Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
`He’s never met a princess, only queens,” says openly gay film director James Whale when introducing his gardener to Princess Margaret in Gods and Monsters.
It’s a gem of dialogue in a script that sparkles with witty one-liners and moments of tragedy. Writer/director Bill Condon deservedly won the Best Adapted Screenplay award at this year’s Oscars for his reworking of Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein.
Whale started off as a cartoonist, but became an actor in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War I. After the war he made the stage his career, first as an actor, then as a set designer and director, bringing RC Sheriff’s war play, Journey’s End, to the stage and eventually to the screen in Hollywood in 1930 – it is still a masterful examination of innocence lost in the trenches.
But Whale is probably best known for his horror movies – obviously Frankenstein and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. The first one has an almost fairy-tale beauty to it, and is put together with cinematic flair and narrative sweep. What is most admirable about the film is its gothic- comical tone. In 1935 Whale directed Bride of Frankenstein, which was distinguished by its macabre sense of black humour and parody, filled with expressionist sets and camerawork; it’s widely regarded as his finest work.
He left the horror genre in 1936 to make the definitive version of Showboat, which some critics have described as “masterly”. After this hit, which marked his commercial peak in Hollywood, Whale made smaller-scale B-movies. His “downfall” has been attributed by some tabloid writers to a homosexual scandal.
Gods and Monsters concentrates on the last few months of the director’s life. Whale (a brilliant performance by Sir Ian McKellen) has suffered a stroke and sees visions from his past, including his days during the “Great War”.
Then gardener Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) arrives and the ageing director develops a friendship, even a crush, on the hunky young man. Their relationship develops as the old man confides in the youngster, who is “straight” and put off by Whale’s homosexuality. The twist in the tale comes when we realise that Whale sees his “monster” in the crop haircut of his gardener and wants the youngster to kill him – living in a state of manic mind loss is too much for him.
The film has much in common with Richard Kwietnioski’s Love and Death on Long Island, which played here earlier last year. Adapted from a novel by Gilbert Adair, Love and Death had John Hurt as an ageing widower who obsesses over a young American movie actor played by Jason Priestley.
The other obvious parallel to Gods and Monsters has to be Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice which, in turn, was adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella. It had Dirk Bogarde as an ageing pederast with a crush on a young boy.
Gods and Monsters, however, is a far more witty and much less drawn-out affair. It’s a story about lonely misfits who somehow create a bond with each other. It’s a spider and fly game that is beautifully realised by Condon. The director made his debut as a screenwriter with the precocious horror script for Strange Behaviour, which had a crazed scientist experimenting on high school kids. He’s obviously concerned about madmen and experimentation.
Gods and Monsters didn’t come easily to the editing table. It was made on the modest budget of a cable TV movie. As Condon says: “Movies get made because someone has a gun to their head. Ian … had a commitment to the National Theatre in London for a year. All of this fooling around had to stop; we had to be shooting by July 1. That was it, there was no choice.
“Ultimately it’s a distorted system. It all gets driven by overseas sales agents who give you lists of names and combinations that might make it palatable enough so I could go to the bank and borrow the money. Horrifying names suddenly started to appear. Everyone in this movie is my first choice, but I was forced to wade through a lot of others to get there. A lot of film- makers get forced to use people who hurt their movie.”
Condon’s choice turns out to be perfect. McKellen is impeccable as Whale – urbane, witty, cynical yet kind – while Fraser ably supports with his “architectural skull”. Adding up the cast is Lynn Redgrave as Hanna, the director’s devoted housemaid.
It’s a brilliant study of class consciousness, Hollywood, ageing and memory, imbued with great humour and pathos. It was hard to get made and only when Clive Barker, the openly gay director of horror classics like Hellraiser, came on board did the finances come to life.
Talking about life, the line from Frankenstein where the monster says, “Love dead, hate life” has many reverberations during this startling, intelligent film. As Whale gets frailer and frailer our sympathies go out to him, and it’s perfectly understandable that he wants the young man to kill him. He doesn’t, but then again that would give the ending away, something James Whale would never do.