Monster March II: Frankenweenie (2012)

Frankenweenie is not quite the movie I was expecting. Certainly I got more than my fair share of Tim Burton hijinks, all angular bodies and the subtle terrors of the suburbs. What I wasn’t expecting was how much of a faithful and loving adaptation Frankenweenie would prove to be of the original James Whale Frankenstein – and what a fitting inclusion for Monster March II. (Remakes and mash-ups and sequels, oh my.)

Young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) loses his beloved dog Sparky (Frank Welker) in an unfortunate accident, but the words of his eccentric science teacher (Martin Landau) inspire Victor to undertake his own experiment. Sparky lives! Yet as Victor struggles to keep his science project secret, his classmates begin to realize that his experiment has the potential to change their town.

 

From the beginning of Frankenweenie, it seems that Tim Burton has set out to make a film about his own childhood. The story begins with Victor screening his latest short film for his parents. Like Burton, Victor clearly has an appreciation for low-budget horror with all its gimmicks and movie magic, even equipping his parents with 3-D glasses for the living room premiere. It’s the sort of peculiar precise detail that suggests Burton actually lived this moment. Already the film was defying my expectations, and I do wish Burton had spent more time on this hobby of Victor’s; I’m not sure how it would fit into the Frankenstein allegory he’s telling, but it’s certainly unique and clearly a passion for Burton.

 

As Victor attempts to discover a world beyond his love for his dog, the film veers into a riff on Edward Scissorhands, which was itself a kind of Franken-fable (with Johnny Depp as a kinder, gentler creature who nonetheless became feared for his unnatural appearance). Here Burton’s obsession with the simulacrum of the suburbs is on full display; though the streets and houses all look normal, the people that occupy them are anything but – especially the children, who are cartoonish and borderline monstrous, even before their fierce competitive spirit drives them to burglarize his attic laboratory. Kids can be real creeps, Burton says here, and having had a childhood myself I would have to agree.

 

Yet if the film starts out in the vein of Edward Scissorhands, it well and truly reminds us by the end of the story that it’s from the same odd mind that brought us The Nightmare Before Christmas. Victor’s relationship with the reanimated Sparky is both bizarre and sweet, a comfortable niche for Burton, but the creature horror of the film’s third act puts one in mind of the vampire bat toy that Jack Skellington’s minions set loose on Christmas Eve. As the children of New Holland reanimate their pets, only some of whom have joined the choir invisible, one can almost hear Burton gleefully rubbing his hands together from behind the camera as he intones, “I will show you fear in a handful of sea monkeys!” 

 

Frankenweenie is plenty enjoyable, even when it feels a bit like a Tim Burton cover band, but it’s of particular interest this month for being a spot-on adaptation of the Frankenstein legend, especially as remediated through the lens of horror films like the Karloff classic. (Indeed, one neighborhood boy, voiced by Martin Short, may as well be Karloff.) Colin Clive’s ecstatic “It’s alive!” is replaced by Victor’s more jubilant “I did it!” And of course, no modern Frankenstein would be complete without Elsa Lanchester’s iconic hairdo from Bride of Frankenstein, though it would be criminal to spoil who gets to wear it. (Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the neighbor girl Elsa Van Helsing, voiced by Winona Ryder.) This is a madcap Frankenstein, a mishmosh of all the iconography Burton loved as a child, run through his instantly recognizable stop-motion filter. It is perhaps exactly the movie you’d anticipate coming from Burton, but by the same token it’s never quite the movie you expect. After two hundred years, this old story still has a little spark to it.

Frankenweenie is rated PG for “thematic elements, scary images, and action.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John August and Tim Burton. Starring Charlie Tahan, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, and Frank Welker.

Monster March: House of Dracula (1945)

As the third monster mash in an ostensible trilogy with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, it’s hard for me to find a Marvel Cinematic Universe analogy to explain what House of Dracula contributes to the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. Instead, I find myself looking at House of Dracula like Return of the Jedi – a third installment that doesn’t really do anything wrong but neither does it quite excel. There are flashes of brilliance, but on the whole there’s nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) receives a strange visitor just before sunrise – Count Dracula (John Carradine), seeking a cure for his vampirism. While the doctor prepares a blood transfusion to cure the count, who is himself conspiring to consume the doctor’s assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), Dr. Edelmann takes on another patient – Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who believes the doctor can rid him of the curse of the werewolf. Meanwhile, in the caves beneath Dr. Edelmann’s castle lies the lifeless body of the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and soon it will take all of Dr. Edelmann’s strength to keep these creatures from tearing down his home.

 

My chief complaint about House of Dracula carries over from House of Frankenstein – the monsters never truly meet. After seeing Chaney and Lugosi on screen together for much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it’s a shame that Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster are kept at arm’s length from each other. Talbot meets the other two, but it’s a far cry from the elegant way that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought the same three monsters together into the same plot. 

 

Instead, what we get in House of Dracula is something akin to the setup for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein walk into a doctor’s office. The plot then becomes a revolving door; when Dracula leaves the office, Talbot enters, and their treatments continue in alternating sequence. I had hoped that there might be some larger string that ties all this together, some way that it all related to a larger plot by Count Dracula, but again the filmmakers seem set on putting the monsters on the same bill without ever featuring them on the same screen. 

 

It's another cash-grab, to be sure, but there seemed to be something more genuine about it in House of Frankenstein. Perhaps it was the legitimating presence of Boris Karloff, who felt like an appropriate thread to unify the whole piece. I hope it’s no slight to Onslow Stevens to say that he’s no Boris Karloff, but there is something a little disingenuous about bringing the whole cinematic universe back together through an actor making his franchise debut in the role. Stevens is perfectly serviceable, at times recalling particularly in his voice a B-movie Orson Welles, but for the most part we’re left wondering what’s so special about this doctor. For one, I’m still not sure what sort of reputation a doctor might have to suggest he could cure both vampirism and lycanthropy, but Karloff never invited that question. Karloff had a presence and a history, but Stevens only has half of one of those. One almost wishes, based on the way the film develops, Dr. Edelmann had instead been Dr. Jekyll – that’d resolve a few of the film’s problems straight away.

There’s the problem of overwhelming coincidence in the film – why is all of this happening now, in this doctor’s office – but there’s a larger problem of continuity, which the Universal Monsters movies have usually been so careful to avoid. For starters, if House of Frankenstein is any indication, at least two of these monsters should be dead. Now I’ll grant you, “dead” is a relative term for this crew, but House of Dracula very carefully and deliberately acknowledges the fate of the Frankenstein monster from House of Frankenstein while glossing over where that film left Dracula and the Wolf Man. The net effect, then, of disregarding continuity – especially at this late date in the franchise, when this is effectively the conclusion of the series before the spoof era begins – is the feeling that none of this matters much, that all of this happened before, and that it was better that time around. There’s something a little cynical about the “do it again but differently” approach in House of Dracula, something that makes me a little sad this is the way it all ended.

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t good material here. John Carradine acquits himself better as Dracula this time around, particularly in a scene where he seduces a nurse playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – it’s an archetypal image that I’m retroactively surprised didn’t originate with Lugosi. Dracula’s motivations might not make much sense in this film (he wants to be healed, until he doesn’t, and why he leaves his coffin in direct sunlight is anyone’s guess), but at least his presence dials into what the film needs, even if I’m still not convinced he’s the Count Dracula. Indeed, his presence looms over the whole film, as it does on the poster, such that you’re always waiting for Dracula to reenter the picture. That he doesn’t – and that the titular house isn’t even his – is to the film’s discredit.

 

In their respective roles, Chaney and Strange appear, after several movies of doing decent work, to be phoning it in. Chaney is trying, but there’s a weariness in his performance, an overly familiar attitude like slipping into a pair of shoes just before you know they’re about to give out. Just about the only new thing this film adds to Lawrence Talbot is a mustache, along with the unusual revelation that lycanthropy is just a case of pressure on the brain that can be alleviated by fractionally enlarging the skull. As hokey as that sounds, it’s the kind of preposterous balderdash that usually makes these films fun, but when the rest of the film doesn’t hold up, that kind of hokum gets the scrutiny it doesn’t deserve and can’t withstand. Strange, meanwhile, has two settings in this film – comatose and raging – and so there’s little to say beyond his inclusion feeling perfunctory. The film plainly doesn’t know what to do with the Monster; he was at least a vessel for Dr. Niemann’s revenge in House of Frankenstein, but here he’s little more than an action figure pulled out of storage.

 

So falls the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe – in a sense, the House of Dracula, the house that Dracula built back in 1931. We might see this as a case of “how the mighty have fallen,” but on another level we might see that House of Dracula is the moment when these creatures escape the bounds of their respective franchises and enter the level of myth. Unburdened by continuity, these monsters are now free to go wherever the next generation of creators will take them; recall that the Abbott and Costello films made no pretense about being true sequels. Rather, the monsters became mythic nightmares, haunting phantoms from a bygone era that operated not on the level of narrative continuity but as freeze-frame images – a swirling cape or a glinting fang, a lumbering giant, or a primal evolutionary throwback. Maybe that’s what the House of Dracula has been all along: not a literal castle in which the vampire resides, but a conceptual wheelhouse of metaphors and filmic illusions not unlike a waxwork house of horrors. We’ve been tenants in that house for the past month; now maybe it’s time to build our own additions and rewrite our own nightmares. 

House of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Edward T. Lowe. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens, Glenn Strange, and Jane Adams.  

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday – the final installment in Monster March – with She-Wolf of London (1945) starring June Lockhart.

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: House of Frankenstein (1944)

If we continue the cinematic universe metaphor, House of Frankenstein is inarguably the Universal Monsters’ version of The Avengers. Although it’s a bit of false advertising – Dracula never actually meets Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man – House of Frankenstein is nevertheless surprisingly fun. The second “monster mash” movie and a direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein also finds a way to weave Count Dracula and Boris Karloff back into the mix. Though the plot is rickety and ramshackle, it’s an achievement all the same, the monster movie equivalent of simple and pure popcorn fun. 

Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish, doing his best Peter Lorre) escape from prison and vow to continue the experiments of the late Henry Frankenstein. Through a series of untoward events, Niemann comes into possession of the bones of Count Dracula (John Carradine), who he reanimates in his quest for revenge on his jailers. And on the road to Visaria, Niemann also finds the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who have their own demands on the not-so-good doctor.

 

House of Frankenstein is really two different movies, and both of them are pretty fun. For the first act of its 71 minutes, House gives us the Boris Karloff and Dracula reunion we never truly got to see, yet it’s not Karloff’s Monster meeting Lugosi’s Dracula. That, I suspect, would have been an absolute winner. Instead, Karloff is crowbarred into the film (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) as an unrelated mad scientist with Frankensteinian proclivities, yet there is a warming charm just to see Karloff included again. At 57, he hadn’t played the Monster in five years, so his very presence is almost a legitimating one, with Karloff as the elder statesman of the Universal Classic Monsters universe. Karloff has tons of fun as Dr. Niemann, and there’s a fiery impish glint in his eyes as he plots his next move.

 

As Dracula, however, John Carradine is a touch underwhelming. His performance is exceptionally hammy, with large bulging eyes and vamping – pun intended – posture. Where there was a subtle seductive charm about Lugosi’s Dracula, Carradine plays the magnetic allure like literal hypnosis, and his skeletal appearance is a far cry from Lugosi’s full-bodied menace. In short, it’s hard to accept that this is the Count Dracula, up to and including the continuity error that his bones are said to be resting in his coffin after we saw Countess Zaleska cremate his body in Dracula’s Daughter. (Perhaps, though, the filmmakers were already perfecting the art of the retcon – which, in the case of Dracula’s Daughter, suits me just fine.)

 

Continuing the grand recast is Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s monster. There’s a moment in Ed Wood when Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) opines, “You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein?! It’s all make-up and grunting – mmrrrghh!” It’s a reductive comparison, one which the real Lugosi may or may not have believed, especially given that Lugosi had himself played the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We know, however, that Karloff did so much more with the character in his three films, proving that he had left unfillably big shoes (in more ways than one). On the spectrum, Strange acquits himself better than Lon Chaney Jr. did, and the editors of House don’t cut his bulky feet out from under him as they did Lugosi. However, the fact remains that Strange isn’t given much to do beyond looking imposing, but he gets a few shining moments when he accesses the Monster’s twin childlike senses of wonder and terror at a world he cannot comprehend.

 

Finally, Lon Chaney Jr. is back as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, and every time I say a negative thing about Chaney in another monster role, he reminds just how reliably good he is as Talbot. From the moment Talbot thaws out of the ice, Chaney elevates the movie, giving another deeply human embodiment to a character that could just as easily have been a lame caricature of an idea. Although his plotline is largely a retread of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – Talbot feels guilty about his lycanthropic curse and wants to die – Chaney brings his trademark pathos to the role, especially in scenes with the Roma girl Ilonka (played with winsome charm by Elena Verdugo), who is herself encumbered by the question of whether she should help relieve the sympathetic Talbot of his burden.

 

All of this comes to a crescendo in an increasingly dramatic climax that includes electrocution, horse-whipping, and defenestration before the most abrupt ending I can recall seeing since White Heat. It’s the sort of ending that desperately leaves you wanting more, and indeed I was left fairly frothing at the mouth aching for more from House of Frankenstein – more Karloff, more monsters, more/any Lugosi, more of the characters bumping into each other. But it wasn’t a question of starvation; my desire for more was akin to hitting the bottom of the popcorn bucket and wanting a refill. Sure, it’s a campy cash-grab, and certainly it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it tastes good and leaves you wanting more. Isn’t that the most we can ask of the Universal Classic Monsters?

 

House of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Curt Siodmak and Edward T. Lowe. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Glenn Strange, and Elena Verdugo.

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) starring Jon Hall.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, it’s She-Wolf of London (1946), starring June Lockhart. For the continuing saga of Lawrence Talbot, though, join us next Tuesday for House of Dracula (1945).

Monster March: Son of Frankenstein (1939)

My eyes were well and truly rolling with the very title card of Son of Frankenstein, accompanied by a melodramatic late-30s fanfare. The “son of” premise seemed like a stretch, and I’d already seen and rejected Son of Dracula some months before. (Join us next week for that fiasco.) Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Son of Frankenstein is a real bang-up winner, captivating from the start thanks to an increasingly manic Basil Rathbone and an irresistibly weird performance from Bela Lugosi. 

Baron Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) has come to his father’s village to reclaim the family castle. Wolf is astonished to learn that his father’s good name has been abhorred by the town, still reeling from the doctor’s monstrous experiments. In exploring the castle, Wolf discovers that he’s playing unwitting landlord to a squatter named Ygor (Bela Lugosi), an alleged grave-robber whose neck was broken in a hanging gone awry. Ygor guides Wolf to the family crypt, where the remains of The Monster (Boris Karloff) lie in suspended animation. Inspired to rehabilitate his father’s name, Wolf resumes Henry Frankenstein’s experiments and sets out to (re)create life.

 

It’s unfortunate that I spent so much time watching Son of Frankenstein while thinking instead about Young Frankenstein. (It doesn’t help that I’ve undoubtedly seen Young Frankenstein more than any other Franken-film.) It’s unfortunate because Son of Frankenstein is actually really rather enjoyable in its own right. But any Brooks-heads worth their salt can’t help but notice how much of the Gene Wilder spoof is airlifted directly out of Son of Frankenstein – the mustache, the darts, the wooden-armed inspector. There is, however, so much more in Son of Frankenstein worth celebrating beyond the parodic legacy it would inspire, even if the relationship between the two is akin to a winking Rosetta Stone.

 

Son of Frankenstein is Boris Karloff’s swan song as The Monster (though not his last outing as a Frankenstein), and it’s a step backwards from Bride of Frankenstein. Where Bride advanced the creature’s intellect by imbuing him with the power of speech, Son gives us a mute Monster. Nor is the Monster entirely sympathetic here, reduced instead to a hulking brute who blindly follows commands; we get a touch of humanity here and there, but it’s nothing like seeing the Monster learn kindness as he did to great effect in Bride. Still, Karloff manages to find potent opportunities for a part that isn’t as juicy as before; there’s a particularly arresting sequence in which the Monster gazes at his own reflection, and Karloff weaves a whole subtext without a single line of dialogue.

 

There are two paradigms that the Universal Monster movies tend to indulge. On the one hand, you have films like Dracula or The Mummy, in which humanity battles a terrible and monstrous being. On the other hand, films like Son of Frankenstein depict how humanity finds its own monstrosity in the face of the supernatural. While there was little question that Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein was already well on his way to madness before his creation lived, Basil Rathbone gives a delightfully hammy turn as Wolf von Frankenstein, whose descent into madness is a downward spiral of manic glee. By the film’s end, when he’s shrieking and cackling like his father, Wolf is a full-fledged madman in the tradition of Renfield or perhaps even The Invisible Man.

 

For mad monstrosity, though, it is (as ever) tough to beat Bela Lugosi. Lugosi practically carves a Thanksgiving turkey out of the scenery as the snarling Ygor, not quite the hunchbacked assistant you might be expecting. From the very first frames of the film, in which Lugosi leers and squints from a castle window, it’s a captivating performance. For a while, it’s almost as though Lugosi has skulked his way out of another film, his hairy fanged Ygor an odd mix of vampire and werewolf, but Lugosi to his credit never veers out of his lane and instead forces the film to bend around him. Like the Monster, Ygor too has been made unnatural, supposedly executed only to rise from his grave and reveal that his neck was merely but not fatally broken. You can probably guess where Ygor’s plot goes based on an early scene in which Ygor spits upon the jurors who had previously sentenced him to a death that didn’t take, but the way Lugosi revels in this bizarre supporting character tests the old Frankenstein cliché that the real monster is the doctor. No, Son of Frankensteinoffers, the real monster is the one society creates. The question of whether Ygor was a grave-robber is almost immaterial because the film is more interested in the ways that Ygor was driven to his present condition.

 

At the surprising heart of Son of Frankenstein, though, is Inspector Krogh, as played by Lionel Atwill. I say “surprising” because my only prior exposure to this kind of character was the exceedingly preposterous Inspector Kemp, portrayed by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein. Mars’s Inspector is eight rungs over the top, with numerous faulty wooden limbs and an accent thicker than oatmeal, so I was in a sense bowled over by Inspector Krogh – and not just to find source material for Kenneth Mars to mine. I was surprised that Krogh is recognizably a prototype for Kemp, but I was even more astounded that Krogh is entirely sympathetic, a tragic figure who steals your heart (while Lugosi steals the movie). Krogh’s underlying backstory – that he had a promising military career torn away from him when The Monster ripped off his arm – radiates through every scene, Atwill instilling a tender and heartfelt note into his character’s very soul.

 

Of course, this is a Universal Monsters movie, and the history-repeating moment when The Monster rips off Krogh’s wooden arm feels very much like having your cake and eating it too. You can almost hear director Rowland V. Lee giggle with delight at finding a way around the censors of 1939 by having a prosthetic torn away; for a moment, movie magic tricks you into think the Monster is tearing actual limbs apart. Lee is clever, though, as he is throughout the film’s comparably exorbitant runtime; Son of Frankenstein runs 99 minutes, which is a good twenty to thirty minutes longer than most of the Universal Classic Monsters features. It’s to Lee’s credit that the film never feels baggy or slow; the films starts on a moving train, and it’s almost as though Son of Frankenstein never loses that momentum. As the first Universal Monsters movie in three years, after Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Frankenstein is a promising reboot/sequel. 

Son of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Rowland V. Lee. Written by Willis Cooper. Starring Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Josephine Hutchinson, and Donnie Dunagan. 

Next week for Franken-Friday, somebody call an exorcist, because it’s The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. If you need your Franken-fix before that, Wolf Man Wednesday has House of Frankenstein (1944), starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

If we’ve been thinking about the Universal Classic Monsters as the first cinematic universe, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is undoubtedly the franchise’s Civil War moment. Though the Marvel Cinematic Universe had its heroes meet and clash long before Captain America: Civil War, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man begins to pull the universe together for “monster rallies” – though I much prefer the term “monster mash.” Indeed, Frankenstein does meet the Wolf Man and even befriends him before (naturally) coming to blows in the third act – incidentally, another parallel to Civil War. The film is full of surprises, not least of all the deep attention to continuity and the fact that the film is, after twelve years and seventeen monster movies, largely a success.

After grave robbers open the tomb of Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), the Wolf Man rises from his grave, discovering that his curse extends to immortality. Talbot regains his memories in a sanitarium before seeking out Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), the old woman whose son transformed Talbot into a werewolf. Maleva promises to care for Talbot and help him to seek out the great Dr. Frankenstein, who might cure Talbot’s malady, but their arrival in Vasaria is far from warm, and Talbot discovers that Frankenstein’s monster (Bela Lugosi) is also something less than dead.

 

We won’t be reviewing The Ghost of Frankenstein for another week yet, so if you’re leery of spoilers – well, here be monsters. It’s a fair question how much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is a sequel, because the two major plot twists from the end of that film – that The Monster is blind and is now voiced by Bela Lugosi – were both deleted from the final edit of this film. The casting of Lugosi remains, however, a nod in that direction, though the editing fairly makes mincemeat of Lugosi’s performance as a lumbering brute of a Monster. (Lugosi, though, would have the last laugh; the extended arms commonplace in any Frankenstein impression originated here, not with Karloff, as The Monster’s way of navigating blindly.)

 

Meets is also set largely in Vasaria, the setting for Ghost, while Ilona Massey portrays Elsa Frankenstein, a recast from Ghost’s Evelyn Ankers. It’s a shame that the film quickly shuffles Elsa out of range of the plot, because the idea of a female Dr. Frankenstein would have been a bold new step for the franchise. Instead, the film relegates the obligatory scientific psychosis onto Dr. Frank Mannering (Patric Knowles), Larry Talbot’s physician who becomes captivated by the thrall of manipulating life. That’s all the stuff of the film’s third act, which is, if I may be so blunt, ludicrous, a dim excuse to retread the same setpieces and plot beats you’d expect from a Franken-film.

 

The third act arrives with such narrative whiplash that you’ll be forgiven if you lose track of the plot, but for such a quick devolution into the realm of the nonsensical... I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun as all get-out. From the note-perfect mood setting that opens the film, with a pair of grave robbers defiling the Talbot crypt, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man knows exactly to which seats it needs to play. The old story goes that screenwriter Curt Siodmak, scribe of much of the Universal Monsters canon, needed a paycheck to buy a car, and so Meets would not appear to be a labor of love, but there’s such an unabashed and unmistakable love for the source materials that you can’t help but enjoy this riveting mash-up. There’s a moment of terrific cheer, for example, when Maria Ouspenskaya shows up again as Maleva; it’s an inevitable turn for Talbot, but there’s an undeniable touch of fan service in seeing such a familiar face.

 

Overall, perhaps the success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is due to Lon Chaney Jr., who continues to be fantastic as Talbot. While Chaney had stepped into nearly every other Universal Monsters franchise at one point or another, the Wolf Man remains his uncontested best. Chaney leavens his performance with psychological realism in the form of Talbot’s heavy guilt complex – almost, one might wonder, a potential template for Bruce Banner’s relationship to his transformation into The Hulk. Frankenstein’s Monster doesn’t appear for about half of the film, but you almost don’t need him for how compelling Meets is as a sequel to The Wolf Man. I could have spent another few films with Lawrence Talbot before he meets up with the rest of the monsters, but perhaps it’s just as well that his character goes in a fun new direction rather than petering out like several of the other monsters before him had done.

 

One last Marvel metaphor before we go: the sequence in which Talbot finds The Monster interred in ice really felt like the secondary origin story for Captain America. Indeed, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man felt the most like a Marvel movie of any of the Universal Monsters movies I’ve watched thus far. It’s fun and playfully hokey, and even in its outlandish conclusion, you have to admire the earnestness with which Siodmak’s script finds an excuse for the two monsters to duke it out. There’s even a musical number, for those who like that sort of thing. It’s a collision of so many good things, like a bowl of Chex Mix – how could the whole not be as delightful as the sum of its parts?

 

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by Roy William Neill. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with Invisible Agent (1942) starring Jon Hall, Peter Lorre, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, the monster mash continues at the House of Frankenstein (1944), starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Assigning yourself the task of watching thirty monster movies in a row can feel like a chore, especially toward the end of the assignment, when you’ve seen all the good monster movies and far too many of the bad ones. Within minutes of starting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though, I was smiling and laughing. Not five minutes went by without a good chuckle, and by the end of it I found myself thinking, “Was that so hard?” How it took a comedy duo to finally get the monster mash right, I’ll never know – but I’m very glad they did.

Chick Young and Wilbur Grey (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) are baggage handlers on a routine delivery to McDougal’s House of Horrors. Against the advice of a phone call from Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), Chick and Wilbur open the crates to discover the bodies of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Wilbur suspects the bodies are still living, much to Chick’s chagrin – and Talbot’s arrival from London only complicates matters when the bodies disappear and the full moon rises...

 

I don’t want to spoil things too much for the coming weeks, but “monster rally” movies like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula cheat a little bit by including all the monsters in the same movie without them ever sharing the screen together. Three/four years after those films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein fixes that problem by embroiling the holy trinity of monsters in one unified plotline, and it’s frankly genius to pit Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster against the Wolf Man so that the monster mash becomes a proper monster smash by the third act. Funneled through the dynamic of Abbott-as-skeptic and Costello-as-rube, you have the perfect formula for hijinks. As an entry in the cinematic universe, it’s debatable whether this is a proper sequel or whether it’s merely a standalone riff. It’s not quite a horror film, but it is fairly spooky with an emphasis on zany, and that makes for a very fresh new take on characters that, quite frankly, had grown stale over twenty years.

 

Moving away from the horror and toward the comedic is a shift in tone that seems to anticipate the likes of Scooby-Doo, who debuted in 1969. Indeed, I’d venture to say that Scooby-Doo wouldn’t exist without this film’s blend of mystery, monsters, and slapstick comedy. The sequence in which all five main characters chase after each other through a hallway of doors, for instance, is exactly the kind of gag that the Scooby-Doo crew would make their signature gag years later, at times even with versions of the Universal Classic Monsters. (Of course, Abbott and Costello are lightyears funnier than anything the makers of Scooby-Doo could dream up; I defy you to find eight minutes of Scooby-Doo anywhere near “Who’s On First,” but that’s beside the point.) In fact, moving into the realm of parody/spoof is in a sense the natural evolution for the Universal Monsters; the two House movies, for example, have their tongues planted firmly in their metaphorical cheeks, so it’s a short putt to outright punchlines. 

 

As for the monsters, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Bela Lugosi back as Count Dracula; if it did nothing else, the film could ride that nostalgia wave for eighty minutes and still be a home run. We’ll see a number of vampires during Monster March – Carlos Villarías, Gloria Holden, John Carradine, even Lon Chaney Jr. himself – but Lugosi remains the gold standard. Even with seventeen years away from the role (and to be fair his age does show), Lugosi slinks right back into the character, and he is magnetic. Indeed, perhaps the film should have been called Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula because he’s the undeniable monster star of the film. As before, his hypnotic stare extends beyond the proscenium of the silver screen; with a waggle of his fingers and a glint in his eyes, he captivates the audience as well as the soft-minded Wilbur. (As for the fact that this Dracula casts a reflection in a mirror – well, let’s just pretend we didn’t see that, hmm?)

 

After not having much to do in his preceding outings, Glenn Strange gives what is probably his best performance as Frankenstein’s monster, though the make-up looks to be a closer cousin of Herman Munster (debut, 1964) than before. It’s also a relief to hear the Monster speak again, having fallen silent once more after Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. As iconic as Karloff remains, I couldn’t help feeling that a great deal of the modern idea of the Monster is encapsulated in Strange’s performance here – the stilted voice, the thudding walk, the arms outstretched (inherited from Lugosi). With this film becoming a legend almost overnight, one wonders how much this film cemented the common conception of the Monster, taking what all the other performers had done before and rolling it into one iconic interpretation.

 

And in his swan song as the Wolf Man – attaining the unusual status of being the only performer to play this particular monster – Lon Chaney Jr. remains compelling. His make-up seems bushier than before, and his proclivities are a bit bloodthirstier, but this is still Lawrence Talbot, the same good performance Chaney had given in the past. He’s in the odd place of being the “straight man” of the monsters, fighting against the other two, but that puts him on a path where Abbott and Costello are his best allies, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t get more frustrated with that turn of fate. Instead, he remains surprisingly patient, confident that these two buffoons are his best hope at saving the world from Count Dracula.

 

What makes Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein a hit is that it’s both a monster movie with comedy and a comedy film with monsters. Both tones are balanced with dexterity, and the comedy is especially funny after more than seventy years. Costello’s underhanded self-deprecation, Abbott’s quick wordplay, even the physical comedy that’s gratifyingly never at the expense of the monsters doing their spooky stuff – this film has it all. I’ve silently been keeping a note all throughout Monster March about which movies I never need to watch again, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ain’t one of them. It’s so good, I might work it into an annual rotation for Halloween – that is, if I can’t get Monster March to stick. 

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Charles T. Barton. Written by John Grant, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, and Lenore Aubert. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week, we’ll see what we can see when Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

Monster March: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

From 1935, Bride of Frankenstein is the first Universal Monsters film to be produced after the so-called “Hays Code” was placed in effect, operating as a mandatory code of conduct for film production. One might then expect, especially with the old maxim that sequels rarely live up to the original, that Bride of Frankenstein would be a watered-down shadow of its predecessor, a moralizing cash grab to capitalize on Universal’s newfound monster mania. The truth is, however, Bride of Frankenstein is a mesmerizing and unmissable continuation of Frankenstein.

Moments after the original film (and following a handy recap segment), Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is rescued from the burning windmill, where his monstrous creation is presumed to have died. But while Henry recovers from his experience, the Monster (Boris Karloff) too has escaped certain death and is lurking near the village in search of companionship. Meanwhile, Henry’s old mentor Dr. Septimus Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) has come to Castle Frankenstein to demand that his former pupil resume his aberrant experiments in order to create a Bride (Elsa Lanchester) for the Monster.

 

Bride of Frankenstein is another in the Universal Monsters canon that I couldn’t be sure whether I’d seen before. There were bits that I recognized, certainly, but what was surprising was that those were sequences I had previously assumed were in the original Frankenstein, like the fact that the creature speaks in this film. I was equally amazed to discover that The Monster’s interaction with a blind man – which was present in the Shelley novel – was reserved for Bride of Frankenstein. (Of course, anyone who can get through that sequence without a hearty guffaw at the memory of Gene Hackman hasn’t, I venture, seen Young Frankenstein.)

 

In fact, watching Frankenstein and Bride practically back to back made me wonder if this was less an early case of Hollywood sequel-itis and more a case of a genuine two-part story that (with the benefit of hindsight) ought to be run sequentially. The analogue that kept running through my mind was a comparison with The Godfather Saga, the seamless editing of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II into one extended epic film. Surely someone out there has stitched Frankenstein and his Bride together, moving the Mary Shelley prologue to the very beginning and eliminating the recap reel that opens Bride. If not – psst, Universal, that’s money on the table.

 

I teased in last week’s review of The Invisible Man that Bride of Frankenstein is the first Universal Monsters film made after the Hays Code was in effect, and the central change here seems to be that Henry Frankenstein’s God complex is excised – or perhaps, more accurately, relocated onto the villainous character of Dr. Pretorius. In the process, however, the net result is that Henry becomes a character practically addicted to his scientific experiments; his aberrations pull him away from his wedding night and drive him into a recursive spiral of abomination. Having created misshapen life already, a sweaty, frantic Henry is now impelled to create a bride. It’s a deranged turn, made all the more manic by Colin Clive’s own struggles with alcohol addiction. 

 

I was surprised to see what little screen time the eponymous Bride is given in this film – only minutes at best (and with no dialogue, to boot). It’s frankly astonishing, then, to think of how iconic she’s become, and that’s almost entirely due to that striking image she presents, with her lightning-frazzled beehive and ghoulish shrieks and hisses. Perhaps the Universal Monsters linger best in our memories as still images, shocking intrusions into reality beyond any horror that a full-length film could impart. One can’t help but wonder what the Bride might have done had the Monster not decided for the both of them, “We belong dead.”

 

Of course, the Monster is speaking also for Dr. Pretorius, who joins the cast as its all-too-willing villain. Ernest Thesiger plays him delightfully arch, with a gleeful dose of camp, which makes him the perfect foil for the repressed mania of Henry. Pretorius is then the other half of the mad scientist coin; where Henry is prone to fits of hysteria (as when he reprises his most famous line to shriek, “She’s alive!”), Pretorius is in full control of his faculties and pursues his own eccentric experiments all the same. The sequence in which he demonstrates the results of his homunculi project is quaint for its 1935 special effects, but there is a sadistic streak in Pretorius, particularly when he encourages Henry to think of him as the devil.

 

Where the first film was very careful to caution us in advance that monstrosity is innate, particularly in the case of the Monster’s abnormal brain, Bride of Frankenstein is more reserved, positing instead that the Monster can and does learn kindness – a double-edged sword, as it were, since the Monster learns in tandem the lesson that humanity will always fear and revile him. This redemptive plot, in which an abnormal brain in an executed criminal’s body can rediscover his own humanity, is both surprisingly progressive and welcomely transgressive, forcing us to ask who the true monsters have really been. Mary Shelley herself (portrayed by Lanchester here) has her own opinion, suggesting that her story has been one of a man who plays God, but it seems the narrative gets away from Henry by the film’s end. The franchise too would get away from him (and, alas, director James Whale, for whom Bride is his last Franken-film), leaving this film a bit like the ending of The Godfather: Part II, in which Michael Corleone sits on a park bench and regrets all the ways his best-laid plans went awry. Whether the Coda to the Frankenstein duology would be Son of Frankenstein or (as I might prefer) Young Frankenstein is a question for next week’s Franken-Friday.

 

Bride of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston. Based on the novel by Mary Shelley. Starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Ernest Thesiger, and Elsa Lanchester. 

Tune in tomorrow for Deep Sea Saturday, with Revenge of the Creature (1955) starring John Agar, Lori Nelson, Tom Hennesy, and Ricou Browning.

Next week for Franken-Friday, madness skips a generation for the Son of Frankenstein (1939), starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi. Next week is a triple-header for the Monster, though. On Sunday, it's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange; then stop by on Wolf Man Wednesday to see what happens when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Monster March: Frankenstein (1931)

Frankenstein is, like Dracula, another classic monster story we know through osmosis. In this case – perhaps even more than in Dracula – it’s through imagery that isn’t in the Mary Shelley novel but has become intrinsically connected to the Frankenstein story through repetition, particularly in satires like Mel Brooks’s brilliant Young Frankenstein. Going back to the original, however, isn’t a case of seeing untapped potential. Frankenstein is that very potential realized.

Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) has gotten so involved with his scientific experiments that he’s about to miss his wedding. Fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) is concerned, so she enlists the help of their friend Victor (John Boles) and Henry’s mentor Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan). What they find at Henry’s lighthouse laboratory is that Henry and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) have been experimenting at making life. “It’s alive!” Henry shrieks upon observing his creation, but he has no idea that The Monster (Boris Karloff) has an abnormal brain inside that flat skull of his. Soon, however, the whole Bavarian village will know...

 

I’ll try not to spend too much time comparing Frankenstein to Dracula, though watching them both practically back-to-back doesn’t make that easy. It’s worth exploring, however, the ways that these two movies operate in dialogue with each other, essentially forming the backbone of the very first cinematic universe. (It’s also interesting to note that Bela Lugosi was originally cast as The Monster, leaving the project after make-up tests proved disastrous. Lugosi had, however, initially wanted to play the doctor.) Critics at the time noted the similarities between the two films, and I do have to agree with them that – no slight to Dracula – Frankenstein is the more successful feature.

 

Though the image of Karloff looms large over the film (and subsequently the very idea of Frankenstein’s monster), Frankenstein’s success owes in large part to director James Whale. Where Dracula’s director Tod Browning kept things mostly stagey aside from the impressive sequences with Lugosi, Whale’s direction is dynamic and, to encapsulate the burgeoning medium in a word, cinematic. The camera moves nimbly, the edits are impressive, and the pacing of the film is enviable; despite the rigor mortis of the subject matter, there are no dead spots in Frankenstein. Whale is especially adept at using shadows and light, particularly firelight, to which The Monster has a notable aversion. 

 

Frankenstein was, like Dracula, adapted in equal parts from the Mary Shelley novel and from a stage play by Peggy Webling. As with any adaptation, there are many interesting changes, a good number of which have become practically canonical. Where the novel takes pains to show that The Monster learns inhumanity from its creator and others, the film sets the creature up to fail by giving him an abnormal brain; in a bit of a reversal, the creature learns compassion from playing with little Maria, but we know how famously that playtime goes south. Similarly, Henry Frankenstein (not Victor, as in the novel) is always already a little deranged by the time we meet him, played to arch perfection by a manic Colin Clive. Perhaps this is a consequence of the novel being told in epistolary fashion through Victor’s eyes; when we view Henry from the outside, we can’t help but notice he seems a little mad in his pride at his aberrant experiments.

 

Among the additions Whale and company bring to the story are the use of electricity and the hunchbacked assistant (Fritz, not Igor). Anyone turning to the novel might be surprised to find these aspects missing, so inextricable have they become to the Frankenstein legend. In the case of the latter, Fritz is played by Dwight Frye, late of Dracula, where he played a similar role as the vampire’s assistant Renfield. It’s the sort of thankless role that Peter Lorre might have played a few years later; surprisingly, Lorre never played any version of Igor, and I’ve never been able to discern how his voice became identified with the part. Also back from Dracula is Edward Van Sloan, playing another skeptical man of science. Here, Van Sloan is less compelling than he was as Van Helsing, largely because his role here is less than central, but his presence forms an odd kind of stabilizing backbone in the emerging monster franchise, where the forces of the supernatural are pitted against the keen and cool intellect of science. There’s even an interesting prelude to the film where Van Sloan comes out of a curtain, breaks the fourth wall, and warns the audience about the film they’ll be seeing. (A similar sequence with Van Sloan was crafted for Dracula, though it is evidently lost to history).

 

Of course, no review of Frankenstein would be complete without a heap of praise for Boris Karloff, whose extensive turns in disfiguring makeup made him a legend. He’s practically synonymous with the Universal Monsters, and we’ll be seeing much more of him throughout Monster March; where Lugosi reprised his role as Count Dracula only once, Karloff gladly donned the makeup again and again, even getting a turn (sort of) as the not-so-good doctor. Karloff manages to emote from behind the thick layers of prosthetics, vacillating between childlike wonder and murderous rage as his fancy suits him. That flat dome and the bolts on his neck continually remind us of the creature’s monstrosity, but so too does Karloff’s shambolic limp and subvocal groans. (His distinctive walk, however, with arms thrown out before himself, would be a Lugosi creation for 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.)

 

For monster movies, it’s hard to imagine a better double feature than Dracula and Frankenstein. They’re two sides of the same coin, two creature features whose very unnaturality can be summed up in the mere names of their stars – Lugosi and Karloff. (Can you imagine if they’d been played by a Smith or a Jones?) By the end of Frankenstein, the natural order appears to be restored, but we all know that the truest undead in Hollywood is the spectre of the sequel, and Frankenstein would certainly have his – as well, we know, as a bride.

 

Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh. Based on the novel by Mary Shelley, and on the play by Peggy Webling. Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerry, Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Marilyn Harris, and Boris Karloff. 

Tune in tomorrow for Deep Sea Saturday, with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Ben Chapman, and Ricou Browning.

Next week for Franken-Friday, behind every successful Monster is a Bride of Frankenstein (1935), starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, and Elsa Lanchester.