While there are other themes at work here, the highlight for me is the waltz theme, which seems to speak so eloquently to an afflicted heart. It's orchestrated for monstrous effect in 'Frankenwhale', with fondness in 'Love in the Trenches', and starkly for solo violin and piano in 'Last Swim'. Once the director is dead, it returns in 'Friend?' to shade the final scene with the feeling that Whale's creativity endured beyond his sad life.

This is an interesting score, because it could have, like Howard Shore's ED WOOD, have taken advantage of the occasion to 'go retro', bringing in references to classic Waxman scores for Whale films in much the same way Shore pulled in the theremin and conga for Burton's film. But the waltz theme really gets to the heart of the piece more directly than a 'clever' pastiche score could have. Perhaps the reason Shore's score works for the Burton film is that the very style of the film-making is an impassioned nostalgic cry for a lost era in tacky film-making. To have the theremin brought in - once a serious icon in sci-fi film music, now a post-modern joke for parodic films - is in the spirit of the whole enterprise. Condon's film being a more conventional 'last days' biopic, the references to Waxman would not be so meaningful.

There's a lot about film-making in this film as well. The sequence where we see four perspectives on BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is particularly clever. (i) Whale as the film-maker remembering the making of it, (ii) Fraser as someone intrigued by the creature's loneliness, (iii) Redgrave as a morally uptight audience member terrified and grateful for a 'good ending' - meaning good prevails, and (iv) the girl in the bar who sees the camp side of the film. All three of the audience reactions were things Whale intended.