I found this double-review in my files, which was originally published in my Books on Film column in Crime Time, when that was still a solid-body magazine. It appeared in issue 15, in November 1998. The Jim Shepard novel was new; it had been titled Nosferatu when it had been published in America; Faber added the 'In Love' bit to juice it up. Curtis' book was a substantial reworking, based on new information, of his 1982 biography with the same title; I assume it was re-issued to coincide with the release of the excellent film Gods & Monsters, with Ian McKellan, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave, adapted and directed by Bill Condon. I would not be surprised to learn that Shepard's book had some impact on Steve Katz's screenplay for the 2000 film Shadow Of The Vampire. Stranger things have happened.
James Whale killed himself in 1957. He was found floating in his swimming pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, and like Gloria Swanson in that film, he was a one-time Hollywood big-wig whose time had long passed. He had not directed a feature film since 1941, a mere decade after Frankenstein made him famous. Before that, starting with Journey's End in 1930, Whale had a six-year run which also included Waterloo Bridge, The Invisible Man, Bride Of Frankenstein (in my eyes, his masterpiece) and Showboat, successes all, during which he was one of Hollywood’s best paid and best regarded directors.
Hollywood was an unlikely resting place for a boy from the Black Country. Whale was a blast furnaceman’s son, raised in a strict Methodist family in the slums of Dudley. As a boy he studied art, but it was as a prisoner of war in Germany that he discovered the theatre. Returning to England in 1918, he began in the provinces, eventually turning to directing and scoring a huge hit on stage with Journey's End, starring a young Laurence Olivier, and showcasing Whale’s brilliance at atmospheric staging..
Whale’s good fortune was to tour America's stages with Journey's End precisely at the point when Hollywood needed stage directors to guide them though the transition to talkies. Whale grasped quickly how camera movement and editing could work with set design to tell a story. Even today, one is struck by the sense of movement in Whale’s best films, which highlights their cinematic economy.
Whale’s decline in Hollywood has often been attributed to discrimination against his open homosexuality. But James Curtis takes pains to point that Whale’s own ease with his sexuality led to general acceptance in the studios. His decline might better be explained, at least in part, by his difficult reputation, especially his tendency to go over budgets and schedules, not least, in par,t by insisting on breaks for tea during shooting.
Whale then spent a decade painting and occasionally directing theatre. In a late fit of mid-life crisis, he abandoned his partner, producer David Lewis, in favour of a series of toy boys. As his health failed, he seems to have realised that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he had sunk into caricature, and he took his own life. It was James Curtis who finally reunited Whale and Lewis, after the latter’s death in 1987, placing their ashes together. This biography is his second act of kindness to a great director.
Horror
movies and homosexuality also go together in Jim Shepard’s novel about
the German director F.W. Murnau. Born Friedrich Lumpe, Murnau was a
“sensitive” provincial boy sent to school in Berlin, where his
schoolmate Hans Ehrenbaum introduced him to both art and society.
After taking his new name from the town where the boys consummated
their relationship, he and Hans entered Berlin’s theatrical world,
under Max Reinhard.’s pre-war Berlin resembles Whale’s
Twenties’ London: with Conrad Veidt (best known here as Major Strasser in Casablanca) serving as his young Olivier, and
Murnau, like Whale, revelling in the discovery of this exotic, creative and rewarding
demimonde.
Hans’ death in the Great War haunted Murnau all his life; he had betrayed Hans with a mutual friend and suspected Hans sought death deliberately. This haunting underpins Shepard’s story, and the sense of Murnau using the vampire Nosferatu as a metaphor for his own unhappy sexuality carries far more credence than similar theories about Whale and his filmic monsters.
Shepherd is best during the filming of Nosferatu and Murnau’s other masterpiece, The Last Man. The emotional apex is actually metaphoric, when the brilliant cameraman Karl Freund finally discovers a gyroscopic process which allows the camera to move. This freedom seems to be the only one Murnau ever found in his life.
Murnau’s career in Hollywood was unsuccessful; he spent much time in the South Seas, including a doomed attempt to collaborate with Robert Flaherty. By this point, Shepard seems to rush the story, perhaps because the bright light of California washes out the expressionist shadows of Murnau’s life. Shepard returns to the past to show, touchingly, how the sensitive boy never recovered from the loss of his soulmate. Murnau was ill-suited for survival in Hollywood. With his latest Filipino houseboy at the wheel, he died in a car crash in 1931.
James Whale: A New World Of Gods and Monsters by James Curtis: Faber 1998 £14.99
Nosferatu by Jim Shepard: Faber 1998 £9.99
