James Whale : A New World of Gods and Monsters - Softcover

Curtis, James

4.3

92 ratings by Goodreads

9780571192854: James Whale : A New World of Gods and Monsters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571192858 ISBN 13: 9780571192854

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1998

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The definitive biography of James Whale, the stylish and innovative British director of Frankenstein who virtually invented the genre of the classic horror film but who only a few years later was no longer making films, living instead on the fringes of the closeted homosexual culture of 1950s Los Angeles, virtually forgotten by Hollywood.

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Review:

You may not recognize James Whale, but you surely recognize his most prominent contribution to American popular culture: Frankenstein's monster, as portrayed by Boris Karloff. Whale, a British expatriate who made his way to Hollywood just as films were making the transition to the talkies, directed both the original Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1936), for Universal Pictures. Afraid of being pigeonholed as a horror director (he also made The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House), he eventually insisted on more mainstream projects, including the musical Show Boat and The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front that flopped at the box office. Today, The Bride of Frankenstein is considered to be his best film, a work that combines moments of genuine suspense with a thoroughly macabre sense of humor.

In 1982, film historian James Curtis wrote his first biography of Whale. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters is not a revision of that book, however, but a substantial reworking involving much in the way of new research. Whale's life story is emblematic of an entire generation of European �migr�s who made critical artistic contributions to American film only to find themselves in ultimate obscurity. Although recent fictional and truthful accounts of Whale's life have emphasized his homosexuality--even the jacket cover of this book cites it as the reason for Hollywood's eventual rejection of Whale--Curtis himself tells a more nuanced tale. Certainly, Whale made no attempts to hide his preference for men; at the same time, he made his sexual orientation neither a prominent feature of his personal life nor his movies. While it's possible that he was fired from Columbia Pictures in 1941 because of homophobia on the part of studio owner Harry Cohn, it should also be noted that it didn't take much to get on the bad side of Harry Cohn and that, perhaps more to the point, Whale hadn't had a significant commercial hit in five years.

Curtis's biography is filled with fascinating anecdotes from David Lewis, Whale's longtime companion, and several of the actors who worked with Whale, including Peter Cushing and Gloria (Titanic) Stuart. It also has a rich appreciation of the artistic qualities of Whale's work. It is, in short, the sort of critical biography that any film director would hope to have. --Ron Hogan

From the Author:

In 1982, the late William K. Everson reviewed a little 267-page book I had written about the life of James Whale. At the time I thought it was pretty good, and so did Everson. "Probably there will be other books on Whale," Everson wrote, "including, I hope, one devoted primarily to the films themselves. But if one should come along to be the glossy equivalent of Whale's own The Bride of Frankenstein, then this initial book must be considered the parallel to Whale's original Frankenstein: flawed, rough-hewn, but still the basic work from which others must derive." I had no idea how prophetic Everson's words would be, for just as it eventually fell to Whale to improve upon his own original, so it was with me. In 1993, I decided I had not done justice to the subject of James Whale. I began researching his life all over again and rewriting it from scratch. This book is the result of that work.

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