Volume 46, Number 12 · July 15, 1999
The Joys of Necrophilia
By Joseph McBride
Gods and Monsters
a film written and directed by Bill Condon. Condon's screenplay appears in Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 1998-1999).
Universal Studios Home Video, $98.99 VHS; $34.99 DVD
Father of Frankenstein
by Christopher Bram
Plume, 276 pp., $12.95 (paper)
James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters
by James Curtis
Faber and Faber, 455 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Bride of Frankenstein
by Alberto Manguel. (distributed in the US by Indiana University Press)
London: British Film Institute, 69 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1998
by David Ehrenstein
William Morrow, 372 pp., $25.00
When the British expatriate filmmaker James Whale was found dead in his swimming pool on Amalfi Drive in the posh Pacific Palisades on May 29, 1957, the world paid only passing attention. In Hollywood terms, the director of the stylish horror films Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man and the 1936 version of Show Boat already had been dead for sixteen years, the length of his retirement from making feature films. Sixteen years is an epoch in Hollywood: that period had seen such tumultuous developments as the government-ordered divorce of studios from their theater chains, the rise of television, and the gradual dominance of color and the wide screen. By 1957, Whale's old black-and-white classics from the Thirties seemed even deader than he was. They were remembered, if at all, as quaint relics from a more gentlemanly age when horror was still portrayed on screen with a sense of discretion.
Review, 5452 words
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