Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

 

Bride of Frankenstein is, of course, the classic sequel to the classic film Frankenstein. The set-up involves author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lancaster, doing double duty as the uncredited “Monster’s Mate” too) informing her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Lord Byron that there is more to the story than she had previously told them. This all really just serves as an excuse to show scenes from the earlier film so that viewers can catch up. The newer film follows two plotlines. The overarching story involves Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesigner) asking Baron Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, reprising his earlier role) to create a mate for “the monster” (again played by Boris Karloff). Henry, unsurprisingly, is reluctant to relive the horrors of his earlier work. Meanwhile, having survived the fire that ended Frankenstein, the monster is wreaking havoc throughout the village or, at least, causing fear among the village. A series of chases ensue, but there are quieter moments too. During one sequence, the monster makes a “friend,” a blind hermit, and learns to speak; it’s the tear he sheds from happiness that makes the monster even more sympathetic. It’s one of the few times that he is not just the “misunderstood” monster. The intended highlight of the film is the big reveal, and it doesn’t disappoint. There’s a reason that it’s been copied and parodied for decades. Bride of Frankenstein has some astounding production design. The expressionistic sets create elaborate environments for the action, and the laboratory is even more complex and eye-catching than the original film set. The filmmakers also use lighting to great effect; this is one of the most stylish-looking black-and-white films of its era. The performances are similarly iconic, but as good as good as everyone is—and they are mostly at their campiest best—the real scene-stealer is Una O’Connor as the maid Millie. With her exaggerated facial expressions and broad accent, she’s a hysterical delight, a figure more compelling at times than the monster or his bride. 

Oscar Nomination: Best Sound Recording

Naughty Marietta (1935)

The songs are the key to the success of Naughty Marietta, the first collaboration between Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, a successful pairing of talented, classically trained singers. The story is a slight one, of course, but you don't really watch a film like Naughty Marietta for the depth of its plot. You want to hear MacDonald and Eddy singing. Solo performances, duets--whatever it takes. I found it tough to stop smiling throughout this film, despite my ignorance of operatic singing and my reluctance to fall for some of the more unrealistic elements of the plot. In the end, MacDonald and Eddy won me over.

MacDonald is the charming Marie, a princess who has been promised to a man she does not love, Don Carlos from Spain. He arrives with a black wedding dress and plans to proceed with the marriage as quickly as possible. She feels as trapped as the birds that she keeps in her aviary at home--one of the most heavy-handed symbols ever put on film. She wants to be free to choose her own husband, so rather than submit to her uncle's will, she trades places with a servant named Marietta and sails for America on a ship filled with women. (She lets the birds free before she leaves, too, just so you don't miss out on the obvious symbolism.) These women are so-called "casquette girls," who have accepted a dowry from the French king as a condition of their marrying colonists once they arrive in America.

A reward is offered for Marietta's return, so she has to assume a disguise in order not to be detected. It's really just a pair of glasses and a plain dress, a sort of precursor to the set-up of those teen make-over movies that do the same thing with the girl who's going to be revealed to be a great beauty before the film's end. Do film makers really think that glasses make people so unappealing and so unrecognizable? Nevertheless, Marietta successfully escapes being discovered, and she even bonds with one of the girls on the boat, a romantic dreamer named Julie (Cecelia Parker), who still thinks she will fall in love with the man she eventually marries.

An attack by a pirate ship and a rescue by a group of mercenary scouts led by Eddy's Captain Warrington leave Marietta and the other women in the care of the soldiers. The fight between the mercenaries and the pirates, unsurprising, is completely unrealistic, but we know it's merely a plot device to get MacDonald and Eddy together so that they can begin some verbal and vocal sparring. He finds out that she isn't interested in marriage the way the other women are, and he begins calling her "your highness" due to her superior attitude. Eddy's performance in these scenes is pretty overwrought, to be honest, but he's not really called upon to act here. He's just meant to be the center of attention. Then again, it's tough not to be noticed when you lead your men through the forest singing "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" at the top of your lungs.

It is easy to see why MacDonald's Marietta would find Eddy's Warrington attractive. He is completely unlike Don Carlos; Warrington is a man of action, not leisure. He's decked out in fringed buckskin and a racoon hat, and he possesses a strong voice for singing. He also has a sense of confidence that can be mistaken for arrogance, but of course, he has to come across that way at first in order to make their inevitable romance more enticing. The fact that he says his men are all happily unmarried might cause a raised eyebrow or too, but you know someone as handsome as Warrington has many women who would be interested in him. MacDonald, too, is appealing. She has a strong sense of her own identity and what she wants, and she is everyone's equal when it comes to quick-wittedness. And, no matter whether she's wearing an expensive gown or the garb of an ordinary woman, she also manages to look beautiful. Her hair and make-up are always flawless, perhaps a stretch for a woman in the backwoods of Louisiana, but again, we aren't searching for realism in a film like this one.

She lies to Gov. d'Annard (Frank Morgan) about her moral character in order to avoid having to fulfill the contractual obligation to marry. That's apparently how she acquires the title designation of "naughty." Shockingly, this intrigues the governor even more, and he tries to conspire with Warrington to bring Marietta to him. Of course, Warrington has his own designs on Marietta, and the governor's wife, played with archness by Elsa Lanchester, intends to keep her husband as far away from Marietta and the other women as possible. Warrington finds Marietta singing in a puppet show and starts to take her to various locations around the city, even taking a canoe ride at one point so that he can sing "I'm Falling in Love with Someone" to her and she can swoon over his singing. People don't swoon in movies the way they used to, and MacDonald shows how it's supposed to be done here.

When news of who Marietta truly is reaches New Orleans, she is forced to revert to her previous way of life, with everyone bowing down to her and treating her as a princess destined to marry someone of a noble background. She finds it all rather boring after her adventures with Warrington. Her uncle (Douglas Dumbrille) and Don Carlos (Walter Kingsford) make the trip across the Atlantic to carry her back to France. It's at a ball given for their honor that Marietta finally sings the song she's been trying to write throughout the film, a song that expresses how she truly feels about Warrington. The song is "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life," perhaps the most famous number associated with this film and its source material, and it's what prompts Warrington to attempt to rescue her and take him with her into the wilderness and on to the West where they can be together without interference from anyone else.

There are several scenes that should indicate to you that the storyline is not the most important aspect here. At the film's beginning, for example, Marietta goes to a pet shop to purchase some lovebirds. She also gets a puppy, and when she goes to visit her old singing teacher, the puppy comes along as a gift. It's a very musical building she visits. Each floor serenades the princess, and the puppy just keeps following her as she climbs higher and higher to hear the next level of music. She eventually listens to four floors of music, only to have people in other buildings also start to sing to her. I started to think the whole movie might just be an extension of this one song. In all, MacDonald and Eddy and the various members of the chorus make their way through eleven numbers, especially impressive for a film that clocks in at a brisk 105 minutes or so. That's a lot of music in a short period of time.

The film is based on the famous operetta by Victor Herbert, and most of the music is Herbert's. There are additional lyrics in some songs to adapt them to the setting for the film, changed a bit from the original stage production, but for the most part, Eddy and MacDonald are performing the originals. My limited knowledge of operettas includes the notion that they are meant to be rather light-hearted, typically romantic in nature and often comedic in tone. Naughty Marietta certainly represents those traits, and it's an entertaining introduction to the duo of MacDonald and Eddy that would star in eight films together.

Oscar Win: Best Sound Recording

Other Oscar Nomination: Outstanding Production

Captain Blood (1935)

Captain Blood is the film that made Errol Flynn a star, and for that, we should be very grateful. Did anyone ever seem to have as much fun on screen as Flynn did? He's asked to portray a pirate in Captain Blood, and his performance led to him being cast in a series of action films, many of them being of the swashbuckling variety. He would become one of the most reliable stars in films like this, and it's easy to see why from his performance here.

It's 1685 in England, and Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn) is awakened in the middle of the night to tend to a man who has been injured in a battle between the forces of King James II and a group of rebels who wish to replace him on the throne with his rival, the Duke of Monmouth. Blood, being a dedicated member of his profession, goes to help but is not interested in taking sides politically. He is arrested for helping a rebel and held for months awaiting trial. When he appears in court, the judge attempts to prevent him from mounting a defense on his own behalf. He and dozens of other men are found guilty, and the judge (a cartoonish villain if ever there were one) hisses out the judgment.

Instead of carrying out the sentence of hanging that comes with a charge of treason, the king decides instead to ship the convicted men to the English colony at Port Royal in the Caribbean. There they will perform ten years of labor to the highest bidder. The ones who work on the island's sugar plantation will also be subject to the brutality of Col. Bishop (Lionel Atwill, who gets more screen time as the main cartoonish villain), the most notoriously callous slave owner on the island. Bishop, at first, refuses to purchase Blood because of the insolence he displays, so his niece Arabella (Oliva de Havilland) buys the doctor instead to save him from having to work in the mines of Port Royal. For the rest of the film, Arabella keeps doing “favors” for Blood despite her repeated attempts to remind him of his station in life. It doesn’t take much of a detective to figure out where their relationship might be headed.

Life on the plantation is difficult. The men work long hours and are given little food and rest. They even have to push a series of large interconnected wheels to grind sugar cane; it’s a device that Rube Goldberg couldn’t have imagined. If someone attempts to escape, he is whipped and then branded on his face with an FT (for "Fugitive Traitor"). The whipping post is so prominently featured during this segment of the film that it almost becomes a supporting character, and the hot iron with the FT initials comes at the audience almost as if we were watching a 3-D movie. Only through becoming personal doctor to the island's governor is Blood spared. Rather than work at hard labor, he instead has to keep the governor's gout in check, no small feat considering how much of a hypochondriac the governor (George Hassell, nicely comic) seems to be. His new job also provides Blood with frequent access to Arabella, whom he finds attractive enough to kiss only to have her slap him for presuming that a slave like himself could touch a lady. Of course, she doesn’t slap him immediately after he starts kissing her, so….

When a Spanish pirate ship attacks Port Royal, Blood and some of his fellow prisoners take advantage of the distraction to escape. They cleverly steal the pirate ship and decide to become pirates themselves. They even develop some rules of piracy to follow, covering such items as taking no female prisoners and how much to compensate someone for the loss of a limb. (The price varies depending upon which limb you've lost, even which side of the body it's on.) After a series of successful raids on Spanish and English ships, depicted in a montage of images, Blood and his men join up with a French pirate, Levasseur (Basil Rathbone at his oiliest), and his men to make even more money.

The French pirates attack an English ship on their way to a rendezvous with Blood's ship, and one of the prisoners they take is Arabella. Blood fights Levasseur for possession of Arabella because he knows that the French pirate will not follow the rules of piracy Blood and his men have adopted. Pirates can be like that, I suppose, and you know what that means for Arabella. Of course, Blood wins, and he tries to convince her that she can have all of the jewels she wants from their treasure. She refuses him, but he counters that he now owns her the way she once owned him. Naturally (at least in terms of the movies), she is attracted to him--we have to have a love interest, after all—a fact that Lord Willoughby (Henry Stephenson, reliable as always), a fellow passenger on the English ship who is now a prisoner of the pirates, notices. As Willoughby tells her, "He's not such a bad fellow for a pirate." Indeed.

Willoughby has a surprise for Blood. King James has been replaced on the throne by William and Mary, who have pardoned the pirates for their crimes and given Blood a commission in the Royal Navy. And it's just in the nick of time, for the French have arrived in Port Royal and are attempting to take the city away from the English colonists there. How fortuitous for the English colonialists. Blood has to try to save the colony and defeat the French, and the film has its last chance to show a powerful battle between ships.

The special effects are particularly worthy of note. The battle sequences are spectacular, especially the moments involving Blood’s ship taking over a Spanish ship. Knowing that the ships are all miniatures (not toy boats, mind you, just smaller scale versions of the real things) doesn’t detract from the tension these battles build. The stunt work is also remarkably well done, and the highlight is undoubtedly the sword fight between Flynn’s Blood and Rathbone’s Levasseur. The success of an adventure movie depends a great deal on scenes like these, and this film provides a nice variety of action interspersed with the quieter or more humorous moments.

Captain Blood is a lot of fun to watch. Given the number of battles and the amount of historical detail crammed into it, you'll be surprised at how quickly it moves. Flynn is fantastic, a true star, although I do wish someone could have given him a better haircut. He always seems stuck with some sort of pageboy in his better films. He and de Havilland have a real chemistry, and they would appear together in several more films (and allegedly become lovers off-screen as well) over the new few years. They are both good here, but it's really Flynn and that smile of his that makes Captain Blood so enjoyable. Even when he's in the heat of battle, nothing seems to stop him from having fun (and from making this movie fun for us viewers as well).

Footnote: The year 1935 was the last year that the Academy allowed write-in votes and the last year that it announced the runners-up in each category. Captain Blood received votes in three categories in which it had not been officially nominated: Best Director, Best Adaptation, and Best Scoring. In fact, the film's director, the great Michael Curtiz, came in second in the voting, behind that year's winner, John Ford for The Informer, and ahead of the two other official nominees.

Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Production and Best Sound Recording

Les Miserables (1935)

I don't think I've ever even attempted to read the Victor Hugo novel on which the 1935 film version of Les Miserables is based. I saw the musical in the early 1990s on Broadway; the tickets were a birthday gift to Partner At The Time, and we both had a great time at the theater that night. The musical was pretty lengthy, and the book has a reputation for being quite the time-killer as well. (Of course, I’ve also seen the film version of the musical, but that will be discussed elsewhere in more detail.) This version, though, is pretty brisk, coming in at just under two hours long. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the adaptation, but this is an enjoyable film with two strong lead performances by Fredric March and Charles Laughton.

March is Jean Valjean, a man sentenced to prison in France during the early 1800s after stealing food to keep his family from starving. During the courtroom scene when he is being sentenced, the film keeps emphasizing Jesus on the cross in the background, making an obvious (heavy-handed?) visual link to the persecution that Valjean is facing. While serving time in the galleys during this ten-year sentence—in scenes reminiscent of ones in Ben-Hur—Valjean comes to the attention of Javert (Laughton), a man whose father died in jail and who was himself born while his mother was in prison. Javert is a strictly by-the-book disciplinarian. Much like the judges who sentenced Valjean, Javert does not believe that the law has any room for empathy or consideration of mitigating circumstances.

After Valjean serves his sentence and is released, he finds that no one will provide him with lodging or food save for a bishop. He says that his “real punishment” begins after he is allegedly a free man. He is forced to carry a so-called "yellow passport" that identifies him as a former prisoner who tried to escape, and only the bishop sees a fellow human being in need. Valjean, though, is desperate for money and steals silver plates and candlesticks from the bishop. He is captured and returned, but the bishop refuses to press charges. He gives the silver to Valjean, who apparently has a kind of spiritual epiphany on the journey that follows. Those two candlesticks, by the way, are enormous, and it must be difficult to carry them around France in a sack for so long, but they are clearly designed to be symbolic, so carry them Valjean must. Perhaps it’s a part of his penance for trying to escape from his unjust imprisonment or his attempt to escape.

We next see him years later when, using the name of Madeleine, he is asked to consider being the mayor and magistrate (an unexpected combination, certainly, for a former prisoner) of the town where he has built a factory that employs many workers. On that same day, one of his managers fires a woman named Fantine, who has a child at a boarding house whom she is trying to support. Valjean learns of the woman's plight and takes her under his care. He also takes over the guardianship of her daughter, Cosette, who has been put to work in the boarding house doing chores like washing dishes despite her young age. Upon Fantine's death, Valjean assumes the role of parent of the child. The film rather rapidly glosses over the somewhat obvious fact that Fantine has worked as a prostitute, but it was 1935 after the implementation of the Production Code, so we’re supposed to understand that no one is showing Fantine any mercy because, you know, she was a “bad person” even if we can’t be more specific than that. Older movies certainly had to work their way around some complicated subjects in the funniest of ways. You had to be a smart viewer sometimes to catch on.

Of course, Valjean is still on the run from his past, and it isn't long before he's recognized by Javert, who seems to have no other occupation than to find Valjean wherever he might go. Valjean helps to lift a wagon that has been stuck, and it's oddly reminiscent of how he used his back in prison once to save a fellow prisoner. Javert, now a police inspector in the city, makes it his mission to capture Valjean and make him admit to his identity as a former prisoner. You see, there's another fellow who has been charged as Jean Valjean, a drunk who's willing to admit to almost any crime and Javert can only accept the “real” criminal being prosecuted and persecuted. Javert begins investigating the mayor over the objections of everyone else. The real Valjean admits who he is in open court, but when Javert shows up to arrest Valjean, the mayor and his "child" escape and assume new identities. He now becomes a gardener at a convent where his daughter is schooled, and they seem to be happy for a time. Prisoner to factory owner to mayor to gardener is quite the story arc, isn’t it? Whenever he relocates to another place, an intertitle informs us that “Thus ended the X phase of Valjean’s life,” a helpful reminder that we’re about to be somewhere completely different.

I know I'm making this plot sound horribly convoluted and perhaps even rather ridiculous at times, and I'd be willing to wager that the book itself requires you to keep a list of all of the characters, but really, it isn't all that tough to follow. I suspect the story has been remarkably streamlined in order to fit within a two-hour time frame, but the intrigue is still strong. The key, of course, is trying to discern if Laughton's Javert will truly find March's Valjean and arrest him and send him to jail despite all of the good deeds that the reformed prisoner has done. I suppose the lesson is about how difficult it is to escape your past even if you experienced prejudice and mistreatment. Can you start over? Not if you have someone like Javert doggedly pursuing you for decades simply because you’ve not checked in with the local police.

March is very good here, playing Valjean and his various aliases each with a somewhat different style. Yet he remains the same man of integrity throughout the film, and his affection for Cosette is one of the film's strongest points. March always had an intensity to his acting, displayed perhaps best in his two Academy Award winning roles in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Best Years of Our Lives. He ages a lot throughout this film, and a beard often hides his face, making it more likely that someone like Javert would not be able to recognize him immediately.

The real star, though, is Laughton. He is younger and leaner here than I remember him from other movies of the era, and there's a hunger to him, an energy to prove himself that seems to drive his actions. Laughton’s Javert doesn’t seem to age at all as the movie progresses, which makes him an interesting contrast to how March’s Valjean is portrayed. Laughton was an actor who always had a haughty look to his face and an unrepentant smirk, and they’re used to good advantage here. His single-minded desire to arrest Valjean leads him to a harrowing trek through the sewers of Paris, but he refuses to give up. Laughton had already won an Oscar the previous year for playing the title role in The Private Life of Henry VIII, and he would co-star this same year in the original Mutiny on the Bounty, which defeated Les Miserables for Best Picture of 1935. That was quite a string of great roles he had during the decade.

There's more to the story, of course, but why bother rehashing all of it? There are revolutionaries and rioting and all sorts of discussions of right and wrong. We are also treated to quite an exhilarating escape through the sewers of Paris and some great battle sequences later in the film that serve as a climactic moment for both lead characters. The year 1935 had a lot of high-brow literary adaptations, among them fellow nominees David Copperfield and Alice Adams and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This version of Les Miserables certainly belongs in that august company.

As a side note, I’d like to mention that this film was one of the Oscar nominees for Best Assistant Director (for Eric Stacey). The award lasted for only five years, and Stacey was nominated for it on three occasions during that short period of time. How did Academy voters know what the contributions of the assistant director were? Under the studio system, they must have had greater insight into the contributions of people like the assistant director.

Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Production, Best Assistant Director (Eric Stacey), Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Mutiny on the Bounty was chosen as the Best Picture of 1935. It's Hollywood filmmaking from the 1930s at its best. It's the story of a revolt by many of the men aboard the HMS Bounty, whose Captain Bligh uses punishment and intimidation to keep his men in line. After witnessing numerous incidents of Bligh's petty and tyrannical ways, Fletcher Christian leads a revolt and seizes the ship in the South Seas. Bligh, through a remarkable series of events, makes it to safety and devotes himself to seeking out the men responsible for the mutiny in order to see them punished.

Everyone in the cast is first rate. In fact, three of the leads were nominated for Best Actor: Charles Laughton as the spiteful and jealous Bligh, one of his signature roles in a long career; Clark Gable as Christian, a man who never lets his sense of decency be overwhelmed by Bligh's bad behavior; and Franchot Tone as the naive Byam, who is new to his position as a midshipman and is learning just how bad conditions can be. Oddly enough, all three of them lost to Victor McLaglen in The Informer; he was the only other nominee, by the way. My guess is that Academy members had a difficult time discerning which of the three men in Mutiny on the Bounty gave the better performance; they are uniformly excellent here, each one intriguing to watch.

The scenes aboard the ship are particularly interesting for their depictions of the day-to-day existence of sailors. These men would sign on or be forced to sign on for voyages that would take them away from their families and lives back in England for as long as two years. You get a real sense of the drudgery of their lives on board, and you'll feel the desperation they have to return to their homeland. When you add the nastiness of a Captain Bligh, who was apparently a remarkable navigator but an incredibly unpleasant human being, you begin to understand the unrest that develops.

My favorite sequences involve the ship's landing in Tahiti. Charged with obtaining 100 breadfruit plants, the crew soon fall in love with the island and its people. Christian and Byam, in particular, seem to relish their days in the sun with two of the beautiful Tahitian women. After such an idyllic time, why wouldn't Christian be more inclined to object to the harsh conditions aboard the Bounty? And it's hardly surprising that after the mutiny, he would take the ship back to the island to enjoy more of the beauty that he found there. Those scenes in Tahiti certainly must have served to increase tourism.

I wouldn't watch Mutiny on the Bounty to learn the truth about what happened on the ship. Movies aren't really history lessons anyway. But if you want a sense of adventure and some thrills and if you'd like to see some dynamic interaction between talented actors, this movie has it all. It's a good example of the old cliche that "they don't make them like that any more."