Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”
Right now cinemagoers can double their Frankenstein pleasure with “The Bride!” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” up for the Best Picture Oscar this Sunday. Sure, “Frankenstein” is streaming on Netflix – it’s practically left theaters – but it is one of those films best seen on the big screen, as is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s newly opened grand spectacle. They play like bookends to the original story by Mary Shelley, just 18 at the time she wrote her 1818 novel subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.”
In the book, The Bride was promised but never made. It’s in the 1935 James Whale-directed sequel to “Frankenstein” (1931) and Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” that we get the realization of the corpse bride via very different narratives. Wedding crashers in the genre are “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973), starring Jane Seymour and David McCallum of the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” and an emotionally inert 1985 version of “The Bride” pairing Jennifer Beals (“Flashdance”) with Sting, in which the rendering of The Bride was defined by the performer’s comely, magazine-cover self.
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