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 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.