SOURCE: "James Whale," in Film Comment, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring, 1971, pp. 52-7

In the following essay, Jensen discusses Whale as an early example of an auteur film director.

It certainly is becoming harder and harder to keep track of the auteurs, especially now that more and more lost films are reaching present-day screens. Directors who once existed solely as names without identity now must be evaluated on the basis of a body of work long unknown. James Whale is one such filmmaker. Even though a few of his films—Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein—show up fairly often on television, these works are only a fraction of his output; and the fact that they are all horror films causes him to be typed as an effective but limited genre specialist. Some of his films are still out of reach and others are rarely screened (this writer is...