GODS AND MONSTERS A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth
**1/2 (out of ****)
Poor little Jimmy Whale.
Being pulled from his north of England boarding school and forced to work in a factory to support his family; watching his best friend die before his eyes, hung like a side of mutton on a barbed wire fence during a Great War skirmish; interred in a prisoner of war camp; and, throughout all this, having to shoulder what was then the burdensome stigma of homosexuality.
It's enough to turn a man to madness.
It was certainly enough to turn this particular man towards Hollywood, where he attempted to unleash his demons, his "electrical storms in the brain," through the creative and cathartic process of film making.
By the time he took his own life in 1957, James Whale, the legendary director of "Frankenstein," "The Bride of Frankenstein" and other classic movies from Hollywood's Golden Age (including, believe it or not, "Show Boat"), was seriously ill. He had also fallen from grace from the studio system that had created him, living out his years as a painter of portraits and still lives.
"Gods and Monsters" is a speculative account of the last days of this iconographic filmmaker. It entertains the notion that Whale, who was slowly losing his mind, might not have acted alone and that his final act may have included more than a walk-on for his gardener, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser). While this idea is certainly an imaginative one, the journey to that point as envisioned by writer/director Bill Condon, is less intriguing, unfolding like a Playgirl magazine-styled hybrid of "Ed Wood" and "Love and Death on Long Island."
The ailing, disillusioned Whale is brought to life by that great English thespian, Sir Ian McKellen. McKellen conveys more with a raised eyebrow than Fraser does with his entire body. It's an authoritative performance, much like Ian Hurt's was in "Love and Death...," but the film suffers the same fate of spending entirely too much time focusing on the not terribly fascinating theme of a lustful, aging queen salivating over an unsophisticated, impressionable boy-toy.
With the more interesting background material left underdeveloped, we're given to assume that any gay war veteran with a rough childhood would opt for a career making horror movies.
For all of the interesting possibilities inherent in Condon's source material, the single most important thing one learns about James Whale, according to the film, was that he was a dirty old man. His Germanic, longtime domestic help Hanna (Lynn Redgrave, who steals every scene she's in) stands by dutifully yet disapprovingly as Whale talks the sweaty, muscular Boone into posing for him. "Just your head," he tells him.
And it certainly is a great head. During one fantasy sequence, Whale and Boone, silhouetted as they stagger across a barren, war-torn landscape, are uncanny in their resemblance to Colin Clive and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and it's at times like these, when Condon takes the time to parallel scenes from Whales' movies, that "Gods and Monsters" comes alive. More of this, and less of the idle sexual entendres (take that dueling cigar sequence for example), would have made for more engrossing cinema.
Neither the temptations of the flesh nor the final seduction of death paint a compelling portrait of the multi-talented James Whale. "Gods and Monsters" makes that abundantly clear, but it misses an opportunity to tell us more about the true father of Frankenstein.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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