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.

Frankenstein Wednesdays International Womens' Day Part Two Tuesday.... Abbott and Costello Meet Women

  Given how protective Glenn Strange's Frankenstein Monster was of his previous resuscitators, I don't know why in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he throws Cinema's first female mad scientist out the window, nor can I really work out why Dr. Mornay tries to attack him in the first place. Has her transformation into a vampire made her overly protective of Lou Costello's in-built blood bags? The script suggests as much, but... Okay look, all this post is really here to do is say, I've just started watching Abbott & Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and it's clear the pair have always had quite a complicated history with feminism:

 Also, I don't know how to stop this clip from running into the rest of the film.
 Tomorrow, it ends though. I promise.

Frankenstein Wednesdays International Womens' Day: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) – Doctor Sandra Mornay

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

 If Bela Lugosi's Dracula in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" is better than his Dracula in "Dracula", some thanks must go to co-star Lenore Aubert. A fellow Hungarian refugee (Lugosi fled the country in 1919 after a failed Communist revolution, Aubert fled the Nazis twenty years later) she plays Universal's first female Mad Scientist: Unspecified "curious experiments" have exiled Dr. Sandra Mornay to a castle off the coast of Florida, where Dracula has blackmailed her into finding a more dependably pliable brain to put inside his Frankenstein's Monster. Enter Abbott and Costello. When we're first introduced to Mornay, as Costello's "classy dish" tenderly nursing his head injury from fallen luggage, there's no indication she'll be anything other than the schlubby comic's typically glamorous love interest. The affection she showers upon Costello's Wilbur is entirely credible, as is everything else Aubert will do in every scene she's in. Look at the shot below, for example. Remove Aubert from the image... cover her up with your fingers or something...

Brawn, Brains and Madness. The Baddie Triumvirate.

  Now put her back in... See? It's impossible for a scene to be dumb when she's present. 

 It's also far more engaging to watch Dracula trying to charm an equal rather than seduce an innocent, and when their differences are finally aired, and he goes in for the kill, I think Aubert might be the first ever victim to smile onscreen when bitten. It's hard to say who out of Lugosi and Costello is the greater benificiary of her provision of reality, but both up their game. Lou, despite his ego, would never be as loveable as he is as Mornay's puppy, just as Bela, despite his frailty, would never be as imposing as he is as Mornay's blackmailer. Lou and Bela also complement each other superbly, but once you get beyond the scare takes and the mesmerism, it's Aubert who is the chemist behind this chemistry. She doesn't have much to do in the following clip, for example, but it's her they're playing to (discuss)...

This is the clip I'm posting for International Women's Day? This.

 The short-sleeved stud at the end, by the way, is Charle Bradstreet as Doctor Stevens, Mornay's glamorous assistant, whom she definitely didn't hire for his smarts. To be continued...

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...

Frankenstein Wednesdays Thursday: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948)... It's a grand New Idea for FUN!

 Up in a bit...

 UPDATE: Okay. It's not. Apologies. While you wait, here is some absolutely excellent burlesque from the opening scene of Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

"The Aristocrats!"

Final Frankenstein Placeholder

"Process"

 The man being spat on is Bobby Barber, employed on the set of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein specifically to prank the crew, dress up, throw pies, drop eggs from a gantry, ruin shots, whatever it took to keep the team's comic energy up between takes. Not a normal provision for a film shoot, his presence suggests two things: that onscreen jokers Bud Abbott and Lou Costello might not have been a guaranteed barrel of laughs to work with themselves, and crucially, that they knew it. A&CMF is the product of perfectionists, something Frankenstein Wednesdays have been short on recently, and I might even find myself arguing by the time this post is written, that it's the single most influential movie ever made.

 Or I might not.

Frankenstein Wednesday: "House of Dracula" (1945) – Test The Blood of Dracula!

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

"That... That's IT?!"

 Here is a publicity still of Award-Winning Make-Up Artist Jack Pierce, preparing Boris Karloff for "Bride of Frankenstein" in 1933:

 And here's a publicity still of Onslow Stevens, making up his stand-in, Carey Loftin, for "House of Dracula" twelve years later (source):

 I don't know who did Onslow Stevens' makeup. My guess is it might also have been Onslow Stevens – there's something just not very Award-Winning-Make-Up-Artist-Jack-Piercey about it. John Carradine may also have done his own make-up as Dracula – a little talc to the temples – but at least in this film his moustache stayed on.

Not a play. A scene from an actual film.

 Digital restoration can be unkind, and blog least-favourite Erle C. Kenton's "House of Dracula" does not bear close examination, if any. It is a bad film. I may just keep talking about the make-up then. Stevens is sporting a fake beard because he is playing a scientist, Dr. Franz Edelmann. Edelmann has been approached by Dracula who wants to be cured of Vampirism, or maybe just because he has a crush on Edelmann's nurse Miliza (played by Martha O'Driscoll), it's not clear which. Both motives are rubbish, but at least this film didn't have a misleadingly good opening like "... of Frankenstein".

"I wear this top hat so my waddle when ascending or descending stairs might describe an even wider arc. And I ascend and descend stairs a lot"

  Just as in the previous sequel, Carradine's Dracula introduces himself as "Baron Latos", possibly because he's trying to conceal his identity, or possibly because nobody wants to hear John Carradine say "I am Dracula." He's moved his coffin – bearing the Dracula crest – into Edelmann's cellar though, and showed it to Edelmann the moment they meet, so it's probably the latter. Edelmann, a man of science, believes Vampirism is simply a mental disorder, so prescribes a series of transfusions of his own blood into Dracula's as a cure. 

 But (?) Dracula then tricks (?) Edelmann by reversing the flow of the syringe (??) which (???) transforms the good doctor into an evil Mr. Hyde version of himself. You can see the make-up for Edelmann's HIDEOUS TRANSFORMATION at the top of this post, as well as below IF YOU DARE. I have literally no idea what anyone was thinking at this point.

  "Push the button, Frank!"

Also, excuse me but who in red hell is Onslow Stevens, and why is he the star of this film? Anyway! Believing now in vampires, the good doctor moves Dracula's coffin into the sunlight, killing its occupant, and ending Dracula's stupid story that makes no sense. Meanwhile! Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, natch) has also come to Edelmann looking for a cure for his Werewolfism, which makes a bit more sense, except that both he and Dracula definitely died in the last film. Edelmann, however, is too busy with "Baron Latos", so Talbot hands himself in to the local police station, where he transforms into the Wolf Man, but it's fine because he's safely locked up. He doesn't escape or anything. Nobody is killed. It's all fine, and so is his make-up.

 "This is actually fine."

 If he looks a little bushier than before, that's because – according to The Titus Andronicus Project – the War had caused a serious shortage of European yak hair, which Jack Pierce previously relied upon for the fur. It's still basically fine. Talbot is then released from his cell and throws himself into the sea. Edelmann follows him on a winch to look for him in the mud, where he finds the reliably unconscious body of Frankenstein's Monster. He brings both back to his not mad hospital/lab/castle, where he then does not revive the Monster because another nurse, trailblazing FEMALE hunchbacked assistant Nina (played by Jane Adams) points out that this would be bad. He does cure Talbot though, which is good, and so ends the Wolf Man's stupid story.

"You have been cured with spores. Now I love you."

 We haven't seen a moustache on Talbot before, but obviously he has every right to try one; perhaps he'd just seen "A Matter of Life and Death" and hoped that, in concert with silk pyjamas and head bandage, it would make him look more like David Niven (and not Houdi Elbow). It looks real anyway. Martha O' Driscoll and Jane Adams both look superb, but that doesn't mean they didn't also do their own make-up. Adams really sells the scoliosis too. Her performance as Nina is probably the best thing in the movie, which is not to say that her role isn't exploitative and infantilising. Regardless, she manages to make Nina the protagonist of every scene she's in – heroic, if childishly heroic – until she is horrifically thrown to her death down a trapdoor at the end by Mr. Hyde Edelmann, in long shot, because this film is bad.

  Also fine is Glenn Strange's make-up as the Monster, athough, yet again, he has absolutely nothing to do for most of his time onscreen, except lie unconscious on a gurney until called upon to break free from its straps by a mad scientist, so there isn't much that could have gone wrong. If his firey death the next minute, trapped beneath Linda Barker's shelves, reminds you of the end of "Ghost of Frankenstein", that's because it is. The studio literally recycled the footage. And so ends the Monster's non-story. It doesn't look like Strange was given a dresser either:

"Lon Helping Glenn into his Costume" Actual caption.

 Lionel Atwill's back and probably did some recycling too, wearing the same uniform for Inspector Holtz he wore for Inspector Arnz in "House of Frankenstein" and Inspector Krogh in "Son of Frankenstein", while Skelton Knaggs is a new face, this film's version of the sweaty weirdo who the whole village listens to instead of their Police Inspector, and I'm not sure anyone did his makeup. I'm not sure he's wearing any. I think that face is just Skelton Knagg's deal.

 Anything else? 

 Oh, there's one other death; a scene in which the evil Edelmann toys with, then murders, his gardener. For this one scene we're reminded of the queasily attractive power fantasy that Horror promises, what Steven Moffat called "the game of the monster", While there's so much more to the best of these films than this game, you still have to play it. It's through this game, in fact, we first came as children to Frankenstein, and Dracula, and the Wolf Man, not through "Scooby Doo". Exactly as we might have dressed up as super heroes, we groaned, and hissed, and adopted the stiff walk, and suddenly felt power because people were running from us, because that was the game. And the fangs, and the claws, and the face paint, and the stick-on bolts, and the scars were the toys we bought to play that game. We learnt of these monsters through make-up. House of Dracula forgot the rules of that game however, and there would be no sequel the following year.

Next week... "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man" in which a comedy comes along to finally sort all this shit out, and then we're done!