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 Mummy's Curse (1944)

Before I watched The Mummy’s Curse, the final mummy movie for Monster March, I feared that I would end up saying the same things I had said for each of the Karloff-less mummies: that it was the umpteenth remake of the same basic premise, stodgy and lumbering, uncharismatic and mildly xenophobic – in short, that I had seen all this before and hadn’t much liked it then. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that The Mummy’s Curse does some things I hadn’t yet seen in a Universal Monster movie, though that still doesn’t amount to a hearty recommendation.

Twenty-five years after The Mummy’s Ghost, chief excavator Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) is draining the local swamp when he is approached by two men from the Scripps Museum, James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Zandaab (Peter Coe), who have come to recover two mummies lost to the swamp ages ago. The murder of a worker suggests, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) has already risen, while a mysterious woman (Virginia Christine) from the swamps may be the resurrected Princess Ananka herself.

 

For the final film in the franchise, The Mummy’s Curse is a mixed bag. There is so much of what we have seen before – literally, in the case of replaying footage from The Mummy and The Mummy’s Hand (in which, yes, it is distracting to see Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler again). There’s a resurrection plot, those omnipresent tana leaves, a secret society led by a sinister foreigner in a fez; there’s an incredulous populace and a staggering body count. There’s even a damsel in distress carted away by Kharis right at the top of the third act, with such mechanical precision that you can almost set your watch by it. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse also continues the bizarre tradition of the retcon. I hadn’t made much about these in each preceding film, but since we’re at the end of the mummy road, it’s worth noting that every mummy film, excepting Karloff’s, has been a continuation of the same story. That story, however, has had its backstory revisited and rewritten, changing the motivations of Kharis and his connection to the Princess Ananka. Moreover, dead high priests return to life without a scratch, while mummies emerge from flames as though their bandages were made of asbestos. It’s also worth noting that the mummy films very deliberately explain lengthy gaps of time between installments, as with the aging of Tomb’s Stephen Banning (Dick Foran); if you followed the internal chronology of the films, Curse ought to be somewhere in the 1990s, not 1944.

 

The final continuity gaffe ends up being oddly central to The Mummy’s Curse. In The Mummy’s Ghost, Kharis and Ananka went into a swamp in upstate New York; in Curse, the swamp is somehow in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun territory. The film stops short of any voodoo subplot – though that could have been interesting to mix with Egyptian mysticism – but we do have characters explicitly named Cajun Joe and Tante Berthe. (If you want voodoo with your Universal Monsters, you’ll have to check out Son of Dracula.) This continuity error exists largely on the level of set dressing, so it’s a bit bewildering why it even happens, but it’s a clear and deliberate choice to relocate the story. 

 

In a way, though, I’ve neglected to make much ado about these continuity goofs because they’re part of the odd charm of the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe; you’d never recast Tony Stark or Luke Skywalker today (indeed, the crew of The Mandalorian bent over backwards not to), but these monster movies have always been a bit like planes built mid-flight, cobbled together with spare parts and scripts banged out over the course of a weekend. Even the early monster films like Dracula and Frankenstein were still working out the kinks of the talkies, actively struggling to transition from the stagey silent pictures into the slick productions of the 1940s. 

 

You could even make the argument, specious though it may be, that the Universal Monsters helped usher in the eras of sequels and remakes. (I say specious, because both had literary precedent, and even Sophocles had his Oedipus trilogy.) The Mummy franchise has been a little bit of both, at once continuing and revisiting the same basic story. But it’s also been pushing the boundaries of invention; for all their Son of and family tree games, the Universal Monsters have also played with gender in interesting ways. Dracula’s Daughter may have been a bust, but The Mummy’s Curse introduces us to the first female mummy. Sofia Boutella, eat your heart out: Virginia Christine is captivating as Princess Ananka, and the silent sequence in which she rises from the swamp and bathes away the mud and embalming is as captivating as anything the mummy movies have given us. Even her amnesiac performance, as she struggles to account for her memories of Kharis, is a fine angle for the fifth film to take. One almost wishes that Curse had spent more time on that dimension, because the Kharis stuff is not unlike the mummy himself – stale, slow, and long past its prime. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse is not rated. Directed by Leslie Goodwins. Written by Bernard Schubert, Leon Abrams, and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Dennis Moore, Kay Harding, Martin Kosleck, Virginia Christine, and Addison Richards. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with House of Dracula (1945) starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

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 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 Mummy's Ghost (1944)

There is no ghost in The Mummy’s Ghost. There is a swamp, a dog, and of course a mummy, but there’s no ghost, which might tell you everything you need to know about this movie. I know I said the exact same thing last week about The Mummy’s Tomb, but if the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to derive a new story, neither should I write an entirely new review. In Ghost, there is a major plotline involving reincarnation, which seems particularly apt for a demi-remake that’s so familiar you’ll feel an acute sense of déjà vu. 

Yousef Bey (John Carradine) has come to New England in search of the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.), believed to have been destroyed during the events of The Mummy’s Tomb. As high priest, Yousef Bey has been tasked with bringing Kharis and the mummified remains of Princess Ananka back to Egypt. Meanwhile, local college boy Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery) is baffled by his Egyptian girlfriend Amina (Ramsay Ames), especially the mystery of why she fainted outside the home of the mummy’s latest victim...

 

The Mummy’s Ghost was filmed over the course of only one week, and I have to say it shows. Ghost is full of narrative dead-ends and plot holes, beginning from the very first reel. If you remember The Mummy’s Tomb (and I won’t fault you if you don’t), it starts with George Zucco as Andoheb recapping Kharis’s backstory while passing on the mantle of high priest before his death; The Mummy’s Ghost begins with exactly the same sequence, right down to Zucco reprising his role. Like Hyman Roth, it seems, Andoheb has been dying of the bullet wounds from The Mummy’s Hand for the last twenty years. (If you’re having trouble telling your Hand from your Tomb from your Ghost, don’t be alarmed – these titles don’t relate to the plot in any way and might as well be interchangeable. Next week’s Curse doesn’t quite help matters.)

 

As I’m watching these movies, I’m starting to wonder whether I actually like mummy movies or whether I only like the 1999 Mummy. I certainly don’t like this mummy movie, which feels as though I’ve seen it four or five times this month. Surely there must be more one can do with a mummy film than this, in which a priest pursues a mummy that acts like a serial killer until carting off the female lead in his withered arms. There’s also only so many times you can retread the plotline where an incredulous town doubts the existence of a mummy, despite several residents having been menaced by this very mummy in the past. At least this time they don’t try to light the mummy on fire – because that hasn’t worked in the last few movies – though the climax set in the swamp ends up having the same net effect.

 

The chief problem with Ghost, as with most of the Universal Mummy films, is that Kharis is not exactly a charismatic screen presence. In a cinematic universe populated by the likes of Karloff and Lugosi, even Lon Chaney Jr. has done better work as the Wolf Man. Behind his plaster face and bandaged limbs, Kharis is little more than a mindless brute, always acting at the behest of someone else. The script certainly tries its best to make him menacing, but it’s a strain on the audience’s credulity to suppose that no one can escape the grasp of the mummy, unless Kharis gives off some sort of stupefying aura that stuns his victims into immobility before he shambles near enough to strangle them with his one good arm.

 

In The Mummy’s Tomb, it fell to Turhan Bey to give an entertaining performance as Kharis’s caretaker, the high priest Mehemet Bey. In Ghost, it’s John Carradine, who’s practically bathing in a river of ham as Yousef Bey. (Any relation? If this were the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Beys would surely have their own show on Disney+.) Don’t get me wrong, Carradine is borderline hypnotic, but Egyptian he’s not, and that’s an incredible distraction, as is the fact that his abrupt third-act heel-turn is precisely the same “twist” that every foregoing mummy movie has pulled at exactly the same moment in the story.

 

Look, there’s a certain amount of formula to be expected from the Universal Classic Monsters. Dracula is always going to stalk and bite his victims, Frankenstein’s monster is always going to be born out of some misguided experiment, and the Wolf Man is constantly running from the moon and his own id. But for whatever reason, the seams of the formula really show on the mummy films, with almost predictable precision. Never mind the fact that the mummy films, more so than the other franchises, feel compelled to begin with a recap that effectively spoils the movie because the franchise’s obsession with reincarnation and the undead often means that there’s a cyclical nature to events, recurring and recurring as the tragic doomed Egyptians live out a vicious yet familiar recursion. All of this will happen at least once more, I’m quite sure, in The Mummy’s Curse, and I have a feeling I’ll be able to rerun this review next week, too, changing the names to protect the innocent – or, if none are found, the dull.

 

The Mummy’s Ghost is not rated. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Written by Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher, and Brenda Weisberg. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco, and Robert Lowery. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Son of Dracula (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Mummy Monday, we’ll “wrap” things up with The Mummy’s Curse (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christine. But for bonus mummy shenanigans, stop by for Silly Sunday, when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

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: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

To borrow a formulation from actor/podcaster Griffin Newman, The Mummy’s Tomb makes The Mummy’s Hand look like The Mummy. Last week, I had barely complimented The Mummy’s Hand for being boring but watchable, but now I find myself in the position of looking back on Hand with rose-colored glasses. Having just been through The Mummy’s Tomb(in which the titular tomb barely appears), I didn’t know how good I had it – The Mummy’s Tomb is a real slog.

Thirty years after The Mummy’s Hand, Steve Banning (Dick Foran) is happily retired, regaling his son John (John Hubbard) and fiancée Isobel (Elyse Knox) with tales of ancient Egypt. Little do the Bannings know, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) was not destroyed; instead, he has been reanimated by Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) to seek revenge against all who desecrated the tomb of Princess Ananka.

 

Of its sixty-minute runtime, The Mummy’s Tomb includes twelve minutes of stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand, designed to catch the audience up on the legend of Kharis (two years was a long time without the benefit of DVD or streaming services). It may be that this extended “previously on” segment made me overly nostalgic for The Mummy’s Hand, since all the boring bits are excluded while only the morbid mummy action gets replayed. This recap/best-of reel is supposed to set the table for The Mummy’s Tomb, but it indirectly shines a light on everything that Tomb does wrong.

 

For one, there is something inherently incongruous about a mummy picture set in Massachusetts. For all its faults, The Mummy’s Hand was at its most watchable during the dig sequences that unearthed the mummy. (See also, naturally, 1999’s The Mummy, which is set entirely in Egypt.) To relocate the action to America gives the whole proceeding a patent absurdity – as, for example, in the moments when we see Kharis shambling his way across a quaint New England wooden bridge. One might argue that the American protagonists are suitably averse to superstition, allowing the mummy to wreak plenty of havoc before being discovered, but The Mummy’s Tomb treats the “discovery of the supernatural” as a routine procedural element of the plot, as many of the Universal Monster movies did.

 

If I were hosting Monster March in chronological order, this would certainly be Lon Chaney Jr. week; alongside The Mummy’s Tomb, Chaney headlined The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and Son of Dracula, all in the span of two years. In many ways, The Wolf Man was the part Chaney was born to play – because he’s nowhere near as engaging in the other roles. As Kharis, Chaney seems to be sleepwalking, though I’ll grant you that the role of The Mummy is almost never the most interesting performance in any of these Universal Monster movies. (Excepting, of course, Boris Karloff.) As before, Kharis is speechless and barely mobile, though even his brief moments of physical activity seem not to have the potency of Tom Tyler’s prior interpretation of the part. 

 

The rest of the cast, too, is given nothing much to enact. Dick Foran and Wallace Ford reprise their roles from The Mummy’s Hand, though they have no scenes together, which seems a terrible waste. Moreover, both are charged with playing the characters thirty years hence, which seems an odd creative decision – though, in fairness, both actors do a decently convincing job playing much older than they are. Elyse Knox is the quintessential damsel in distress here, especially in a retread of the “priest’s bride” third act turn from The Mummy’s Hand. Only Turhan Bey, as the mummy’s high priest, is given any substantive material to perform; he does an admirable job being captivated by the mysticism of the mummy, though the film largely relegates him to the “strange foreigner” stereotype, right down to the fact that the residents of Mapleton, Massachusetts, immediately (and, I grant you, rightly) suspect that the mummy must be connected to their new Egyptian neighbor.

 

Despite running about as long as an episode of your average streaming service television show (once you get that longer-than-average recap out of the way), The Mummy’s Tomb manages not to do anything new with that runtime. Even three scant films into the franchise, we’ve seen all this before and better. The mummy may be more violent than last time, but he’s also slower and sleepier – just as the plot is. There’s less suspense to be had in The Mummy’s Tomb, and I can’t help but feel a bit cheated that we never really get to see much of the eponymous tomb. That dissonance – a tomb-less Tomb – might say all we need to know for this Mummy Monday.

 

The Mummy’s Tomb is not rated. Directed by Harold Young. Written by Neil P. Varnick, Griffin Jay, and Henry Sucher. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, Wallace Ford, and Turhan Bey. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden.

Next week for Mummy Monday, prepare to be haunted by The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.

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: 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.