:03:01
Contract player Frank Lawton
was considered to play Shelley.
:03:04
David Niven tested for the part,
but was rejected.
:03:08
Screenwriter John Balderston worked
the prologue into his second draft,
:03:11
but only in William Hurlbut's final script
was the precision achieved
:03:16
that makes Bride of Frankenstein
so memorable.
:03:19
Eight writers worked on it, but the story
and language of Bride of Frankenstein
:03:23
is ultimately due almost entirely
to William Hurlbut and James Whale.
:03:53
This shot of the funeral cortege was
the original opening of Frankenstein,
:03:57
curiously still missing from prints today.
:04:00
As originally recorded, Franz Waxman's
music for the prologue ran 5¾ minutes,
:04:04
indicating that the sequence
has been trimmed by nearly two minutes.
:04:08
Waxman scored the prologue
as salon music of the early 19th century,
:04:12
utilising strings and celeste to create
a delicate minuet in A-B-C-A form:
:04:16
Statement, development,
followed by a scherzo
:04:18
as the original picture's horrors
are relived in flashback.
:04:21
The scherzo is a minor-key
desyncopated variation of the minuet.
:04:25
At each depiction of the monster
:04:27
is sounded a nine-note
ascending/descending chromatic run,
:04:30
patterned on the monster's growl.
:04:32
It will recur as a danger motif
several times in the score,
:04:35
usually in conjunction with a five-tone
third-interval motif for the monster.
:04:39
The motif that we heard in the main title
is saved for Karloff's first entrance.
:04:44
That was Torben Meyer
being throttled by the monster -
:04:47
the only new footage in the flashback.
:04:49
Meyer played the Danish tenant in
Universal's Murders in the Rue Morgue.
:04:53
Some thought the prologue immaterial.
:04:56
Film editor Ted Kent
argued for its complete elimination.
:04:59
As the flashback ends, the demure
'A' section of the minuet returns.