Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) again – Literally The Last Laugh

 Concluding the conclusion of my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 The huge success of "Abbbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" meant numerous, lazier horror sequels for Bud and Lou, but none for Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula or the Wolf Man, so let's say some goodbyes... Firstly, Glenn Strange: Of all the Monsters we've seen over the past two months, his was by far the most reliably unconscious, but in this last outing we finally see him give lumbering chase, closing in like a moving wall, the perfect nightmare somnambulist. Many commentators express disappointment, given the Monster's historic fear of flames, that he ends this film walking directly into a fire, but I like the look of pained surprise on his face as he does so, like a sleepwalker suddenly waking. The fire's properly explained this time too. The Monster's lost, his master gone, there's water beneath him and he's done this before, he knows the deal now, so no, I'm fine with "Junior" finally giving himself to the flames, and I remember watching his death as a child with a weird feeling of horror and pity new to me. Speaking of which...

 

  Oh, Bela! My happiest takeaway from these Wednesdays has been finding out just how good an actor he was. It's said his manager had to literally shame Universal International's new bosses into recasting the now sixty-five-year-old Lugosi as Dracula, the oldest actor to play him until John Carradine would return to the role in 1979. "You owe Bela this" his manager said apparently. They thought he was dead, it is said. That's Lugosi's myth anyway, and it's the Bela of Ed Wood, and it's why I'm so reluctant to dwell on the lives of the artists on this blog, because it shouldn't be necessary to pity Lugosi in order to love him. He doesn't need "points for trying", although God knows he earnt them. Five years earlier, he'd been slumming it as a heavy, opposite Monogram Pictures' super-numerary East Side Kids in William "One-Take" Beaudine's Ghosts on the Loose, so maintaining dignity in the face of packaged zaniness was not a new trick for him, but here, allowed to be in on the joke again as he had been in Son of Frankenstein, and allowed to be Dracula again (this was actually only the second time he had played the Count on screen) Lugosi balances both tasks to achieve what I so loved Boris Karloff for achieving in Frankenstein: a performance no other actor would have known how to give. Actual magic.

 I've written a little before about why I think this is Lon Chaney Junior's best Wolf Man too: he's on a mission here, and he's noone's creepy love interest. That said, he does in this film sometimes get relegated to the status of guy-in-a-gorilla-suit, and his games of "behind you" with Costello's Wilbur make very little sense. However, when there's a barrier between them – a hotel wall or a transatlantic call – he's immediately thrilling in a way I haven't seen before. Putting a werewolf behind a door you shouldn't open clearly provides more interesting nightmares than pouncing from the shadows.

 I also said this film was the work of perfectionists. Well, here are some numbers: According to Gregory W. Mank's detailed Blu-ray commentary, Lon Chaney Jr. had to lie still for a day and a half while makeup job after makeup job was applied to his face for the opening transformation, after which the team decided they could still do better, and spent a second full day re-doing the whole thing. (These stage-by-stage transformations always fascinated me as a child – as is evident in this comic from 1987 – but the fact Talbot had to remain completely still for them was always a problem, only successfully addressed when it first happened in The Wolf Man and Talbot was already supposed to be dead.)

Awwwww!

 Despite his exemplary behaviour on set, lying still for two and half days, or stepping in as the Monster when Glenn Strange had twisted his ankle, Chaney also apparently hated this film, retrospectively blaming it for the change in Horror's tone towards self-parody in the second half of the twentieth century, which possibly mistakes the symptom for the cause, and is a huge shame. I don't know what the actual cause was, but off the top of my head, I'd suggest the more a culture identifies as middle-class, the more comfortably it favours for catharsis customers shouting at a comedian over torch-wielding mobs storming a castle. The Titus Andronicus Project's youtube commentary talks a lot about Chaney's unhappiness, but it also provides a beautiful coda to the series by noting that the last voice we hear in the film, that of the Invisible Man (great joke), belongs to an actor who would come to exemplify this lighter-hearted attitude towards the Gothic. The last laugh, literally, belongs to Vincent Price.

 Having begun this project moaning about the lack of music in "Dracula", here to play us out is Frank Skinner's terrific "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" suite.