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: 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.