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The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal). When Carl Laemmle Jr. resurrected the cadaver of an old story by Mary Shelley and sent it shuffling out with necrotic vivacity to become the box-office smash of 1932, he cannily left the door open for a sequel. Audiences went away from Frankenstein wondering whether the monster really died in the blazing mill that seemed to be his catafalque. Now, it appears, he did not.
With a vitality that makes their efforts fully the equal of the original picture Writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston lift their monster (Boris Karloff) out of the water-filled cellar of the mill and send him out to terrify the countryside, break out of a dungeon, and make friends with a blind hermit who teaches him to smoke cigars and speak. Meanwhile one Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), as convincingly lunatic a scientist as ever reached the screen, shows Baron Henry Frankenstein, the monster's creator, the Tom-Thumb King, Queen, Archbishop and Satan he has cultured from human seed until they can chatter and gesticulate in test-tube prisons in his Mephistophelian laboratory. Pretorius forces the Baron to collaborate on a woman-monster by having the Baron's bride (Valerie Hobson) kidnapped until he consents. There is one scene in which Pretorius and Frankenstein make a heart for their she-demon out of the still warm organ of a young girl murdered by their assistant, and another in which they impregnate her with crackling life from a lightning bolt brought down on gigantic kite-cables. The synthetic woman (Elsa Lanchester) lives to demonstrate complete distaste for the monster intended as her mate before she is blown jnto eternity with Dr. Pretorius.
The story, told as a cutback from the recital of Mary Shelley herself, who tells it to her husband (Douglas Walton) and Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), has none of the hangdog air that one expects in sequels. Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein. Henry VIII had enough wives to make four screen stars. Elsa Lanchester is the latest to gain stellar fame in Hollywood, having had the way paved for her by Binnie Barnes (There's Always Tomorrow), Merle Oberon (Folies Bergere) and Wendy Barrie (It's a Small World). In private life also Miss Lanchester is the wife of Henry VIII (Charles Laughton). Although he is known for his plump effeminacy, she is mannish in dress. She journeyed from England to play Clickett Micawber's slavey in David Copperfield, a portrait mostly left on the cutting-room floor; appeared briefly in Naughty Marietta. As a child she refused to be educated at a young ladies' seminary, was the only girl at a small English school for boys. She ran her own night club for a while, did a turn in Chariot's Revue, is a candid camera addict and while in Hollywood wanders around streets and byways taking pictures of interesting dogs, horses and persons.