June 22, 1889– James Whale:

“Boris Karloff’s face fascinated me. I made drawings of his head, adding sharp bony ridges where I imagined the skull might have joined. But, that queer, penetrating personality was more important than his shape, which could be easily altered.”

James Whale was a great film director, a true artist, and the subject of one of my favorite films, Bill Condon’s Gods And Monsters (1998) featuring Sir Ian McKellen’s masterful performance as Whale. Thinking of him, I landed on that moment in the film when McKellen’s Whale murmurs about the hunky Brendan Fraser’s “architectural skull”. This, from the man who would design the impressive and imposing head of the Frankenstein monster?

In Gods And Monsters, a geeky young film fan tells the aging Whale: “It’s the horror movies you’ll be remembered for”, and despite his gentlemanly English manners, you can see the irritation in McKellen’s eyes. The young fan is correct of course. Whale’s other films, even his definitive version of the great American musical Show Boat (1936), are mostly forgotten in the 21st century, but people still watch Frankenstein (1931) and Bride Of Frankenstein (1935). The look of the monster: square head, seams, scars and neck bolts, remains one of the greatest visual icons of the 20th century.

Whale was a painter before he was a stage and film director. His keen eye for design is part of what makes his films so memorable. Besides the look of Doctor Frankenstein’s monster, perfectly played by the great Boris Karloff, he also created the hairstyle and elegantly stitched scars of the monster’s Bride played by Elsa Lanchester. Whale had studied the great German expressionist silent horror films that were never widely released in the USA, and from them he took the stark dramatic lighting and impressionistic sets. Along with his art director Charles Hall, Whale created the style now called Universal Studio Gothic: huge dark interiors with enormous doors, imposing staircases and long shadows. Young Frankenstein, Mel Brook’s affectionate 1974 parody of Bride Of Frankenstein, reproduced that Universal Pictures look with an eye for detail. Most of the lab equipment used as props for Brook’s film was created by Kenneth Strickfaden for the 1931 film Frankenstein. To help evoke the atmosphere of the earlier film, Brooks shot his film entirely in black and white, a rarity in the 1970s.

Gods And Monsters considers that a major influence on Whale’s work was his time as a young soldier in the trenches in WW I. The film uses flashbacks of a handsome young man in a foxhole to provide Whale with awful memories of a boyish lover’s death. But experiences in the war to end all wars really did the same for the real life Whale. He was in the thick of some of the most intense battles, before ending up in a POW camp, where he began his directing career by producing amateur theatricals.

There is beauty, perversity and humor in Whale’s horror films. His dark, horrid, witty works portends the movies of directors like Brian De Palma, David Lynch, the late George A. Romero, and Tim Burton.

Whale was an openly gay man in Hollywood in the 1930s, not an easy life. While Gods And Monsters is fiction, his actual last lover was his former chauffeur working a gas station operator who had to share Whale with a male nurse. They were a couple for the last five years of Whale’s life.

I have read that the Frankenstein films were a way for Whale to give a coded clue to his sexuality and his feelings of being a misunderstood outsider. Gods And Monsters shows this with an understated intelligence & elegance. Whale’s longtime partner David Lewis stated:

“Jimmy was first & foremost an artist, his films represent the work of an artist, not a gay artist, but an artist.”

Whale probably identified with the monster not just because of his gayness, but also because of his standing as a member of a lower-class in Britain.

Whale directed the play Journey’s End (1928) on London’s West End and then on Broadway. He went to Hollywood to direct the film version and stayed there for the rest of his life, most of that time with Lewis, a successful producer of films including Dark Victory (1939) and Raintree County (1957). They were a couple for 23 years, ending their relationship when Whale invited his young chauffeur to live with them. Lewis bought his own cottage nearby and remained close to the director, helping care for him to the end.

Of course, Whale will always be most noted for the horror films, along with the Frankenstein flicks there is The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933), but he became increasingly disenchanted with his association with horror and never returned to the genre.

Having experienced WW I close-up, Whale seemed an inspired choice to direct The Road Back (1937), a sequel to All Quiet On The Western, but the film was a critical and commercial failure.

A string of failures followed and by 1941 his film directing career was over. Whale continued to direct for the stage and also returned to his love for painting. He had invested wisely and he lived a comfortable life in Hollywood until he suffered a series of strokes in 1956 that left him frail and in misery.

Despondent, lonely, in intense physical pain, Whale drowned himself in his backyard swimming pool in May 1957. Ironically, Whale never swam in the pool, building it after Lewis had a pool installed at his own home. Whale maintained it as a spot for hosting swimming parties for young guys.

Lewis, close to his own passing in 1987, revealed the details of Whale’s suicide note:

To All I Love,

Do not grieve for me. My nerves are all shot and for the last year I have been in agony day and night, except when I sleep with sleeping pills, and any peace I have by day is when I am drugged by pills.

I have had a wonderful life but it is over and my nerves get worse and I am afraid they will have to take me away. So please forgive me, all those I love and may God forgive me too, but I cannot bear the agony and it is best for everyone this way.

The future is just old age and illness and pain. Goodbye and thank you for all your love. I must have peace and this is the only way.

Jimmy

My lovely friend Christopher Bram, the author of the original novel Gods And Monsters, has a terrific chapter about writing the book and the making of the film version in his terrific memoir Mapping The Territory (2009). I recommend this highly entertaining, emotionally involving book to anyone that is interested in the process of writing.