James Whale
James Whale was an English film director, theatre director and actor, who spent the greater part of his career in Hollywood. He is best remembered for several horror films: Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein, all considered classics. Whale also directed films in other genres, including the 1936 film version of the musical Show Boat.
Whale was born into a large family in Dudley, Worcestershire. He discovered his artistic talent early on and studied art. With the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the British Army and became an officer. He was captured by the Germans and during his time as a prisoner of war he realised he was interested in drama. Following his release at the end of the war he became an actor, set designer and director. His success directing the 1928 play Journey's End led to his move to the US, first to direct the play on Broadway and then to Hollywood, California, to direct films. He lived in Hollywood for the rest of his life, most of that time with his longtime romantic partner, producer David Lewis. Apart from Journey's End, which was released by Tiffany Films, and Hell's Angels, released by United Artists, he directed a dozen films for Universal Pictures between 1931 and 1937, developing a style characterised by the influence of German Expressionism and a highly mobile camera.
At the height of his career as a director, Whale directed The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Studio interference, possibly spurred by political pressure from Nazi Germany, led to the film's being altered from Whale's vision, and it was a critical failure. A run of box-office disappointments followed and, while he would make one final short film in 1950, by 1941 his film directing career was effectively over. He continued to direct for the stage and also rediscovered his love for painting and travel. His investments made him wealthy and he lived a comfortable retirement until suffering strokes in 1956 that robbed him of his vigor and left him in pain. He took his own life on 29 May 1957 by drowning himself in his swimming pool.
Whale was openly gay throughout his career, something that was very rare in the 1920s and 1930s. As knowledge of his sexual orientation has become more widespread, some of his films, Bride of Frankenstein in particular, have been interpreted as having a gay subtext and it has been claimed that his refusal to remain in the closet led to the end of his career. Other commentators have contended that his retirement was provoked by a succession of poorly received projects with which Whale was growing personally dissatisfied.
Early years
Whale was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, at the heart of the Black Country, the sixth of seven children of William, a blast furnaceman, and Sarah, a nurse. He attended Kates Hill Board School, followed by Bayliss Charity School and finally Dudley Blue Coat School. His attendance stopped in his teenage years, because the cost would have been prohibitive and his labor was needed to help support the family. Thought not physically strong enough to follow his brothers into the local heavy industries, Whale started work as a cobbler, reclaiming the nails he recovered from replaced soles and selling them for scrap for extra money. He discovered he had some artistic ability and earned additional money lettering signs and price tags for his neighbors. He used his additional income to pay for evening classes at the Dudley School of Arts and Crafts.World War I broke out in early August 1914. Although Whale had little interest in the politics behind the war, he realized that conscription was inevitable, so he voluntarily enlisted just before it was introduced, into the British Army's Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in October 1915, and was stationed initially at Bristol. He was subsequently commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Worcestershire Regiment in July 1916. He was taken prisoner of war in battle on the Western Front in Flanders in August 1917, and was held at Holzminden Officers' Camp, where he remained until the war's end, being repatriated to England in December 1918. While imprisoned he became actively involved, as an actor, writer, producer and set-designer, in the amateur theatrical productions that took place in the camp, finding them "a source of great pleasure and amusement". He also developed a talent for poker, and after the war he cashed in the chits and IOUs from his fellow prisoners that he had amassed in gambling to provide himself with finances for re-entry into civilian life.
Career
Theatre
After the armistice, he returned to Birmingham and tried to find work as a cartoonist. He sold two cartoons to the Bystander in 1919 but was unable to secure a permanent position. Later that year he embarked on a professional stage career. Under the tutelage of actor-manager Nigel Playfair, he worked as an actor, set designer and builder, "stage director" and director. In 1922, while with Playfair, he met Doris Zinkeisen. They were considered a couple for some two years, despite Whale's living as an openly gay man. They were reportedly engaged in 1924, but by 1925 the engagement was off.In 1928 Whale was offered the opportunity to direct two private performances of R. C. Sherriff's then-unknown play Journey's End for the Incorporated Stage Society, a theatre society that mounted private Sunday performances of plays. Set over a four-day period in March 1918 in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, France, Journey's End gives a glimpse into the experiences of the officers of a British infantry company in World War I. The key conflict is between Capt. Stanhope, the company commander, and Lt. Raleigh, the brother of Stanhope's fiancée. Whale offered the part of Stanhope to the then barely known Laurence Olivier. Olivier initially declined the role, but after meeting the playwright agreed to take it on. Maurice Evans was cast as Raleigh. The play was well received and transferred to the Savoy Theatre in London's West End, opening on 21 January 1929. A young Colin Clive was now in the lead role, Olivier having accepted an offer to take the lead in a production of Beau Geste. The play was a tremendous success, with critics uniform and effusive in their praise and with audiences sometimes sitting in stunned silence following its conclusion only to burst into thunderous ovations. As Whale biographer James Curtis wrote, the play "managed to coalesce, at the right time and in the right manner, the impressions of a whole generation of men who were in the war and who had found it impossible, through words or deeds, to adequately express to their friends and families what the trenches had been like". After three weeks at the Savoy, Journey's End transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre, where it ran for the next two years.
File:Colinclive.jpg|thumb|right|Colin Clive in Whale's 1929 stage production of Journey's End
With the success of Journey's End at home, Broadway producer Gilbert Miller acquired the rights to mount a New York production with an all-British cast headed by Colin Keith-Johnston as Stanhope and Derek Williams as Raleigh. Whale also directed this version, which premiered at Henry Miller's Theatre on 22 March 1929. The play ran for over a year and cemented its reputation as the greatest play about World War I.
Early work in Hollywood
The success of the various productions of Journey's End brought Whale to the attention of movie producers. Coming at a time when motion pictures were making the transition from silent to talking, producers were interested in hiring actors and directors with experience with dialogue. Whale traveled to Hollywood in 1929 and signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He was assigned as "dialogue director" for a film called The Love Doctor. He completed work on the film in 15 days and his contract was allowed to expire. It was at around this time that he met David Lewis.Whale was hired by independent film producer and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, who planned to turn the previously silent Hughes production Hell's Angels into a talkie. Whale directed the dialogue sequences. When his work for Hughes was completed, he headed to Chicago to direct another production of Journey's End.
Having purchased the film rights to Journey's End, British producers Michael Balcon and Thomas Welsh agreed that Whale's experience directing the London and Broadway productions of the play made him the best choice to direct the film. The two partnered with a small American studio, Tiffany-Stahl, to shoot it in New York. Colin Clive reprised his role as Stanhope, and David Manners was cast as Raleigh. Filming got underway on 6 December 1929 and wrapped on 22 January 1930. Journey's End was released in Great Britain on 14 April and in the United States on 15 April. On both sides of the Atlantic the film was a tremendous critical and commercial success.
With the Laemmles at Universal
signed Whale to a five-year contract in 1931 and his first project was Waterloo Bridge. Based on the Broadway play by Robert E. Sherwood, the film stars Mae Clarke as Myra, a chorus girl in World War I London who becomes a prostitute. It too was a critical and popular success. At around this time, Whale and Lewis began living together.In 1931, Universal chief Carl Laemmle, Jr. offered Whale his choice of any property the studio owned. He chose Frankenstein, mostly because none of Universal's other properties particularly interested him, and he wanted to make something other than a war picture. While Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus itself was in the public domain, Universal owned the filming rights to a stage adaptation by Peggy Webling. Whale cast Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein and Mae Clarke as his fiancée Elizabeth. For the Monster, he turned to the little known Boris Karloff, who had wide-ranging experience in supporting roles. Shooting began on 24 August 1931 and wrapped on 3 October. Previews were held 29 October, with wide release on 21 November. Frankenstein was an instant hit with critics and the public. The film received glowing reviews and shattered box office records across the United States, earning Universal $12 million on first release.
Next from Whale were The Impatient Maiden and The Old Dark House. The Impatient Maiden made little impression but The Old Dark House, starring Karloff and Charles Laughton, is credited with reinventing the "dark house" subgenre of horror films. Thought lost for some years, a print was found by filmmaker Curtis Harrington in the Universal vaults in 1968. It was restored by George Eastman House, and released on Blu-ray disk in 2017.
Whale's next film was The Kiss Before the Mirror, a critical success but a box-office failure. He returned to horror with The Invisible Man. Shot from a script approved by H. G. Wells, the film blended horror with humor and confounding visual effects. Much admired, The New York Times placed it in their list of the ten best films of the year, and the film broke box-office records in cities across America. So highly regarded was the film that France, which restricted the number of theatres in which undubbed American films could play, granted it a special waiver because of its "extraordinary artistic merit".
Also in 1933 Whale directed the romantic comedy By Candlelight which gained good reviews and was a modest box office hit. In 1934 he directed One More River, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by John Galsworthy. The film tells the story of a woman desperate to escape her abusive marriage to a member of the British aristocracy. This was the first of Whale's films for which Production Code Administration approval was required and Universal had a difficult time securing that approval because of the elements of sexual sadism implicit in the husband's abusive behavior.
Bride of Frankenstein was Whale's next project. He had resisted making a sequel to Frankenstein as he feared being pigeonholed as a horror director. Bride hearkened back to an episode from Mary Shelley's original novel in which the Monster promises to leave Frankenstein and humanity alone if Frankenstein makes him a mate. In the film he does, but the mate is repelled by the monster who then, setting Frankenstein and his wife free to live, chooses to destroy himself and his "bride". The film was a critical and box office success, having earned some $2 million for Universal by 1943. Lauded as "the greatest of Universal's gothic horror", Bride is frequently hailed as Whale's masterpiece.
With the success of Bride, Laemmle was eager to put Whale to work on Dracula's Daughter, the sequel to Universal's first big horror hit of the sound era. Whale, wary of doing two horror films in a row and concerned that directing Dracula's Daughter could interfere with his plans for the first all-sound version of Show Boat, instead convinced Laemmle to buy the rights to a novel called The Hangover Murders. The novel is a comedy-mystery in the style of The Thin Man, about a group of friends who were so drunk the night one of them was murdered that none can remember anything. Retitled Remember Last Night?, the film was one of Whale's personal favorites, but met with sharply divided reviews and commercial uninterest.
With the completion of Remember Last Night? Whale immediately went to work on Show Boat. Whale gathered as many of those as he could who had been involved in one production or another of the musical, including Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, Charles Winninger, Sammy White, conductor Victor Baravalle, orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, and, as Magnolia, Irene Dunne, who believed that Whale was the wrong director for the piece. The 1936 version of Show Boat, faithfully adapted from the original stage production, is believed to be the definitive film version of the musical by many critics, but became unavailable following the 1951 remake. In 2014, a restoration of the film became available on DVD in the U.S. as part of Warner Home Video's Archive Collection line; and in 2020, a 4K restoration Blu-Ray was released by The Criterion Collection.
Show Boat was the last of Whale's films to be produced under the Laemmle family. The studio was now bankrupt, and the Laemmles lost control to J. Cheever Cowdin, head of the Standard Capital Corporation, and Charles R. Rogers, who was installed in Junior Laemmle's old job.