Brothers

Voluptuary Stuck in a Box

IT’S odd and amusing — in a dry, British sort of way — that James Whale, the best director of Hollywood horror movies in the 1930s, was born and raised in a Midlands mining district known as the Black Country. (Would romantic comedy have been his destiny if he’d grown up in, say, Mayfair?) But everything about his life and career was — as a man of the theater, like Whale himself, might say — passing strange. Between 1930 and 1941 he directed 20 feature films, including the hit spooky-movie classics “Frankenstein” (1931), “The Invisible Man” (1933), and “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935); a lone musical, “Show Boat” (1936); and the period swashbuckler “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1939). [...]

di Terrence Rafferty, articolo completo (6036 caratteri spazi inclusi) su The New York Times 2009