I wouldn’t care if they did think I was crazy.”

Frankenstein and his monster, however, both become heroic because they have the guts to stare into that mechanism: Frankenstein by choice, his creation by way of the calamitous existence that was thrust upon him. Their exceptional destinies are intertwined and the movement of the wheel seems to knit them together—as doubles, as a dialectical pair, as two individuals who madness and bad luck has rendered aware, whether rationally or intuitively, of the forces that govern the world and which, when tampered with, grind a human being to despair.

For me, the beauty of Frankenstein resides in the morbid, yet poetic way the film doesn’t just portray modernity, but also practices it. For instance, in true Gothic novels, one prototype being Ann Radcliffe’s celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho, any time a skull or skeleton pops up, we’re dealing with a key plot point or shock-value moment… and you have to wait for about 200 or so more pages for another one.

James Whale, on the other hand, constantly throws this kind of memento mori imagery at us. Even Dr. Waldeman, who presents himself as the healthy scientist, in contrast to Clive’s obsessive one, keeps a line of skulls on the back shelf of his study.

Or, consider the classroom scene preceding the brain theft, which opens with this droll, direct shot of a dead man’s feet.

There’s a very similar shot in Murnau’s Faust, with the feet of plague victim appearing disproportionally large in the foreground, but the effect achieves a grimmer tone there. The cadaver in Frankenstein possesses a good deal less dignity. He’s just served as a visual aid to a bunch of med students, and his feet poke humorously right into the camera, into the spectator’s face as it were. These med students even start to chuckle when, nudged by the gurney, an anatomical skeleton, suspended from the ceiling, bobs up and down. Whale depicts a world at least partially desensitized to the horror of death.

In place of the dreadful, foreboding atmosphere of Browning’s Dracula, Whale gives us a bizarre mixture of irreverence and fear. Frankenstein shows us a world in which death is not the master, but the servant. Death is the thing that we’ve learned to chuckle at and demean—even as we cower before it.

I think that a lot of this cynical attitude towards death comes from the director’s time in the trenches of WWI. A lot of gears were in constant motion on the front…

Like all great works of art, Whale’s Frankenstein doesn’t allow a viewer to pin it down with a single meaning. The monster and his maker both win over our sympathy—and even the torch-wielding villagers do, too! But, for me, the crux of the drama occurs at that moment when the creature and his maker face off with a searing reciprocal gaze, separated by that marvelously evocative wheel that seems to both separate them and unite them. This visually stunning, revolving flourish elevates what could be a stagey, old-fashioned finale into a truly modern metaphor for the gears of the universe, for the mechanical man… and perhaps for that ultimate in life-creating edifices—the cinema?