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, finally...

 The huge success of Abbbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein meant numerous lazier 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 these last 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 have expressed disappointment, given the Monster's historic fear of flames, that he ends the film by just walking into a fire, but I like the look of pained surprise on Strange's face, like a sleepwalker suddenly waking, and 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 new feeling of horror and pity. Speaking of which...

 

  Oh Bela! The highpoint of these Wednesdays has been finding out just how good Bela Lugosi was. It's said his manager had to literally shame the new bosses at Universal International into casting him again at sixty-five, the oldest actor to play Dracula 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, it's the Bela of Ed Wood, and it's why I'm so reluctant to dwell in these posts on the lives of the artists, because it shouldn't be necessary to pity Lugosi in order to love him. He doesn't need "points for trying". But 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 in Son of Frankenstein, and allowed to be Dracula again (famously this was only the second time he had actually 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 already written a little about why I think this is Lon Chaney Junior's best Larry Talbot too - he's on a mission here, also he's nobody's creepy love interest. That said, this film sometimes relegates the Wolf Man to the status of guy-in-a-gorilla-suit. His games of "behind you" with Costello's Wilbur make no sense, but when there's a barrier between them, a hotel wall or a transatlantic call, he's immediately thrilling again 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 make-up job after make-up job was applied to his face for Talbot's 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 evidenced in this comic from 1987), but the fact Talbot has 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.

Aww!

 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 in the second half of the twentieth century towards self-parody, which possibly mistakes the symptom for the cause, and is a huge shame. What the actual cause was for this shift I don't know, but off the top of my head I'd suggest that the more a culture identifies itself as middle-class, the more comfortably it favours customers shouting at a comedian for its catharsis over mobs coming for a monster with torches. The youtube commentary of The Titus Andronicus Project talks a lot about Chaney's unhappiness, but also provides a beautiful coda to the series by noting that the last voice we hear in the picture, that of the Invisible Man (great joke), belongs to an actor whose work would later 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.