My notes on The Bride!
In 2009, Dave Elsey got me together with Rick Baker to work up a pitch for a Universal film to make something of their Bride of Frankenstein IP – it had been announced in Variety that Rick was working on this and it was the first he’d heard of it. We hashed things over, first admitting no one needed a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein – then started thinking of the things we’d do if we were forced to make the film* … which may well have been what Maggie Gyllenhaal did with this, made for Warner Brothers rather than Universal though she does one of the things we thought only possible with a Universal deal and uses a version of the Jack Pierce makeup job. We came up with a shortlist of actors who might work well in the flathead, reasoning that Pierce built up from Karloff’s face and that not everyone – like chubby Lon Chaney Jr – worked as well in the get-up. On out list was Christian Bale, who has quite a bit of Karloff around the mouth and eyes.
This is roughly a sequel to the novel, or an unmade version of it, and is greatly in contrast with what del Toro did in his Frankenstein – but it’s also a movie which takes very big swings, not all of which connect … and in the end I think it’s an exciting, revivifying jolt to the Frankenstein legend, not at all concerned with being a franchise (which is what Uni seem to want in their monster variants) and ambitious enough to go off on all sorts of tangents. It has the Monster (Bale) and his mate (Jessie Buckley) dance to ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, with the quite articulate ‘Frank’ imitating Peter Boyle’s howl of the title, and pust Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett on the end titles, as well as referencing a whole range of cinema and American social issues from the era of Whale’s film – we get a Bonnie and Clyde crime spree, hobos riding the rails, RKO-style white tie and tails musical, Bringing Up Baby kooky-dame-shakes-up-dusty-guy rom-com and Scarface massacre-all-mobsters in the mix, along with deep cuts like Marked Women and Pennies From Heaven – which resonate to the present, with an impassioned repeating of the line ‘me too’ as the movie turns to the exploitation of women. Then again, the Bride’s signature line – often quoted – comes from Herman Melville (with actual credit) ‘I would prefer not to.’ Whatever you think of the film as a whole, you have to admit that hanging a major motion picture in 2026 on having Mary Shelley channel ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ is audacious.
Circa 1935, in Chicago, good time girl/undercover police informant Ida (Buckley) – she’s after a mob boss called Lupino, played by foreign baddie of the year Zlatko Buric – makes a spectacle of herself in a club and is pushed downstairs by hoods, breaking her neck. Frank shows up, scarved and hatted, in the lair of Dr Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), who is the Pretorious analogue with an Igor-like maid (Jeannie Berlin, a deep cut herself), and pleads with the ‘mad scientist’ to make him a mate. Besides being a rageaholic and alienated from humanity – he says the doctor is the first person to shake hands with him in over a century of life – Frank is a film fan and romantic, obsessed with the works of Astaire-like musical comedy star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), who overcame childhood polio to become a lightfooted dance sensation.
In James Whale’s film, the Monster’s predestined mate screams and rejects the big-booted incel, which is a blunter statement against presuming too much of women than we get here when Ida, who has been semi-possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (Buckley again, enjoying a wild British accent), is revivified as Penelope, with an ink stain on her cheek, a blonde frizz just distant enough from the Elsa Lanchester look for copyright purposes, and a jumble of loose limbs which suggests not all her bones have been set. The couple have their ups and downs, which include some impulsive if not exactly justified kills (fans of Blue Lives Matter will note that the monsters off a lot of unsympathetic uniformed cops), a wild party crashing scene where Frank fumbles through an attempt to tell Ronnie how much his work means to him (a moving depiction of a fan-artist interaction which rings embarrassingly true), and several twirls of a gangster/crime movie plot with Penelope Cruz trying to get respect and Peter Sarsgaard going along with it as they sleuth across country with a whole lot of story baggage and a hired killer (John Magaro) dogging them to get to the ‘monsters’.
It often seems to contradict itself, have half-formed thoughts and pin themes to characters and story elements without really making links, but I had a great time with The Bride! Among other things, I think Gyllenhaal and her cast are hugely enthusiastic, inventive and engaged and that comes across as entertaining if messy … which is pretty much how every Frankenstein has worked since 1818. This is certainly a wilder take than the 1985 The Bride, and mixes it with Flesh for Frankenstein, Lady Frankenstein, Frankenstein Created Woman, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Frankenhooker as a cut-up and stitch-back-together job on one of the primal myths of gothic horror, science fiction and movie monsterdom.
*we weren’t. I did a work-up for a redo of WereWolf of London as a sequel to the Benicio del Toro The Wolfman but that didn’t happen either.
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