James Whale is, as Schreck aptly notes, a director in dire need of reevaluation. Unfortunately for the average cinephile, very few of his films are available on DVD, and even more harrowing, very few cinemas out there are interested in an all-out retrospective (impossible now that the Universal prints all burned down - unless, that is, they strike new prints of
Remember Last Night? and
Green Hell (to name just two) from the negatives, but somehow I doubt that). To that end, I'm endlessly grateful for having seen eleven of his films, and two of those that I have not seen (
The Old Dark House and
Waterloo Bridge) are available on DVD in R1.
Whale's cinema is unique in my eyes for its combination of personal filmmaking, its mastery of tone, mood, and pacing, and a special kind of "cinematic theatricality" (for lack of a better word). All of these elements can be found in films as diverse as
Frankenstein (horror),
By Candlelight (true screwball comedy), and
One More River (melodrama). Often enough, Whale juggled all three of these genre types intermittently,
Bride of Frankenstein being the example par excellence. It's fascinating to me that we hail Howard Hawks today for his wonderful ability to combine genres as well as work across them, no attention has been paid to Whale's similar work in the 1930s.
To get back to those elements I noted above, Whale's films, moreso than those of contemporary Hollywood filmmakers of the period (with a few notable exceptions such as John Ford and Frank Borzage), feel remarkably personal. I do wonder whether such a reading is inspired by Whale's own personal biography, particularly his life as a gay man. However, the best of Whale's films are always those that seem to have the most affinity with the man's own beliefs and feelings.
Invisible Man is the film that most strongly begs for a gay reading. In that film, Rains' character (the titular "invisible man" of the title) tries to live a life of seclusion and secrecy after discovering the ability to become invisible. However, after society consistently evades his seclusion and begins calling him a "freak" and a "monster," he goes mad, attacking friends and acquaintances, and indeed, society itself. Lines like: "All right, you fools. You've brought it on yourselves! Everything would have come right if you'd only left me alone. You've driven me near madness with your peering through the keyholes and gaping through the curtains. And now you'll suffer for it!" and "Even the moon is frightened of me, the whole world is frightened of me, frightened to death!", especially when delivered by such a wonderful and capable performer as Rains, feel haunting, and achingly tragic in a way that only a director as sympathetic as Whale could have delivered.
But Whale was more than just a director begging for a personal reading, but a supremely talented craftsmen. While one could write at length about the moods and tones of his astounding horror films, wonderful examples can be drawn from his other films as well.
The Great Garrick,
One More River, and
The Kiss Before the Mirror are all noteworthy for their ability to alternate between light and darkness, comedy and melodrama. In other words, these films always teeter precariously on the edge of excess, but Whale always manages to strike a supreme balance between these sudden shifts in tone and mood. I'm reminded of a scene in
The Kiss Before the Mirror in which Frank Morgan's defense attorney reenacts his client's murder with increasing passion and fury. Whale's camera draws steadily closer to Morgan's beady brow as shafts of chiaroscuro light dance around his head. Finally, his friend explodes in a passionate plea to stop, and Morgan, astonished with his own sudden exuberance, settles back in silence. Whale's ability to throw this frightening scene in amidst what is generally a fairly routine, occasionally quite humorous melodrama is symptomatic of his cinema from this period.
Finally, there is what I call a "cinematic theatricality." By this I mean that Whale worked well within the conventions of the theatre, using quite obvious sets, familiar theatrical tropes and acting, and traditional blocking elements, but he constantly inverts or alters these in such a way that the integrity of the films as cinema remains. His famous lateral tracking shots are a great example of this. Not only do they operate on a narrative level, allowing Whale to concentrate the viewer's attention on an event in one continuous, unbroken shot, but they also establish the spatial dimensions of the space within which the characters are acting. This is why a familiar lateral tracking shot in
Green Hell feels so gratuitous and out-of-place. There is no such "space" to explore - there is only jungle, that is, endless space, but on a kind of two-dimensional flat plane. But beyond these tracking shots there is an inherent love of the theatre that Whale was never afraid to teasingly mock, as he did in
Bride of Frankenstein and most obviously, in
The Great Garrick. But beyond this, he also had a remarkable ability to bring out the inherent cinema in a piece of theatre, as he did in the most wonderful moment in
Show Boat, Paul Robeson's show-stopping rendition of "Ol' Man River." Not only does Whale bring energy to this scene through rapid editing; but he also creates an almost expressionistic, dream-like atmosphere through exaggerated sets (the prison) and lighting, and through his nearly 360 degree circle around Robeson.
I've rambled on long enough. Whale is, to put it bluntly, one of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers of the 1930s. While I have absolutely no faith that Universal (and Warners as well) will ever put out DVDs of these pictures, they are without a doubt real treasures of American cinema. That audiences will perhaps never get to enjoy the sublime pleasures of
By Candlelight (an amazingly funny film that obliterates the conventional wisdom that
It Happened One Night was the first screwball comedy),
One More River, or
The Great Garrick is an absolute crime.
Just wondering, Shreck; have you (or anyone else here) seen The Road Back? This ditty is a bitch to find, and I've been hoping Universal might have put it out with All Quiet on the Western Front or in some war film box, or maybe in their cinema classics line. This was supposed to be Whale's masterwork, gutted by the studio, but apparently is still worth seeking out.
I unfortunately haven't seen this one. I'll look into this, but from what I remember, there have been some problems with the rights to the Remarque novel, or some such silly reason.
) except the relative dud that is Green Hell (although even that has one has a few good moments). 
