BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) ** I love the way they blame this fabricated tawdry sequel plot on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Not that she was above repeating herself or anything, only that she certainly wouldn't have done it like this. Boris Karloff ambles the countryside with James Whale filming in hot pursuit, each in hopes of locating a plot. When the blind man doesn't have one, they amble laboriously towards the predestined conclusion. Until that time, the best scenes are the ones in which the cleverly named Dr. Septimus Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) exhibits and demonstrates his spectacularly over-developed attitude affliction. Now how did they, in scouring the landscape for something interesting to do, fail to transplant that in the monster? Oh, well. The good news is that once they manage to create the monster's mate, the film turns really funny. The bad news is that Una O'Connor begins her historic term as Mrs. Frankenstein about five minutes before they start rolling final credits. If it had taken Mary Shelley this long to get her stories going-false starts littered with corpses or not-I doubt that we'd have ever heard of her.
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