Frankenstein Wednesdays Friday: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) – Baggage Handling

  Beginning to conclude my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 How often is the last film in a series the one you'll have almost definitely seen first? 

 I saw "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" long before I ever sought out "Frankenstein" or "Dracula", and it's worth noting how smoothly the film went down with the rest of my childhood diet: "The Goonies", "Young Sherlock Holmes", Bugs Bunny's toying with Elmer Fudd, Han Solo's screaming flight from Stormtroopers, nearly all of Spielberg's output, even "Dangermouse" and "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" all shared this tone of Horror Comedy, so much so that it seemed the only tone going, and all of the above may have learnt a thing or two from "A and C Meet F".  Ignoring the duff bit with the chair, consider the clip below (which comes towards the end of the picture, so might be a little SPOILER-y): sitcom director Charles T. Barton doesn't just juggle the comedy and threat, he protracts the threat long enough for it to become comic – a relentless piling on of threats that seems at least as big an influence on "Indiana Jones" as the joke-free adventure serials normally credited.

 It's worth noting too how different this films's strengths are from the kind of routine which had made Bud and Lou famous stars of burlesque. The pair are best known nowadays for two entirely separate contributions to Culture: this film, and the sustained miscommunication of "Who's On First?" – still one of the most famous sketches ever written, over eighty years later. Their timing was atomic, but "AaCMF" has no classic spoken routines. Its laughs come almost exclusively from Lou Costello's obliviousness to, or acknowledgement of, danger. Few would put Abbott and Costello in the same comedy pantheon as Laurel and Hardy, but you always knew how the latter pair would react to a threat – they'd gulp, and go "Mimimi!" or "Whoahhh!" – whereas Costello innovated an entire language's worth of scare takes. With no spoken material he trusted enough to fall back upon, he was given little choice. Fortunately, his writers (credited here) had a far clearer idea of how funny this was going to be than Lou did, but still, with no live audience on set to gauge the laughs, this absence of patter clearly terrified him.

 The Casino Theatre, Broadway. Bud and Lou played here 

but really I just ike the picture.

 "No way I'm doing this crap!" he apparently complained of the script, "My five-year-old daughter could write something better!" It should be noted then what an improvement this film's plot is over previous Frankenstein Wednesdays. Five-year-old Paddy Costello may have been able to write better, but Curt Siodmak couldn't. Consider, if you can bare to, we who know, the screenwriter's three previous attempts to bring the monsters together: 

 In "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" Larry Talbot seeks out the Scientist, hoping to be rid of his werewolf curse by learning the secret of eternal death. Finding Frankenstein's Monster frozen in ice, he frees it, then transforms into a werewolf in the midst of transferring his own "life force" into its body. They then fight. 

 In "House of Frankenstein" a deranged former associate of Frankenstein escapes from a dungeon, finds Dracula's skeleton in a travelling circus and briefly brings it back to life to wreak revenge. He then unrelatedly finds the bodies of Larry Talbot and Frankenstein’s Monster frozen in ice and thaws them out, hoping to put the Monster's brain into Talbot's body, but everyone dies before any of this is achieved. 

 In "House of Dracula" Larry Talbot and Dracula independently approach a doctor completely unconnected with Frankenstein, hoping to be cured of their respective spookinesses. The doctor agrees to treat Dracula, Talbot impatiently throws himself into the sea, and looking to retrieve his body the doctor finds Frankenstein's Monster buried in some mud. Talbot is then cured, Dracula turned into a skeleton, and the doctor goes mad and brings the Monster back to life for just over a minute before everything explodes. 

 By contrast, in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" Dracula wants to revive Frankenstein's Monster, and Larry Talbot the Wolf Man is trying to stop them. That's it.

 It’s not just the simplicity of this story that comes as such a relief, it’s the dramatic improvements made upon delineating its main characters' whole deal: Dracula wants mastery, the Monster wants a master, and Talbot wants to do good rather than just kill himself – a mission tragically hampered by his own curse. As a result of this clarity, Lon Chaney Junior, Glenn Strange, and even Bela Lugosi all give arguably their greatest performances in the roles for which they are best known, and it's now three o'clock in the morning so this will have to be continued...