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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
You may not recognize James Whale, but you surely recognize his most prominent contribution to American popular culture: Frankenstein's monster, as portrayed by Boris Karloff. Whale, a British expatriate who made his way to Hollywood just as films were making the transition to the talkies, directed both the original Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1936), for Universal Pictures. Afraid of being pigeonholed as a horror director (he also made The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House), he eventually insisted on more mainstream projects, including the musical Show Boat and The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front that flopped at the box office. Today, The Bride of Frankenstein is considered to be his best film, a work that combines moments of genuine suspense with a thoroughly macabre sense of humor.
You may not recognize James Whale, but you surely recognize his most prominent contribution to American popular culture: Frankenstein's monster, as portrayed by Boris Karloff. Whale, a British expatriate who made his way to Hollywood just as films were making the transition to the talkies, directed both the original Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1936), for Universal Pictures. Afraid of being pigeonholed as a horror director (he also made The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House), he eventually insisted on more mainstream projects, including the musical Show Boat and The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front that flopped at the box office. Today, The Bride of Frankenstein is considered to be his best film, a work that combines moments of genuine suspense with a thoroughly macabre sense of humor.
In 1982, film historian James Curtis wrote his first biography of Whale. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters is not a revision of that book, however, but a substantial reworking involving much in the way of new research. Whale's life story is emblematic of an entire generation of European émigrés who made critical artistic contributions to American film only to find themselves in ultimate obscurity. Although recent fictional and truthful accounts of Whale's life have emphasized his homosexuality--even the jacket cover of this book cites it as the reason for Hollywood's eventual rejection of Whale--Curtis himself tells a more nuanced tale. Certainly, Whale made no attempts to hide his preference for men; at the same time, he made his sexual orientation neither a prominent feature of his personal life nor his movies. While it's possible that he was fired from Columbia Pictures in 1941 because of homophobia on the part of studio owner Harry Cohn, it should also be noted that it didn't take much to get on the bad side of Harry Cohn and that, perhaps more to the point, Whale hadn't had a significant commercial hit in five years.
Curtis's biography is filled with fascinating anecdotes from David Lewis, Whale's longtime companion, and several of the actors who worked with Whale, including Peter Cushing and Gloria (Titanic) Stuart. It also has a rich appreciation of the artistic qualities of Whale's work. It is, in short, the sort of critical biography that any film director would hope to have. --Ron Hogan
From Publishers Weekly
Shortly before his death, film director James Whale admitted that he'd looked in the mirror and realized that he'd launched "this horror" into the world that he couldn't stop. Was he referring to his creation of the classic film Frankenstein (1931) or its inferior off-shoots? Was he alluding to his inability (despite succeeding in mainstream genres) to transcend his reputation as a specialist in monster movies? Curtis (Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges) narrates in seamless detail how this innovative son of a West Midlands coal man rose from obscurity to acclaim as a British theater and Hollywood director. Trained as a West End actor and stage manager, Whale gained recognition for his rendition of the WWI war drama Journey's End. He traveled to Broadway and finally Hollywood to adapt Journey's End (1930) to the movies. Curtis charts Whale's triumphs as well as his failures, lending insight into the convoluted collaborative world of moviemaking in the days of Hays Office censorship. Many of Whale's mainstream films (Waterloo Bridge; One More River; etc.) disappeared while Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein never went out of circulation. Showboat (1956) marked the pinnacle of Whale's career and was followed by a gradual decline and slide into suicide. One comes away from this quixotic and compelling biography with the feeling that Whale, who was homosexual, not only reinvented the monster movie but also himself, and that his particular genius was often ill appreciated except in the one genre he disdained. 60 b&w photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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