Monster mash

Condon's bio-pic is no Whale of a film

by Gerald Peary

GODS AND MONSTERS Written and directed by Bill Condon. With Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave, and Lolita Davidovich. A Lions Gate Films release. At Cinema 320 from February 16 through 21. An old-time director reminiscing about his bygone career makes a fine nostalgic read. With the sublime exception of Ed Wood, bio-pics about real-life filmmakers have been dramatic duds, from 1957's ill-conceived The Buster Keaton Story, with Donald O'Connor, to 1992's gaseous, Robert Downey Jr.-starring Chaplin. At recent international film festivals, I've encountered new bio-pics spotlighting the lives of Nanook of the North's Robert Flaherty and Zéro de conduite's Jean Vigo. More losers.

Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters (opening this week at the Kendall Square) tries again. It's a screen bio of James Whale (born 1896), a lumpen, crudely educated British lad who arrived in Hollywood and succeeded brilliantly as the elegant filmmaker of the original Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Whale's the one who ingeniously cast Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein's unfortunate creation, freezing that gentlemanly actor forever in the world's mind as the Monster. Whale's stylish résumé also included The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Show Boat (1936). But in the early '40s, his career halted abruptly. In 1957, he was discovered dead, Sunset Boulevard fashion, in his California swimming pool.

One thing known for sure about Whale: he was flamboyantly homosexual in the severely closeted 1930s Hollywood, and he lived openly there for many years with producer David Lewis. Although his last couple of films were box-office disasters and might have factored into his dismissal, Whale was probably a Hollywood firing because of his unhidden gayness. At least that's the surmise of film historians like The Celluloid Closet's Vito Russo.

As for his death, nobody knows much. He might just have died swimming. He might have been a suicide because of his then-forgotten career. Or were there "other factors"?

Gods and Monsters tries to fill in those last days, basing its speculations on Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein. We are given Whale (a white-haired, dandyish Ian McKellen) at home, waited on hand and foot by his religious servant (an ever-flustered Lynn Redgrave). Suddenly, he becomes enamored of his new yard man (George of the Jungle's Brendan Fraser, awkward as a Lady Chatterley's Lover-like object of desire). Whale would love to bed down his muscle-bound employee, but young Clayton assures the horny old man he's straight. So instead, they talk. And talk. And talk.

And the James Whale of this movie proves to be a dotty bore. Enough already of those self-pitying stories about his unfortunate childhood, about his lover lost in the Great War, about his jealousy of Hollywood's establishment gay director, George Cukor! Filmmaker Condon reinforces Whale's tiresome complaints with lugubrious flashbacks to post-Dickensian England and the trenches of World War I. As for Cukor, Condon invents an unpersuasive Hollywood party where a semi-gate-crasher Whale dishes his director arch-enemy.

And Whale's Hollywood horror hits? Gods and Monsters goes along with the perhaps too-cozy Freudian line that the director's Otherness came out in his freaky, condemned, bruised creatures. Condon cuts quite obviously between scenes from the Frankenstein pictures, where Karloff cries out to be loved, and poor, forlorn James Whale.

There is one great sequence in Gods and Monsters: a re-creation of the Universal Pictures 1935 shooting of The Bride of Frankenstein. We see a portion of the filming of the immortal scene where an adult female is created for the Monster and where, coming to consciousness, she shrieks with abhorrence when she actually sees her would-be husband. Filmdom's all-time most potent Castrating Glance!

Condon gets his day on the set just right, with his modern-day actors as the perfect broken-mirror counterparts of that wonderfully loopy original cast. As Condon also demonstrates, James Whale must have been in queer heaven on The Bride of Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester, wife of gay actor Charles Laughton, as the reluctant bride, and Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Praetorius played, respectively, by Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger, two of his homosexual pals.

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Some switches in critic jobs. The very capable David Denby, once film editor for the Phoenix, has left New York magazine to write reviews for the New Yorker, where he'll alternate with Anthony Lane. Daphne Merkin, after a miscast few-months stint at the New Yorker as a movie critic, has been transferred to "general assignment."

Meanwhile, New York magazine concluded its search for Denby's replacement with a splendid hiring, Peter Rainer of LA's New Times. Is there room at any of America's major newspapers (the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, etc.) for a chief critic who doesn't embrace the majority of movies he or she reviews? Although he was clearly the most talented critic at the LA Times, Rainer was fired there a few years ago because he was considered too tough on movies. His sweet revenge: he was a Pulitzer finalist at the New Times, a feat never approached by the soft reviewers whom the LA Times kept on. And now this choice New York magazine job. Congratulations!