Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Son of Frankenstein" (1939)... An Heir to the House of Fronkensteen!

 Continuing my weekly "But What Do I Know" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 Boris! Basil! Bela?

 There are very few scenes in Rowland V. Lee's "Son of Frankenstein" where one couldn't imagine the whole company bursting into laughter the second the director shouted "Cut!" It's an extraordinarily happy film, especially extraordinary given one of its happiest elements is Bela Lugosi as a body-snatcher with a broken neck. Lugosi had just become a father for the first time. So had Karloff, seen here sharing a moment of swagger with Bela Jr...

 The story of the film's making is also a happy one: Universal Studios had stopped making horror pictures in 1936 after a British boycott of the whole genre (stupid bloody country), but a nation-wide re-release of "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" in 1938 proved so popular that the studio immediately dug out those old tesla coils and machines that go BVURRRP! as well as Bela Lugosi, whose career and reputation had taken a horrific hit from Horror's brief hiatus. To quote his widow, Lillian Donlevy Lugosi:

"[The studio] cut Bela's salary from $1,000 per week to $500. Then they planned to shoot all his scenes in the picture in one week! When Rowland V. Lee heard about this, he said, and I quote, Those God-damned sons of bitches! I'll show them. I'm going to keep Bela on this picture from the first day of shooting right up to the last! And he did."

  Lee really did. There's barely a scene in this film's first twenty minutes upon which Lugosi isn't eavesdropping as "Ygor", his shaggy, snaggle-toothed head popping up and down from behind a rock or a broken window for a day's paid work. Good gig, especially given Ygor wasn't even in the first shooting script!

 But boy, is Ygor in the finished film! Not the hunchbacked assistant from future spoofs, this Ygor-with-a-Y is a shunned criminal who, having survived his hanging, is now something of an embarrassment to the other Frankensteinians - Oh yes, it turns out "Frankenstein" is actually the name of the village, and Frankensteinians is genuinely what they call themselves. And Lugosi gives a revelatorily anarchic performance as the real monster of this movie, a million miles from his Margaret-Dumontish aristocrats. There's something of the wicked witch about him too; children are seen daring each other to approach his crooked house. And in his shrewd adoption of the lowest possible status to avoid suspicion there's even something of Columbo, if Columbo was the murderer. (Ygor is using the monster to kill off those who sent him to the gallows, you see, that's sort of the plot Lee managed to rustle up.)

 That face he's coughing into here? Michael Mark! Maria's father in "Frankenstein", but as I remarked last week, absent from its sequel "Bride". And just off camera is Lionel Belmore, the Burgomaster from "Frankenstein", also absent from "Bride". Both of the monster's final victims were therefore refugees from the canon whom Rowland V. Lee returned to the fold. See? Happy!

 Aww, and the mob's back too! Instead of torches, they're now weilding axes, which might be safer? Who knows? But when we first see them it's a sea of umbrellas, having braved torrential rain to meet Basil Rathbone's American heir, Wolf von Frankenstein, at the Bahnhof only so that they can then showily walk out on him. They're a miserable bunch of rock-throwers, and I'm pretty sure we're not meant to mind when they're murdered. The influence of this film upon Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" is obvious, but there's a strong possibility "Blazing Saddles" was influenced too.

 And "The Shining"! Because unlike Gene Wilder's Frederick, Wolf has brought his family along with him. Josephine Hutchinson plays his wife Elsa, and her almost immediate disenchantment with the adventure they've undertaken is perhaps the saddest thing in the film. You don't blame her. "If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at head to head." Their new home has neither the claustrophobic chintz of "Frankenstein" nor the eccentric kitsch of "Bride", it's just... well, this:

 And this...

 And this...

 ... athough some people might find that last view quite sexy. And after the lever from nowhere that blew everything up in "Bride" it's nice to finally have some foreshadowing... Okay, that's how the monster's going to die.

 By the way, it's interesting to hear even Wolf acknowledge that nine out of ten people now think Frankenstein is the name of the monster. It's also funny. As he descends deeper into the sulphurous unniceties of his father's sexless work then, literally trying to save his name, his wife starts fearing for his sanity and again you don't blame her. Rathbone is a brilliant actor but not a sympathetic one, physiognomically incapable of looking at anything other than down his own nose. The deeper he falls therefore, the funnier it is watching him imperiously attempt to maintain any semblance of dignity, and Rathbone's manic performance suggests he knows this.*

 Meanwhile their tiny son Peter, in scenes we never see, has started communicating quite happily with the horrors in the walls. All of which would be terrifying if everything young actor Donnie Dunagan did and said wasn't hilarious. I can't find any audible footage but here's a still of the future voice of Bambi being restrained by Karloff's monster, who in turn is menacing Lionel Atwill's Inspector Krogh with the arm he's just pulled off.

 It is very much that kind of film. Huge fun, but you can understand why Karloff didn't return for a fourth. For much of the film his creature is comatose - again, a good gig - and it does offer us, finally, three films in, the tableau so often recreated in comedy routines down the ages: Frankenstein, Ygor, and the Monster unwrapped (although it's actually Frankenstein's bird-skeletoned butler Benson who throws the switches.)

 There's also one superb wordless sequence, three minutes long, when the monster and Wolf, Frankenstein's two offspring, first face one another. Karloff's monster no longer talks. I'm fine with that - I'm fine pretending for the sake of this movie that "Bride" never happened in fact - and some of what the monster does, examining his "brother"'s face, then his own reflection, has the poetry and clarity of his reaching up for the light back in 1931. Some of it though is distressingly, convincingly unreadable. When he brings Wolf over to the mirror, what's he doing? Is he seeing if the mirror is lying? Is he performing an experiment? What's he asking for? I don't know. Nor does Wolf. So the monster gives up. Who can blame him? He's a stranger to us now.

 He seems a little too sly carrying out Ygor's murders too. Making something look like an accident wasn't really our boy's style. Oh well, one-armed Inspector Krogh is on the case, an almost Spielbergian portrait of dependability and genuine goodness from Lionel Atwill, perhaps the most deadpan performance of the film, but a deadpan that serves not only the comedy, but the film's unique take on celebrating humanity. Because Atwill brings no bitterness to the loss of Krogh's arm, just clarity. And when he sticks darts in the wooden prosthetic, yes it's funny, but also, how else was he going to hold the darts? We can laugh, but we'll catch up with Krogh. It's all good.

 Okay, I'll stop there. The quote from Lugosi's widow comes from here, where you'll also find extracts from Willis Cooper's orginal Ygor-less shooting script. This lovely blog on "Son" also provided useful background, although generally I'm trying not to write too much about artists' private lives here. But I like hearing people were happy.

*Rathbone would start playing Sherlock Holmes the same year, and Nigel Bruce's Watson would have to be a harmless buffoon for us to care what happened to either of them. It's a perfect partnership, and I sort of wish I was writing about those films from now on rather than what's to come. Still...

 Next week kids, it's 1942's "Ghost of Frankenstein". More Ygor!