Bride of Frankenstein - Censorship

Censorship

Bride of Frankenstein was subjected to censorship, both during production by the Hays office and following its release by local and national censorship boards. Joseph Breen, lead censor for the Hays office, objected to lines of dialogue in the originally submitted script in which Henry Frankenstein and his work were compared to that of God. He continued to object to such dialogue in revised scripts, and to a planned shot of the Monster rushing through a graveyard to a figure of a crucified Jesus and attempting to "rescue" the figure from the cross. Breen also objected to the number of murders, both seen and implied by the script and strongly advised Whale to reduce the number. The censor's office, upon reviewing the film in March 1935, required a number of cuts. Whale agreed to delete a sequence in which Dwight Frye's "Nephew Glutz" kills his uncle and blames the Monster, and shots of Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley in which Breen felt too much of her breasts were visible. Curiously, despite his earlier objection, Breen offered no objection to the cruciform imagery throughout the film — including a scene with the Monster lashed Christ-like to a pole — nor to the presentation of Pretorius as a coded homosexual. Bride of Frankenstein was approved by the Production Code office on April 15, 1935.

Following its release with the Code seal of approval, the film was challenged by the censorship board in the state of Ohio. Censors in England and China objected to the scene in which the Monster gazes longingly upon the as yet unanimated body of the Bride, citing concerns that it looked like necrophilia. Universal voluntarily withdrew the film from Sweden because of the extensive cuts demanded, and Bride was rejected outright by Trinidad, Palestine, and Hungary. One unusual objection, from Japanese censors, was that the scene in which Pretorius chases his miniature Henry VIII with tweezers constituted "making a fool out of a king".