Monster March: The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

While watching The Ghost of Frankenstein – the fourth Franken-film in the Universal Classic Monsters franchise – I was reminded of a line from Peter Pan: “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” As much as the Frankenstein films have pushed the narrative forward, more so than most of the Universal Monsters movies, The Ghost of Frankenstein is the first time that I’ve felt bored by the old familiar tropes; rather than continue to reinvent the monster wheel, Ghost of Frankenstein doubles down on what we’ve already seen.

Following the events of Son of Frankenstein, the village is gripped with fear that Frankenstein’s monster will return, and so they implore the mayor to destroy Castle Frankenstein. Ygor (Bela Lugosi), having miraculously survived the end of the last film, discovers that so too has the Monster (Lon Chaney Jr.), and the pair escape the castle in search of Henry Frankenstein’s other son, Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). With the Monster weakened, Ygor hopes Ludwig will restore his strength and threatens to expose the doctor’s lineage if he does not obey.

 

I’ve compared the recursive nature of Ghost of Frankenstein to the classic line from Peter Pan, but there’s also something to be said for the infomercial quality of the film, which seems to shout to its audience, “But wait, there’s more!” Both Ygor and the Monster met pretty definitive ends in Son of Frankenstein, but Ghost handwaves both of those in order to get the plot going. I’ll grant you that there’s a tolerable level of suspended disbelief in accepting that the Monster outlived his bath in molten sulfur, but even the characters in the film can’t believe that Ygor survived being shot multiple times. Ditto the existence of a secret, second son of Frankenstein; it’s the same gimmick as Son of Frankenstein, just flavored a little differently. 

 

All of which is to say that within ten minutes of Ghost of Frankenstein, I was overcome with a wave of déjà vu – and not in a good, “this is how the genre gets invented” way. Where it’s been fun over the course of Monster March to watch filmmakers figure out the nascent genre (and indeed, talkie motion pictures more generally), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the formula wasn’t invented so much as ossified over the course of the 1940s. Every creative decision in Ghost of Frankenstein seems to be borne out of expectation rather than invention, and the result is something that feels overly familiar. 

 

Consequently (or perhaps as a contributing factor), much of Ghost of Frankenstein is rather low-energy – which may come as a bit of a surprise because the film is arguably the loudest monster movie so far. From the opening frames, the score is banging and crashing, while the film is never a few seconds away from an all-out riot erupting. But all the performances lack the verve that had set the Franken-films apart; even Bela Lugosi seems restrained by the material, though he’s trying as hard as he can to make Ygor as weird as he was in Son of Frankenstein. (Still, no one lurks in a window like Lugosi.) As Ludwig Frankenstein, Sir Cedric Hardwicke is appropriately subdued if a bit too reliant on the stiff upper lip, the kind of performance that might best be described today as “slumming it.”

 

The big headline in Ghost of Frankenstein is that it’s the first Franken-film without Boris Karloff as The Monster, and Lon Chaney Jr. struggles to fill his oversized shoes. While Chaney was captivating as The Wolf Man, his Monster lacks Karloff’s surprising humanity, and his stumbling around the film suggests that his Monster is blind long before the third-act turn in which that affliction actually manifests. (I would have thrown up a spoiler warning, but it’s not even a plot detail that matters, and I would venture to say you’d be as surprised as I was to discover that wasn’t always already the case.) There’s only one moment when Chaney’s Monster is transcendently creepy, though it’s more the fault of the script than the performance. Amid so much kerfuffle about how to restore the Monster’s strength, the monster kidnaps a young girl (shades of the original Frankenstein) and pantomimes to Ludwig that he wants the girl’s brain put inside his head. It’s a moment of genuine horror and an astonishingly dark intimation, especially by 1942’s standards.

 

Of course, it never comes to pass, and the second act concludes with a bizarre half-chase in which the Monster shambles after Ludwig’s daughter as she shelters the youngling from his grasp. The third act then transforms into a shell game in which brains are shuffled about until one lands in the operating room with the anesthetized Monster. To say which brain ends up in the Monster would be a spoiler, so I’ll refrain – but even that moment plays less like the next evolution of the character and more like a sad reduction of the whole affair into a B-movie plot. I shouldn’t be questioning why a 1942 movie misunderstands how blood transfusions work if that movie is sufficiently engaging. I should instead be captivated, enthralled, perhaps even briefly horrified – but sadly The Ghost of Frankenstein lives up to its name, a sad and pale specter of greatness long dead, a mere apparition haunting the franchise. 

The Ghost of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by W. Scott Darling and Eric Taylor. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Bellamy, Lionel Atwill, and Evelyn Ankers.  

While we covered it last week for Wolf Man Wednesday, recall that the Frankenstein saga continues into Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Since this is the last Franken-Friday – and Deep Sea Saturdays concluded last week – all I can do is bid you welcome to Transylvania Tuesday, to see what happens when Frankenstein’s Monster enters the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Of all the Universal Classic Monsters, the Invisible Man franchise has often seemed like the franchise without a compass heading. Certainly over the course of five movies, we can say the protagonists all looked alike (or didn’t – but who can tell?), and there’s been a faint thread distantly connecting the films by way of the Griffin family tree. But if these films weren’t all bundled together in a DVD box set, would anyone consider this a franchise? In that sense, The Invisible Man’s Revenge is the logical next step in this increasingly disconnected series, but in all other senses, it’s the all-too-common “final fizzle” for these Universal Monsters.

Robert Griffin (Jon Hall) escapes from a mental institution and sets off in search of his old friend Sir Jasper Harrick (Lester Matthews), who left him to die while on African safari. While the now-mad Griffin lobbies for his share of the diamond mines Jasper discovered, Jasper and his wife Lady Irene (Gale Sondergaard) arrange for Griffin to be drugged and thrown in a river. He’s rescued by local swindler Herbert Higgins (Leon Errol) before falling in with Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine), something of a mad scientist whose newfound invisibility serum may prove to be Griffin’s ticket for revenge.

 

The Invisible Man was such a strong and auspicious beginning to the franchise, though Claude Rains making one and only one appearance should have been a good indicator that the series would never again reach those heights. Then we had a remake by way of a crime procedural, a slapstick comedy/feminist farce, and a war picture before we got to... whatever The Invisible Man’s Revenge is supposed to be. Is it a revenge tragedy, or is it a descent into madness? Is it your classic “mad scientist” story, or is it another physical comedy kneeslapper? The problem with Revenge is that it tries to be all of these and more, while succeeding at none of them. 

 

For starters, we’re more than a half-hour into the 77-minute runtime before any invisibility shenanigans start up, and before that we’re regaled with a lengthy shaggy-dog tale of diamond mines, legal rights, attempted murder, and African safaris. It is, in short, a set-up that would make The Count of Monte Cristo blush. If this were the tale of an invisible Edmond Dantes, I cannot tell you how there I would be for that movie – after all, that premise is everything I wanted The Invisible Man Returns to be. Instead, Revenge is a bizarre amalgamation of the revenge plot from Returns, the lighthearted dynamic of Invisible Woman, and the “serum makes you mad” premise of the original. Even the most amazing special effect – the use of makeup to render Griffin partially visible – is pilfered wholesale from Invisible Agent.

 

Historically, I’ve been in favor of these cut-and-paste franchise installments, in which the foregoing chapters are plundered to derive a kind of formula for the next film (see also You Only Live Twice and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales – both, like Revenge, the fifth film in their respective series). The difference in the case of Revenge, however, is one of consistent tone. Revenge never quite knows whether it wants to be horror, tragedy, or comedy; furthermore, the use of the invisibility effect is deployed in a similarly inconsistent manner. Revenge innovates in a few moments when Griffin uses water or milk to make his face partially visible – it’s a neat gag and plenty uncanny, though we’d seen something similar in Invisible Agent with the cold cream. But while these shots are properly unsettling, the film’s ostensible setpiece is outright slapstick comedy, with Griffin aiding Higgins in a round of barroom darts. Higgins and Griffin land bullseye after bullseye with the darts, but it’s wildly out of place in a film where a career criminal is aiding a madman to steal property from the couple who tried to murder him.

 

Just about the only thing in Revenge that works without reservation is the casting of John Carradine as Dr. Peter Drury. When Griffin first enters Drury’s lab, it’s as though he’s walking into another film altogether – and it’s the film I would much rather have seen. Carradine is wickedly hammy in the mad scientist role, and the idea of this daft eccentric living on the edge of town is precisely the kind of bent reality that the Universal Classic Monsters do best. Carradine would, as we saw yesterday, go on to play Dracula in some of the later Universal features, and it’s little wonder from this performance why the studio would hand over one of its headline creatures to Carradine, who ably dials into the valence Revenge needs to strike to succeed.

 

It’s a shame, then, that Revenge never quite lives up to Carradine’s performance, just as much as it’s disappointing that the franchise ends on this note. Then again, if an invisible protagonist stars in five films, and no one calls it a franchise, can it really be said to exist? You’d have to see it to believe it.

 

The Invisible Man’s Revenge is not rated. Directed by Ford Beebe. Written by Bertram Millhauser. Starring Jon Hall, Leon Errol, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard, and Lester Matthews. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Monster March: Son of Dracula (1943)

A few months before Monster March – perhaps even the dark and stormy night that this month-long marathon first came to mind – I found myself watching Svengoolie. If you’ve never seen Svengoolie, it’s a Chicago-based program that airs horror and science-fiction movies, often of (shall we say) the less critically favored variety, with jokes and zingers thrown in the commercial breaks. It’s all in good cornball fun, and a majority of the films probably benefit from some gentle ribbing. I had hoped that such would be the case for Son of Dracula, but the truth is that Svengoolie’s lame puns did their level best to save Son of Dracula – in isolation, it’s a dreadful bore, maybe the worst of the Universal Classic Monsters thus far.

When a train pulls into a New Orleans station, all anyone can talk about is who’s not aboard – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.), late of Hungary. Plantation heiress and voodoo dabbler Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) awaits the arrival of her foreign beau, spurning her American sweetheart Frank Stanley (Robert Paige). Once Alucard arrives, he and Katherine are swiftly married, but Frank protests; a scuffle breaks out, and Frank opens fire on Alucard, only for the bullets to pass through the count and strike Katherine. But is Katherine actually dying? Or is she already among the undead?

 

Let me set the stage a bit. I prefer to watch these movies late at night, with all the lights out – it really sets a spooky mood. I try to imagine what it must have been like to see these movies in their initial releases, as the horror genre and the very notion of a shared cinematic universe were evolving before the audience’s eyes. (And unlike our themed sequence of Monster March, I’ve been watching them in release order.) Usually these films have surprised me in one way or another, be it in establishing genre canon or in entertaining me more than I anticipated. With Son of Dracula, we have a first – it’s the first time I very nearly fell asleep during a Universal Monster movie. It was a genuine struggle to jolt myself out of a stupor even as the credits rolled. Son of Dracula is boring, boring, boring.

 

In terms of plot, Son of Dracula is largely confounding, and the parts that make sense don’t entertain in the slightest. For one, I’m still unsure if Count Alucard is the son of Dracula or if he’s Dracula himself. Unlike many Universal Monster movies, there’s no nods to continuity with previous films, nary a mention of Lugosi’s vampire or of Countess Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter. Just about the only thing we know is that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards – and we know this because it’s explicitly explained on screen twice, almost as though writers Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor wanted us to know just how clever they are. It’s also unclear why Alucard has chosen Louisiana as his next stomping grounds; it’s implied that his Hungarian neighborhood has gone to pot, suggesting that this film might as well have been Dracula Moves to the Suburbs. Or it could be that he just happens to have found the dumbest woman in the world, who just happens to be set to inherit a plantation of her own. (Though why Dracula would trade a castle for a swampland plantation, I’ve no idea.) Then again, Katherine Caldwell is merely using Alucard to gain immortality for herself – which is in itself heroically unwise.

 

It would be unfair for me to single out Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as terrible, because in truth nearly every performance is lamentable. As the headliner, though, Chaney leaves much to be desired. He was so terrific as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, but every ounce of charisma in that performance is entirely absent from Count Alucard. If Chaney is attempting to do a Transylvanian accent, it isn’t working; instead, his dialogue comes off as stilted, stiff, and unnatural (and not in a good way, like Lugosi managed). It’s as though he’s trying to read cue cards phonetically for an audience that doesn’t quite understand English. Moreover, his presence lacks any semblance of menace; he is, in short, terrifically dull.

 

As I said, though, the rest of the cast fails to rise above Chaney’s soporific turn. Louise Allbritton is practically sleepwalking through the film as Katherine Caldwell; you’d think a southern belle with a voodoo fetish might be a cause for some intrigue, but her delivery is lackluster and her motivations are frankly ludicrous. As her sister, Evelyn Ankers is equally disappointing. She had such fine chemistry with Chaney in The Wolf Man, but here she’s largely forgettable; indeed, I’m struggling to remember why she’s in the plot at all. Meanwhile, Robert Paige plays Frank like a Dollar Tree Gomer Pyle, again without the kooky voice, and he becomes unhinged so quickly in the film that you can’t help but wonder if he’d been mad the whole time. The only performance that’s mildly engaging is J. Edward Bromberg as Professor Lazlo, though only because he’s playing a watered-down Van Helsing – and Bromberg is no Edward Van Sloan.

 

Very little about Son of Dracula rises above the level of a B-movie, which actually makes it a perfect fit for Svengoolie. The acting is hammy, the script is ramshackle, and the whole film is borderline unwatchable because of the nonstop pipe organ soundtrack that seems to be straight out of a Firesign Theater parody of itself. But you’ve got to hand it to Son of Dracula, if only for being the first film to depict Dracula/Alucard transforming into a bat on screen. The effects are more clever than a bad 1943 movie has any right to possess, and so I won’t spoil how the effect is done (though you’ll know right away when you see it done).

 

It was Thumper’s father who wisely instructed the little rabbit in Bambi that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” and so it may surprise you that I do have something nice to say about Son of Dracula: the ending is so well-constructed that I wish the rest of the film lived up to it. In the moment when Alucard discovers that Frank has set fire to his coffin, Chaney really comes alive, and his portrayal of the desperate and furious Count is handily the best acting in the film. The purely visual storytelling that follows – with no expository dialogue to hold the audience’s hand – ends up giving us easily the most downbeat ending of the Universal Monsters canon. Maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude at play, because it’s darkly gratifying to see things end so horribly for every character in the film, but I also have to admit that director Robert Siodmak stages a truly compelling conclusion to a film that neither earns nor deserves it.

 

Son of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Written by Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Louise Allbritton, Robert Paige, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with House of Frankenstein (1944) starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, enter freely and of your own will into the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange. If you need your vampire fix sooner, though, join us tomorrow for House of Frankenstein (1944).

Monster March: The Wolf Man (1941)

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Half of the Universal Monsters had some sort of literary inspiration, but only The Wolf Man had his own rhyming couplet to sum up his tragic fate. It’s a clever little jingle that echoes through the film, haunting its protagonist – and the audience – until that moon shows itself and the curse manifests. Like the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as The Wolf Man proves that, after a decade of monster movies, Universal still had a few new tricks up its sleeve.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns home to Wales after the death of his brother, hoping to rekindle his relationship with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Smitten with Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), who runs the antique store in town, Larry squires her and her friend to a traveling group of gypsies to have their fortunes read. When one of the women is attacked by a wolf-like creature, Larry rushes to her defense but is mauled in the process. Gradually he begins to fear that the creature was a werewolf – and now he’s under the transformative spell.

 

It’s interesting to think back and reflect that the bulk of the Universal Classic Monsters were all introduced within two years – and that The Wolf Man made his debut a full decade after Dracula kicked things off in 1931. (A sixth and final, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, would not emerge until 1954.) At a time when monster sequels were starting to run stale (I’m thinking especially of The Mummy’s Hand and The Invisible Woman, which immediately preceded The Wolf Man), the introduction of the werewolf into the pantheon of monsters almost revivifies the genre. Indeed, the presence of the Wolf Man ends up serving as a kind of backdoor pilot to bring all the monsters together for the “monster mash” sub-genre – but that’s a story for later on in Monster March. Suffice it to say, though, that the advent of the Wolf Man feels a bit like the final piece of the puzzle.

 

Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as Larry Talbot is really quite remarkable among the Universal Monsters canon because it’s the first bit of acting that feels human. We’ve had campy caricatures and stock archetypes, but I’ve never gotten the vibe that any of the performances before 1941 were of real people with natural emotions. It sounds like a low threshold – and it is – but Chaney’s Talbot is imbued with genuine humanity. He’s compassionate with his loved ones (though his pick-up skills could use a little work), and he’s compellingly fearful when he believes his life is at stake. Moreover, he’s concerned for the fate of his soul, and he evinces a deep pathos when he assumes the burden of guilt for what he’s become. Larry Talbot is almost more interesting than the Wolf Man himself, which is a definite and welcome change of pace for the genre.

 

Having said that, though, this is a Wolf Man movie, and the sequences where Talbot goes wild are the stuff of gleeful popcorn matinees. Chaney mugs for the camera, sniffing and snorting, such that his Wolf Man is almost more dog man. It’s a far cry from what we’ll see next week in Werewolf of London, with a carefully groomed wolf man; there is very little sophisticated about Talbot as the Wolf Man. It is a shame that we don’t see more of the Wolf Man in this film, though I suppose it follows the old maxim of “leave them wanting more.” Indeed, one could imagine a version of this movie that doesn’t show the Wolf Man at all, leaving room for the possibility that Talbot is merely going mad, that his lycanthropy is all in his mind.

 

The rest of the cast is engaging enough, though very few of them get much of anything to do. Claude Rains is magnificent (and, unlike in tomorrow’s film, entirely visible) as Talbot’s father, though one wonders what he might have done with a meatier role in the vein of what Anthony Hopkins achieves in the comparable role in the 2010 remake. Evelyn Ankers is suitably shrieky in the role of the distressed damsel, but I confess that many of the other supporting players – Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patrick Knowles – I would struggle to point out in a line-up. Instead, my focus was hypnotically drawn to Bela Lugosi, who I hadn’t expected to see in a werewolf movie (though his role as Ygor in a few Franken-films is delectably wolfish), and to Maria Ouspenskaya, who quietly steals the show with a gravitas-laden performance. I’m legitimately excited to see that Ouspenskaya will be back for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – as if that title weren’t enough to augur good things!

 

Chaney said that he regarded Talbot as “my baby.” Considering how often Universal recast or outright replaced its monsters, it’s remarkable that Chaney stayed in the role for as long as he did – which is to say, permanently, never being supplanted as Talbot. With a debut as strong as The Wolf Man, though, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise. Larry Talbot might be vulnerable to silver, but this reviewer is a sucker for cinematic gold. 

 

The Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by George Waggner. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers, Patrick Knowles, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man (1933) starring Claude Rains.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, we’ll get a big dish of beef chow mein with Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.