Continuing my weekly "But What Do
I Know!" through
Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...
Boris! Basil! Um, Bela?!
There are few scenes in Rowland V. Lee's
Son of Frankenstein where one couldn't comfortably imagine the company bursting into laughter the second Lee shouted
"Cut!" It is an extraordinarily happy film – extraordinary especially as one of its happiest elements is fallen star Bela Lugosi as a body-snatcher with a broken neck. Lugosi had just become a father, as had Karloff – seen here sharing a moment of swagger with Bela Junior:
The story of the film's making is also, overall, a happy one. In 1936, Universal had resolved to stop making Horror following a British boycott of the genre (stupid bloody country), but this hiatus proved short-lived: in 1938, a nation-wide re-release of both
Frankenstein and
Dracula proved so popular that the studio immediately dug out the old tesla coils and machines that go BVURRRP, as well as Bela Lugosi, whose reputation and career had taken a horrific hit from '36. But, according 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."
He really did. There's barely a scene in the opening twenty minutes of this film where Lugosi isn't eavesdropping somewhere as "Ygor", his shaggy, snaggle-toothed head
popping up from behind a rock, or broken window, for a day's pay – a good gig, especially as Ygor
wasn't even in the first shooting script.
But, boy, is he in the finished film! Not the scoliotic assistant from future spoofs, this Ygor-with-a-Y is a shunned criminal, who having survived hanging, is now something of an embarrassment to other Frankensteinians – Oh yes! It turns out "Frankenstein" is actually the name of the village. And Frankensteinians is what they call themselves! – As the real monster of this movie, Lugosi gives a revelatorily anarchic performance, a million miles from the Margaret-Dumontish aristocrats he'd played previously. There's something of the wicked witch about him too – children dare each other to approach his crooked house – and in his shrewd adoption
of lowest possible status to avoid suspicion, there's also something of Columbo but if Columbo was the murderer (Ygor is using the Monster to kill off the jury who sent him to the
gallows; that's the plot Lee manages to rustle up.)
The face Ygor's coughing into above? 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 exiles from the canon whom Rowland V. Lee has returned to the fold. See? Happy!
Aw, and the mob's back too. But instead of torches, they now weild axes (which might be safer, who knows?) When we first meet them though, they're a sea of umbrellas, braving torrential rain to meet the late Doctor's American heir, Wolf (sic) von Frankenstein at the Bahnhof, only to then showily walk out on him. They're a miserable bunch of rock-throwers, and I'm not sure we're meant to mind when they're murdered. Obviously, Mel Brooks'
Young Frankenstein was influenced by this film, but there's a strong possibility
Blazing Saddles might have been as well.
And
The Shining! Because, unlike Gene Wilder's Frederick, Basil Rathbone's Wolf brought his family along. As Elsa, Josephine Hutchinson's almost immediate disenchantment with the adventure her husband has undertaken is perhaps the saddest thing in the film. Not that you can blame her: Her relationship with Wolf is no more happily heteronormative than his parents'."If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at head to head..." is one Frankensteinian tradition. And 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:
Although some people might find that last view quite sexy.
It's nice, after the lever from nowhere that blew everything up in Bride, to have some foreshadowing: Oh okay, so that's how the monster's going to die.
It's also nice to hear even Wolf acknowledge in this film that nine out of ten people now think "Frankenstein" is the name of the monster. Funny too. As he descends deeper into the sulphurous unniceties of his father's sexless work – literally trying to save his name – Elsa starts fearing for his sanity (and again, you can't blame her). Rathbone is a brilliant but not sympathetic actor: he's physiognomically incapable of looking anywhere other than down his own nose, and so the further he falls, the funnier it is to watch him imperiously try to maintain any semblance of dignity, and Rathbone's manic performance suggests he knows this.*
Meanwhile! The Frankensteins' tiny son, Peter – in scenes we never see – has started happily communicating with the horrors in the walls: potentially terrifying, if everything young actor Donnie Dunagan did and said wasn't absolutely hilarious. I tragically can't find any audible footage of his performace online, but imagine Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, and here's a still image of the future voice of Bambi being restrained by Karloff's monster, menacing Lionel Atwill's Inspector Krogh with his own prosthetic arm.
So it's that kind of a film: Huge fun, but also, you can understand why Karloff didn't return for a fourth. His creature is comatose for much of it – again, a good gig – and we are finally, three Frankenstein films in, presented with the semi-recumbent tableau so often recreated in comedy routines to come (although it's Frankenstein's bird-skeletoned butler Benson here who throws the switches, not Ygor):
There is one superb, wordless sequence, three minutes long, when Frankenstein's two offspring – the Monster and Wolf – first face one another: Karloff's monster no longer talks. I'm fine with that. I'm fine in fact pretending, for the sake of this movie,
Bride never happened. Some of what Karloff 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. But some of it is distressingly, if 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. And you can't blame him either. He is a stranger to us now.
It's unusual to see our boy carry out the murders so slily. Making things look like an accident had never been his style. Oh well... one-armed Inspector Krogh is on the case – an almost Spielbergian portrait of dependability and genuine goodness from Lionel Atwill, and perhaps the most deadpan performance of the film. Krogh's dry tone serves not only the film's comedy though, but also its surprising celebration of humanity. Atwill brings no bitterness to the loss of his arm, just clarity. When he sticks darts in the wooden prosthetic, yes it's funny, but also, how else was he going to hold the darts? We may 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, I'm generally not trying to
write too much about artists' private lives here. But I like hearing people were happy.
* Rathbone embarked upon perhaps his most famous role, Sherlock Holmes, this same year, 1939. Nigel Bruce's
Watson had to be a harmless buffoon for an audience to care what happened to
either of them, and it was a perfect partnership. I sort of wish I was writing about those films from now on, rather than what's to come. Still...
