Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)

Despite having met an invisible man (Vincent Price) in the final frames of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello continued their monster spoofs with an invisible man all their own three years later, in a film that could only be titled Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Like most of Universal’s Invisible Man franchise, this Meet is a hodgepodge of genres designed to be a life support machine for special effects sequences – and it’s not the comedy duo’s finest hour, either.

Newly graduated from detective school, Bud Alexander and Lou Francis (Abbott and Costello) strike out on their own, but to their bad luck the first case is that of accused murderer and boxer Tommy Nelson (Arthur Franz). Tommy hires the newly-minted detectives before shooting up with the Griffin invisibility serum in hopes of clearing his own name. Bud and Lou have to dodge mobsters and Detective Roberts (William Frawley) until a series of zany shenanigans puts Lou in the boxing ring himself as “Louie the Looper.”

 

After all that Monster March has thrown our way, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from an Invisible Man film. The film begins as a kind of detective noir parody, which suits me just fine – I’d had occasion a few nights earlier to rewatch The Maltese Falcon for the umpteenth time, and it seemed to me that Abbott and Costello were about to add a dose of monster mischief to the noir formula. With the addition of gangsters, however, we verge into Some Like It Hot territory (though Meets predates Hot by eight years), but before long we’re in a full-on boxing picture. (Barton Fink, eat your heart out.) If anyone had “underdog sports movie” in your Universal Monsters bingo, mark that square – the rest of us are stunned.

 

In the way that most of the latter-day Universal Monsters movies are retreads of previous iterations of the same story, this Invisible Man bears more than a few similarities to The Invisible Man Returns (1940), which starred Vincent Price in a mystery about an invisible man proving his innocence. Indeed, several of the special effects shots from that film – like the disappearing guinea pig and the Invisible Man traipsing through the woods – have been repurposed and recycled here. Audiences at the time might not have recognized the scenes eleven years later, but I suppose that’s why God invented critics like me. Then again, audiences certainly should have recognized the fact that a photograph of Claude Rains hangs prominently in this film’s laboratory; I certainly did, and it was akin to spotting a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel film, the kind of throwback reference I’ve wanted from these films all along. It’s surprising that it took until 1948 for the franchise to stop taking itself so seriously and start to wink at the audience.

 

Three years may not seem like a long time, but it must have been for Abbott and Costello. The idea of casting the 54-year-old Abbott and 45-year-old Costello as greenhorn detectives is frankly preposterous without assuming that these are two men in a midlife crisis looking for their career’s second act. It’s such a struggle that the two have to be pitted against an endearingly aggravated William Frawley, ten years their senior, to make them look young and goofy. Their comedy is a bit slower, too – though when it’s fast, it’s fun, as when they trot out an old vaudeville sleight-of-hand gag passing dollar bills from hand to hand. On the whole, however, many of the gags stretch out a little too long, as in an extended sequence in which Costello struggles to order food and eat it without the intervention of invisible man Tommy Nelson.

 

This is to say nothing of the film’s third act, which becomes almost entirely a boxing picture. As one who isn’t quite a connoisseur myself, I can’t say whether this plays better for someone who likes boxing movies, but for me I found it unsurprising and dull. At first, it seems a clever premise, watching Costello swing at his opponent while the invisible man does all the heavy hitting, but then it keeps going, and going, and going. By the time the fight ends – as inevitably you might expect it to end – the gag has long since stopped being funny, if ever it actually was. Then follows a kind of epilogue, a coda in which a blood transfusion accidentally renders Costello invisible; it’s the sort of joke you might expect more of the movie to engage, since Meet Frankenstein made Costello’s brain pivotal to the Monster’s plot. Here, though, it’s a throwaway gag or two, riffing on the “invisibility=nudity” punchlines of Invisible Woman. 

 

By the time you get to the epilogue, one feels as though the writers – and there are an astonishing five of them – have run out of ways to thread the jokes together, resorting instead to coupling them like train cars. (To say nothing of how the invisibility effects are noticeably poorer, as if the budget had well and truly run dry.) The comedic fruit of Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is low-hanging, and the script plucks it all in the hopes that some of it won’t be rotten. To be fair, this Invisible Man isn’t rotten, but it’s a far cry from the timeless comedic genius of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Like most Invisible Man movies, though, this one just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Hugh Wedlock Jr., Howard Snyder, Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Arthur Franz, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Sheldon Leonard, and William Frawley. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Silly Sunday, we’ll wrap things up when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1954), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

While I originally said good things – twice – about the theatrical cut of Justice League, those takes essentially amounted to “some Justice League is better than no Justice League.” As time went by, though, we could see more clearly the seams in that exquisite corpse, to say nothing of the fairly horrifying allegations plaguing an already troubled production. Cut to four years later: the #SnyderCut has been released (on HBO Max, of all places), and it may not surprise you to hear that I loved every minute of its four-hour runtime; I could happily have enjoyed another three hours of Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Guilt-ridden over his role in the death of Superman (Henry Cavill), Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) scours the globe for superpowered individuals after learning from Lex Luthor that an evil force is headed for earth. That selfsame evil, the fearsome Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), has come in search of the newly-awakened Mother Boxes, whose primordial slumber was disturbed when Superman died. Before it’s too late, Batman must convince Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) to fight beside him.

 

If Zack Snyder has a tank, I’m solidly in it. Back in 2017, I spent the better part of five months analyzing Batman v Superman, only confirming my suspicions that it’s one of my top three favorite comic book films of all time (the other two being, I think, The Dark Knight and Captain America: The Winter Soldier). So I freely admit that I’ve got a bit of a predisposition bias, but I’ll also admit that it feels good to finally see the movie I was promised four years ago. I vividly recall leaving the theater after seeing Justice League, thinking about all the scenes from the trailers that hadn’t made their way to the theatrical release. Little did I know that only half an hour of Snyder’s footage made its way into the theatrical cut – and with Snyder’s vision finally fulfilled, I don’t think I’ll ever need to go back to the 2017 edit.

 

For one, Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels so much deeper and richer, and not simply because we spend so much more time in it. Someday, perhaps, you’ll see a post (or twenty) about the differences between versions, and so I’ll not spend much time on it here. But here’s a case in point: you may recall the moment in the 2017 League when Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) launches a flaming arrow into an ancient temple in man’s world. In the theatrical cut, it’s presented as just one more thing Amazons know how to do, a way to get Wonder Woman interested in the plot, yet in ZSJL, there’s a whole ceremony to accompany it; the temple has intense significance for the Amazons; and that communication from Themyscira sets Diana Prince on a quest for knowledge. And all along, we feel Diana’s pain at leaving her homeland behind, something of which we saw not even a glimmer in the theatrical cut. Throughout ZSJL, Snyder and fellow writers Chris Terrio and Will Beall take great pains to deepen the world of the Justice League, giving the characters a full-fledged mythology to enter. Everything seems thought out, with a reason for being.

 

The greatest strength in ZSJL is its characters, especially (and perhaps surprisingly) The Flash and Cyborg – the former reduced in 2017 to a Spider-Man caricature, the latter all but erased from the film after Snyder left the project. Without a standalone film of their own just yet, both characters get to take center stage; where they felt compulsory inclusions in 2017, teases for films that never came to pass, here they feel like integral members of the team, with standout sequences that introduce them to audiences. The Flash, Barry Allen, gets a playful moment to demonstrate the full range of his powers during his meet-cute rescuing Iris West (Kiersey Clemons) from a runaway truck. Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, though, emerges as the heart of the film, with a full character arc that reminds one a great deal of Superman’s arc in Man of Steel. Put another way, after watching ZSJL, you can understand why Fisher more than the rest was embittered by the process of reshoots and reedits: this should be a star-making performance, not a footnote in a painfully brief filmography.

 

There are moments in ZSJL that you’ll recognize from the theatrical cut, shots that have space to breathe in this version. But I was truly struck by the moment when Barry Allen tells his father (Billy Crudup) he’s landed a job in a crime lab to help prove his innocence. In the theatrical cut, this felt almost obligatory, a tease for Barry’s future. Here it feels like the culmination of Barry’s arc, bouncing from dead-end gig to gig before he finds his destiny. Far from feeling compulsory, this moment actually got me choked up at Crudup’s evident joy seeing his son succeed, at Barry’s newfound confidence in his future. It’s this sort of character moment that makes ZSJL sing. Things happen in this film because they matter to the characters, and it’s the characters – not studio fiat – who drive the momentum of the plot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Bruce Wayne, whose immense guilt and strategic forethinking refuel his vigilante mission into forming an army to prepare for war. Now that the reshoot footage has been excised, all that’s left of Affleck’s performance is lean, peak Batman, equally driven and haunted but finally, happily, leaning on the stalwart Alfred (Jeremy Irons), who becomes like a den mother to the newly-formed League.

 

Ultimately what Zack Snyder’s Justice League accomplishes is no less than encapsulating the entire potential of the superhero genre. These stories stick with us because they allow us to imagine ourselves as our best selves; they reassure us that hope is not lost, that we will always have one more chance to save ourselves from our own worst demons. Running underneath the surface of the film is the reminder that this sort of movie isn’t supposed to happen – studios don’t change their minds and admit they were wrong. Directors don’t get second chances when an industry reboots itself away from their vision. Ever since The Magnificent Ambersons, when studio meddling literally burned the footage Orson Welles shot to spite him, filmmakers who lose control of their movies don’t get them back, and audiences seldom get to see an unexpurgated vision, least of all one restored after being looted and reanimated. But Zack Snyder’s Justice League is proof that hope is never in vain; for those of us who beat the drum for four years, hashtagging to keep the fire going, ZSJLis a promise fulfilled, a warming moment of reciprocal gratitude. And it’s a story about second chances; while the heroes all have personal wrongs they need to right, even the villain is looking for redemption from his torturous past. 

 

But above all, it’s a fulfillment of the promise Jor-El made to his son back in Man of Steel, eight long years ago: “You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” By the end, as the heroes watch the sun rise over the battlefield, I couldn’t help muttering, “They will join you in the sun.” Zack Snyder and the fanbase have accomplished wonders. It’s a miracle this movie even exists, and after a year of endless lockdowns and the triumph of pessimism, perhaps we all need a reminder that the dawn is coming – that each one of us has the potential to save the world. The only thing holding us back is ourselves. Our nature, all of us, is to fly. 

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is rated R for “violence and some language.” Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio, and Will Beall. Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Jeremy Irons, Amy Adams, and Ciarán Hinds.

Fear not, loyal readers – Monster March continues tomorrow.

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: Invisible Agent (1942)

Is the Invisible Man series the franchise without a clue? Is it even a franchise at all? Is it fair to consider this a Universal Monsters series? The answer to all three questions is, I think, “Yes.” If we’re thinking about the Universal Classic Monsters as the first cinematic universe, The Invisible Man would be akin to an Iron Man franchise in which Tony Stark’s brother gives the suit away, while an unrelated inventor makes an iron suit, before Tony’s grandson builds his own suit. (Next week, to push the analogy, an entirely unrelated Stark is given the suit by another disconnected inventor.) Can you hinge a franchise on iconography alone?

Frank Griffin (Jon Hall) finds his print shop invaded by Nazis and Japanese agents (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre) who demand that he turn over the secret formula for invisibility devised by his grandfather, the original Invisible Man. Instead, Frank escapes and signs over the formula to the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor, on one condition – that only Frank be permitted to use the invisibility serum. Frank parachutes into Germany to meet with a German spy (Ilona Massey), who promises she can get Frank a book of German operatives.

 

Maybe I’m just a sucker for (no pun intended) transparently propagandistic WWII films, but there is something infectiously gee-whiz about an invisible American parachuting behind enemy lines to bust up the Axis. In short, I really enjoyed Invisible Agent more than I thought I would, especially given the mileage-may-vary quality of these later Universal Monsters movies. But this movie ticks a lot of boxes for me, almost like an invisible Rocketeer – which readers of this blog should know is a major gold star in my book. There are, for me, few cinematic pleasures more pure than seeing an enthusiastically patriotic American get the better of Nazis who end up defeating themselves through their own hubris. It’s almost like Captain America in Casablanca.

 

As the eponymous invisible agent, Jon Hall is square-jawed and serviceable, the kind of newsreel hero you really don’t see any more. As an Invisible Man, however, Frank Griffin isn’t any sort of monstrous menace; there is no danger that his serum will drive him mad, brushed away by his claim that only he knows the potency of the formula. This deck-clearing moment allows Invisible Agent to be something closer to The Invisible Woman than The Invisible Man, opening the door for this Griffin to slapstick his way through Nazi Germany. He douses goons in hollandaise and sets his own Reichstag fire by igniting the curtains in Nazi HQ. It’s played for laughs and thrills, but there is rarely any danger to or from our invisible agent. 

 

Even his “appearance,” doused in cold cream rather than swathed in bandages, elicits a hearty chuckle. I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the special effects in these Invisible Man movies, proving that they are almost more the star of the franchise than any invisible protagonist him-or-herself. The cold cream gag works, both as a punchline and as a screen trick to see the unseeable, but I was more taken by the sequence directly before, in which Frank Griffin lathers up in the bathtub. We can see his hands covered in soap, and his legs come into view as he scrubs them – truly effective stuff, even if the DVD transfer makes the seams a bit visible. The aforementioned parachute sequence, too, is fairly incredible, as Griffin disrobes mid-air, dropping his clothes as he drops out of sight. 

 

Invisible Agent truly stands out for its villains, though, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre – two performers who, let’s be honest, are so much better than the fourth Invisible Man film ought to deserve. I’ve been lukewarm on Hardwicke in The Invisible Man Returns and The Ghost of Frankenstein, but those films didn’t quite give him much to do. As Conrad Stauffer, though, Hardwicke sinks his teeth into the clipped disdain and opportunistic deception of a top-ranking Nazi. The performance is an exercise in restraint – less is more – and Hardwicke conjures up the image of a screen villain who’d be just as comfortable in the heightened reality of an Indiana Jones film. Likewise for Peter Lorre, one of my all-time favorite actors. By 1942, Lorre had carved out an odd niche for himself playing Japanese characters, particularly the detective Mr. Moto in an eight-film series. Lorre plays Baron Ikito without the aid of any discomfiting yellowface makeup, though one wonders why this Japanese villain has an Austrian accent. Still, Lorre is at his creepy best in a role that leans into the icky stereotypes of the Japanese as sadistic torturers, and he sends a real chill up your spine in the moments before he erupts into shocking violence.

 

Invisible Agent feels like a one-off in a franchise of one-offs, never quite coming to the level of The Invisible Man and its frantic mad monster. At the same time, though, it never quite feels as though it needs to meet the high bar set by Claude Rains. Instead it’s a flag-waving model of its time, taking the concept of a Universal Classic Monster and doing something sideways with it – and you know I’m always keen on mash-ups and genre-bending. I liked it better than I thought I would, and it’s only too bad that we didn’t get more like this – can you imagine Wolf Man of Berlin or Frankenstein vs. The Axis? (Sidebar: maybe that’s why God invented comic books; cf. The Creature Commandos, etc.)

 

The Invisible Agent is not rated. Directed by Edwin L. Marin. Written by Curtis Siodmak. Starring Jon Hall, Ilona Massey, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Son of Frankenstein (1939) starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, we’ll see – or not, as the case may be – The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), starring Jon Hall. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday revisits the franchise for Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

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: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

On the surface, there is much that should be intriguing about Dracula’s Daughter. It represents the last Universal Monsters film before a hiatus and renewal, it follows closely on the narrative heels of Dracula, and it expands the Dracula mythos by introducing a daughter to the world of the vampire’s curse. Even better, Edward Van Sloan is back as Van Helsing (here, inexplicably, Von Helsing). Yet for a good amount of Dracula’s Daughter’s brief runtime, I found myself bored amid what sounding like a promising premise.

Immediately after driving a stake through Count Dracula’s heart, Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is arrested for murder. Scotland Yard scoffs at his tale of vampires, so his only hope for exoneration lies in proving his sanity. He calls on his friend Jeffrey Garth, a psychiatrist, to join his legal team, but Dr. Garth is slowly falling under the quite-literal spell of Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), the secret daughter of Count Dracula himself.

 

Typing that synopsis out, Dracula’s Daughter sounds like a real winner. I was perhaps unreasonably excited to see Edward Van Sloan return, as he was my second favorite from Dracula (behind Bela Lugosi, naturally). Thanks to Van Sloan, the first reel of Dracula’s Daughter is dynamite, though I concede that I was half-expecting a courtroom drama in which Von Helsing defends his innocence by proving the existence of vampires – though I grant you, that probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was therefore disappointed that Von Helsing’s significance to the plot dwindles as the film goes on, to the point where his arrest for murder is never actually resolved (though we hope and presume that Scotland Yard believes him after settling the strange case of Countess Zaleska). Sadly, the film reduces Von Helsing to an exposition machine, down to repeating a great deal of dialogue from the 1931 film. (What’s more, Dracula’s Daughter actually reuses a shot from 1931, the operating room when Lucy Weston passes, here subbed for one of the Countess’s victims.)

 

Unfortunately, then, Von Helsing is not the focus or even a primary concern of Dracula’s Daughter. In a classic case of wasted potential, Von Helsing never even meets Countess Zaleska. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; where Edward Van Sloan had crackling chemistry opposite Bela Lugosi, it’s hard to imagine him getting blood from the stony performance of Gloria Holden, who is, I’m sorry to say, a bit of a bore. At first, she seems promising, scheming to free herself of her father’s dreadful curse, yet as the film elapses and the poor Countess surrenders to the selfsame curse, Holden’s performance dries up, and she spends most of the rest of the runtime – pardon the pun – vamping. There’s very provocative subtext (especially for 1936), if terrifically clichéd, about the female vampire being coded as lesbian, which makes her budding relationship with Dr. Garth a real mystery. Is she planning to bite him, or does she hope he’ll hypnotize her out of her vampirism? The film leans more toward the second possibility, though I’m not sure that’s how vampires or hypnosis work.

 

Surprisingly, some of the best parts of the film have nothing to do with Countess Zaleska or with vampires in general. Equally if not more compelling are the sequences between Dr. Garth and his secretary Janet, played by Marguerite Churchill. The pair have a wonderful sense of interplay, reminiscent a bit of a discount William Powell and Myrna Loy. (Indeed, I’m certain I would have loved Dracula’s Daughter if Powell and Loy had played in it.) These scenes are light and breezy, and Churchill plays what could have been a thankless role with spunk and good humor.

 

Dracula’s Daughter does represent something of the end of an era. It’s the last Universal Monsters film for three years – the cinematic universe would be, appropriately enough, resurrected in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein – and it’s the last to bear the influence of studio bigwig Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. It certainly feels of a piece with its predecessors, stodgy and stagey for better and for worse. Its pace is deliberate, often slow, and the monstrosity of the story is largely restricted to the imagination. In a sense, the key is again Edward Van Sloan; though Dracula’s Daughter takes place moments after Dracula, Van Sloan certainly appears to have aged at least five years, with his hairline receding and his presence more sedate than before. So too perhaps did the studio feel the monster movies had run their course; Universal certainly felt that way about ousting the Laemmles.

 

But if we’ve learned one thing over the course of this Monster March, it’s that you can’t keep a good creature down for long. In the case of the vampire, it would only take seven years for the Son of Dracula to rear his head; fortunately for you creatures of the night, it’ll be a scant seven days.

 

Dracula’s Daughter is not rated. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Written by Garrett Fort and Oliver Jeffries. Starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Irving Pichel, and Edward Van Sloan. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, if Dracula’s Daughter can’t git-r-dun, this looks like a job for the Son of Dracula (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr.

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: Revenge of the Creature (1955)

The Gill-Man made quite a splash into the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe with an exceptionally strong debut in Creature from the Black Lagoon. A scant year later, Revenge of the Creature brought audiences back to the Amazon, though not for long – after the first reel of the film, I found myself bored silly, attentive only when I realized I enjoyed this movie better when it was called Jurassic World.

Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) mounts an expedition into the heart of the Amazon to capture the fabled Gill-Man (Tom Hennesy and Ricou Browning). After successfully apprehending the beast, Joe brings it to the Ocean Harbor Oceanarium in Florida, where the Gill-Man is the subject of both scientific scrutiny and tourist obsession. The Gill-Man is studied by Clete Ferguson (John Agar) and Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson), but it’s the latter who catches the Gill-Man’s eye as he waits for a chance to escape.

 

We’re not even far enough into the Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a good analogy for a franchise debut twenty-three years after the series began (that’d be 2031, from Iron Man in 2008), but the advent of the Gill-Man felt a bit like, say, something as off-beat as Groot. Both Gill-Man and Groot don’t seem like obvious fits for their respective cinematic universes, but that innate weirdness ends up being their great asset, and they manage to blend in seamlessly, thanks to an almost corporate adherence to the vibe of the brand. What kept Groot top of mind, though, was that James Gunn, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the crew at Marvel kept finding new things for Groot to do – despite his limited vocabulary, he could dance, he became a baby, and he saved the day in numerous surprising ways.

 

The Gill-Man, on the other hand, is explicitly forbidden from doing anything different in Revenge of the Creature. If it’s intentional, it’s brilliant, because the plot of Revenge finds the Gill-Man shackled in a cage for the amusement of his captors and the tourists who flock to Florida to see him. It could be a clever metaphor for sequel-as-sideshow, reducing the Gill-Man to the star attraction in a freak show while forcing him to relive his greatest hits from the previous film. I think there’s ripe metafictional ground to be ploughed with such a storyline, one that acknowledges the cyclical and recursive sequel formula while finding something new for the franchise to address. I have no sense, however, that returning director Jack Arnold is using his own source material for satire. Instead, it often feels like a cost-cutting measure to relocate the aquatic monster series onto dry land, with a built-in excuse for why the water sequences look like they were shot at SeaWorld.

 

It’s unfair for me to criticize Revenge for not being the low-hanging satirical fruit I might have made it, so I’ll say instead that the premise of the film reminded me a great deal of Jurassic World. Both films are about the ill-advised nature of building a theme park around a murderous creature, and the overall arcs of both films are virtually identical. They even share the stock character of a female scientist (there, Bryce Dallas Howard; here, Lori Nelson) who wonders if she should give up all the science and amusement park scenery to settle down and start a family. The only difference, it seems, was the budget, and maybe that’s why I found Jurassic World mindless yet entertaining, while Revenge nearly put me to sleep.

 

For the better part of an hour, the Gill-Man doesn’t do anything. He’s imprisoned first in a wading pond, but when he proves able to leap out of his enclosure, the Ocean Harbor staff sedate him and relocate him to a larger aquarium tank, chaining him to the bottom. Then we’re regaled with sequences of him eating fish and menacing his captors, but it’s a far cry from the slasher rampage we saw in his debut film. The minute he’s introduced to Helen, a comely ichthyologist who delivers dialogue like she doesn’t want to disturb paint drying, you know exactly where the film is headed, but there’s something less compelling about seeing it the second time around, no tension in the chase this time. It feels inevitable instead of alarming, in the Universal Monster sequel tradition of retreading familiar ground. 

 

Just about the only bright spot is that the sequel brings back Nestor Paiva as Captain Lucas, here cast in a role roughly analogous to Edward Van Sloan’s turn as Van Helsing. Like Van Helsing, Lucas is on hand to assure us of the Gill-Man’s existence, to brush off the initial skepticism and encourage his passengers to embrace a wider understanding of the supernatural. Of course, Lucas also ends up guiding a new cast of the doomed right to the Gill-Man’s lair – leading me to believe that he might also be the Renfield of the Black Lagoon. Yet Lucas, a bright spot in the first film, is used perfunctorily in Revenge, right down to the reuse of footage from the first film. (Lucas using the boat’s horn to startle an alligator wasn’t all that funny the first time we saw it; recycling it for Revenge is distractingly perplexing.)

 

With Revenge and all the other Universal Classic Monsters sequels that preceded it, I am fast coming to the conclusion that, if the Universal Monsters popularized the notion of franchises and sequels, they must also be responsible for the truism that sequels are never any good. Film sequels were not exactly common when Bride of Frankenstein (the first monster sequel) debuted in 1935, and for many years they would seldom be as good. Revenge of the Creature is proof that sequels like Bride were the exception, not the rule. 

Revenge of the Creature is not rated. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by Martin Berkeley and William Alland. Starring John Agar, Lori Nelson, Jon Bromfield, Tom Hennesy, and Ricou Browning. 

Tune in tomorrow for Silly Sunday, with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.

 

In two weeks, the Gill-Man trilogy concludes when The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), starring Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Don Megowan, and Ricou Browning.

Monster March: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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