by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened the next Abbott and Costello film in sequence in
the Universal boxed set: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 production directed by Charles T. Barton
(who also seems to have been the one who thought up the concept even though old
A&C hands Robert Lees, Frederick Rinaldo and John Grant wrote the script)
which, as the title indicates, united Universal’s famous comedy team with their
equally famous cast of copyrighted screen monsters: the Frankenstein creation
(Glenn Strange), Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi, playing Dracula on film for the
second and last time — despite Lugosi’s reputation he only made five films in
which he played a vampire: Dracula, The Mark of the Vampire, Return
of the Vampire, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire — and the last two were comic spoofs) and the Wolf
Man, a.k.a. Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr., as usual). That makes this both a
“doubles” movie (two Draculas: Lugosi and Chaney) and a “triples” movie (three
Frankenstein Monsters: Chaney, Lugosi and Strange). Boris Karloff, the
best-known Frankenstein Monster of all, wasn’t in this movie but agreed to help
promote it as long as he didn’t have to watch it; he later appeared in two of
Universal’s inevitable follow-ups, Abbott and Costello Meet the
Killer, Boris Karloff (1949) — a
red-herring title if there ever was one because Karloff’s character was not the killer — and Abbott and Costello Meet
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). Lou
Costello was originally reluctant to do the film — “My little girl could write
a funnier script than this!” he said — but Universal-International (as the
studio was then called) agreed to sweeten the pot financially, and the result
was a solid commercial hit, a major comeback for Abbott and Costello and the
studio’s biggest moneymaker of the year. It’s an oddly schizoid film in that
the horror elements are presented almost completely “straight” — there’s no
effort to make fun of the Frankenstein mythos itself the way Mel Brooks did in Young
Frankenstein (though quite a few elements
in this one anticipated Young Frankenstein and Charles and I were quoting a lot of Young Frankenstein dialogue as they came up: when Costello, stumbling
around after hours in a “House of Horrors” wax museum, chops off the head of a
dummy representing a guillotine victim I said, “Freshly Dead,” when A&C
stumbled around the secret entrance to the basement of the old castle —
actually the old set of the Paris sewers from Lon Chaney, Sr.’s legendary horror vehicle The Phantom of
the Opera from 1925 — Charles said, “Put the
candle back,” and when we saw the original journal of Frankenstein’s
experiments, here called “The Secrets of Life and Death,” we both chanted in
unison, “How I Did It!”) — and one can see the gears in Barton’s and
cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s styles switched from heavy-duty Gothic in
the prologue scene in London to the plain style Universal used in its comedies
when the action switches to Florida, where the bulk of the film takes place.
The movie opens with Lawrence Talbot calling Chick Young[1]
(Bud Abbott) and Wilbur Smith (Lou Costello) long-distance from London to
Florida to warn them not to
deliver two crates to McDougal (Frank Ferguson), proprietor of a House of
Horrors wax museum. The crates contain the remains of Count Dracula and the
Frankenstein monster, and Talbot wants to warn Chick, Wilbur and anyone else he
can get hold of that the creatures are still alive and Dracula is part of an
elaborate scheme with Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert, who despite her
French-sounding name was actually part-Austrian and part-Slovenian, though
she’d been living in Paris for some years before coming to the U.S. and making
her film debut, except for a bit in the 1938 comedy Bluebeard’s
Eighth Wife, as a glacial European femme
fatale in Bob Hope’s 1943 film They
Got Me Covered) to revive the Monster and
bring him back to full power. To do this, they have somehow secured access to a
large old-style castle built on an island in the middle of the Everglades, and
Dracula — posing as a Hungarian scientist named “Dr. Lejos” — decides he wants
to give the Monster a perfectly innocent, childlike brain so he won’t resist
and will be totally subservient to Dracula’s commands. He starts by breaking
out of his coffin in McDougal’s museum and attaching a cigarette-lighter style
device to each of the Monster’s neck electrodes to give him a semblance of movement.
(The Monster says, “Master,” as soon as Dracula does this — marking this as the
third time in the Universal Frankenstein cycle the Monster has spoken: the
first time was in The Bride of Frankenstein, the second at the end of Ghost of
Frankenstein in which Lon Chaney, Jr.’s
Monster starts speaking with the voice of Bela Lugosi as Ygor because the
Monster has just received Ygor’s brain — which was why Lugosi was cast as the
Monster in the next film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man: originally the plan was for the Monster to speak
throughout that film but when preview audiences started laughing at Lugosi’s
lines as the Monster, they were erased from the soundtrack along with any
reference to the Monster being blind, which he became at the end of Ghost
of Frankenstein because of an imbalance
between the Monster’s and Ygor’s blood types.)
The principals go out to the
island in the middle of the Everglades — though a portion of the film’s action
plays at a masquerade party, during which Abbott and Costello (remember them?)
freak out Lon Chaney, Jr. by dressing up in wolf-man costumes. Costello’s
character is also being romanced by two women — by Dr. Mornay, who wants to
lure him to the island so she can take out his brain and transplant it into the
Monster, thereby giving it the perfectly innocent, guileless, stupid, pliable
brain Dracula wants it to have; and also by insurance investigator Joan Raymond
(Jane Randolph), who’s been assigned by the company to process McDougal’s
insurance claim and see if the bodies of Dracula and the Monster can be
recovered so the company won’t have to pay the claim. Randolph is described on
her imdb.com page as “briefly in the limelight in the 1940’s,” and by the time
she made Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein she’d already been in two of the finest horror films
ever made in the U.S.: Val Lewton’s Cat People and (repeating her role) its sequel, The
Curse of the Cat People. (She’d make only
one feature film after Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, as an extra in a 1955 production called That
Lady; she retired to marry producer Jaime
del Amo and live with him as a socialite in Switzerland, where she died in
2009.) Raymond romances Costello to get a line on the whereabouts of the
exhibits, but she also falls for Dr. Mornay’s assistant, Professor Stevens
(Charles Bradstreet), who like the male ingénues in Mystery of the
Wax Museum and its remake, House
of Wax, is a decent young guy who’s totally
unaware of the sinister doings of his employer. Abbott, predictably, can’t
understand why two delectably pretty young women are falling for Costello, of
all people; when he asks her why, Dr. Mornay says, “Blood … and brains.”
The
film has some great lines — of which the best is, when Lawrence Talbot explains
to him that when the full moon comes out he turns into a wolf, Costello
answers, “Yeah — you and 20 million other guys!” — and is also surprisingly
well staged as a horror movie, even though it suffers from the departure of
Universal’s makeup genius, Jack P. Pierce. The new owners at Universal-International
decided they could dispense with his services and brought in Bud Westmore,
whose brothers Perc and Wally headed makeup departments at other studios; and
Westmore decided that instead of using the laborious practices Pierce had employed
to create the Frankenstein monster — wrapping the actor’s head in cheesecloth,
applying facial putty and a special collodion and literally sculpting the face (and achieving the uncanny look
of the Monster’s skin having pores, like real skin) — he would create the
Monster’s face out of rubber appliances and glue it onto Glenn Strange. The result is a look that’s a
lot less convincing and more visibly “fake,” especially in the close-ups. Also,
in order to make Lugosi look the same age he was in Dracula even though it was 17 years later, Westmore
plastered white makeup on his face, seemingly with a trowel, which made it
virtually impossible for Lugosi to do any real facial expressions under all the
white goo — and Universal cartoon department head Walter Lantz (best known as
the creator of Woody Woodpecker) not only did a great animated credits sequence
in which Abbott and Costello appear in skeletal form and their bones later fly
apart and rearrange themselves into the name of the film, he also worked out a cool
but not all that convincing
effect of turning Dracula into an animated cartoon every time he turns from a
bat into a human, or vice versa. (This was much the same technique Columbia was
using the same year in the Superman
serial with Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel — Alyn turned into a cartoon every
time the script called on Superman to fly— though that was probably better than
the way they did it on the 1950’s TV show, which was to hang George Reeves
horizontally on a harness and pose him against a process shot of sky.)
Still,
this is a nice film to be Lugosi’s (arguable) swan song for a major studio (his
last completed film, The Black Sleep,
was produced independently but released by the reputable United Artists
company), and though this was a low-budget production at least they had a long
enough rehearsal schedule for Lugosi to learn a substantial amount of dialogue
phonetically — remember that Lugosi never learned more than rudimentary English
and memorized his scripts phonetically, and the sleazy fly-by-night producers
with which Lugosi did most of his work didn’t give him long parts because they
either wouldn’t or couldn’t wait around to let him memorize a lot of lines that
way. A number of commentators think Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein is their best film; I don’t —
I don’t even think it’s their best horror-comedy (that would be Hold
That Ghost, made seven years earlier for
their best director, Arthur Lubin, and funnier than this film precisely because
it doesn’t have the mythic weight
of all Universal’s monster legends hanging over it) — but last night I liked it
better than I ever have before even though they really ran into the ground the gag of Costello seeing some
horrific sight, summoning Abbott, and then when Abbott comes the scene has reverted
to normal reality and he thinks Costello was hallucinating. They had already
reached a point of diminishing returns with this gag in Hold That
Ghost and really ran it into the ground in later “Abbott and Costello
Meet _____” movies!
