I saw The Son of Frankenstein when I was a boy either on late-night TV or on a summer afternoon as one of Mel's Matinee Movies -- the host of this show was a Twin Cities TV personality with a bombastic voice and horn-rim glasses named Mel Jass. In any event, the movie was broadcast in a mangled version, gloomy and underlit on the little TV screen and interrupted by scads of commercials for local plywood stores, restaurants, cars, cigarettes, and other commodities. Movies shown on TV on local network affiliates were treated with scorn (black and white cockroaches creeping across the screen) and broadcast in a sort of bait-and-switch format -- the first few ads were interpolated at 20 minutes intervals, but, then, as the movie progressed, the commercials became more and more frequent until they were interrupting the picture every four or five minutes. We didn't know any better in 1966, but this was an awful way to watch a movie and, decades later, when I saw some of these pictures in uninterrupted form and projected so that the images and sound were actually intelligible, it was a revelation to revisit some of these films, particularly something as striking and bizarre as the 1939 Son of Frankenstein. Viewed today, when I am an old man, my assessment of the movie is further complicated by the fact that most of the funniest schtick in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein is derived from this picture -- a parody of a parody of a parody: The Bride of Frankenstein (1934) is a Gay-inflected, campy and extremely witty and brilliant parody of the Monster's first silver-screen interation (Frankenstein, also directed by Whale and released in 1931); the 1939 picture featuring Basil Rathbone as Wolf von Frankenstein, the son of the original Baron played by Colin Clive. is a parody, more or less, of The Bride of Frankenstein, recycling various motifs from the 1934 picture in an even more outrageous and over-the-top presentation. And the Mel Brook's movie, also about Baron Frankenstein's son, originates in the macabre gags and morbid satire in the 1939 picture. Ultimately, the viewer is trapped in a hall of mirrors -- in the thirties, at least, remakes in the horror genre were made with excellent production values, superb musical scores, and brilliant set design, but the sequels didn't take themselves seriously and, indeed, were scripted to mock the very attributes that had made the original pictures audience-pleasers. There is a kind of merry and robust self-deprecation in the Universal horror films made throughout the Thirties and early Forties -- the movie makers know that these films are trash but trash of a very highest order. But viewed on its own terms, The Son of Frankenstein, although always considered the least effective of the three pictures starring Boris Karloff as the Monster, remains an exceedingly impressive film, replete with memorable sequences that have remained vivid to me for almost sixty years.
Wolf von Frankenstein is riding with his hapless wife (a non-entity in The Son of Frankenstein) on a train traversing some Mitteleuropaische wasteland -- through the train windows, we survey foggy terrain in which, at intervals, some blasted and hideous tree reaches up from the invisible heath to claw at the murky air. Frau Frankenstein remarks that it's a peculiar-looking landscape -- an understatement if ever there was one. Then, Baron Wolf indignantly says that he and his family are misunderstood and that "nine out of ten people call that misshapen creature --" He pauses and, then, we hear the conductor's voice calling out in sepulchral tones: "Frankenstein, next stop Frankenstein". The point, of course,is that to most film-audiences the name "Frankenstein" doesn't denote the creature's maker but the monster himself -- a shrewd and witty aside, as it were, introducing a series of variations on themes from the earlier films. At the hamlet of Frankenstein, the crowd gathers in driving rain to meet the train. The Baron rants to the mob of people hidden under the umbrellas. They detest the Frankenstein family, of course, for unleashing the monster on them and, after a minute or so, everyone has deserted the wretched town square where the Baron ends up speaking to a single gendarme and puddles of water thrashed by the downpour. Lurking around the Frankenstein castle is a peculiar deformed figure, a hairy-looking man with a mouth full of blackened serrated saw-edge teeth and a grotesquely twisted neck. This is Ygor, a local peasant and grave robber by profession, who has been hanged but somehow survived his execution. "I'm dead," Ygor proclaims, tapping his crooked neck which resounds as if it were made out of oak. (Ygor is played by Bela Lugosi in a robust, Rabelaisian role, a sardonic and mordant peasant -- the polar opposite of the suave Continental seducer in the actor's signature role as Count Dracula.) Ygor is systematically murdering the jurors who condemned him, using the services of the Monster who has become, however, comatose and paralyzed. (A primitive x-ray shows that he's riddled with bullets.) Two of the jurors remain alive and, of course, Ygor implores Baron Frankenstein to resurrect the paralyzed monster so that he can complete his vengeance. The monster is duly revived in a spectacular laboratory sequence involving curlicues of arcing electricity. The creature wanders around the completely studio-bound and expressionistic landscape committing crimes and, also, interacting in an avuncular way with Baron von Frankenstein's little son, Peter (who speaks with an inexplicable Southern accent). A couple times, the Monster has a chance to hurl little Peter into a sulfur pit -- said to reach temperatures exceeding 800 degrees -- but he likes the lad and spares him. Interspersed in these grim proceedings are scenes with Krogh, a man who was mutilated by the monster as a child, embittered that his missing limb has prevented him from being a soldier and consigned him to this backwater where he serves as the black-clad chief of police. Krogh (Lionel Atwell) with his stiffly jointed prosthetic arm is one of cinema's great creations: figures modeled on him include Dr. Strangelove and, of course, the constable played by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein. In the end, the Baron shoots Ygor prompting a fit of violent grief in the Creature. The Monster begins hurling all the furniture in the lab into the reeking fumes of the sulfur pit (where they explode in a satisfyingly lurid way). When the Monster threatens to trample on little Peter, the Baron swings on a rope to his rescue pitching the Creature into the fiery pit. An indelible feature of this climax is the Monster's attack on Officer Krogh -- the Creature rips off Krogh's artificial arm (just as he tore off his arm many years earlier when he was a child) and is about to beat the policeman with the prosthesis when the Baron swings to the rescue, saving Peter and the constable, by pitching the Monster into the undying flames.
This film is Karloff's last outing as the Monster and he's excellent, stumbling around in a wool fleece wrapped around his vast chest -- the little boy calls him the man with the "hairy shirt." Karloff's outburst of strangled grief when he finds Ygor gunned down is impressive and his enraged dismantling of the laboratory, throwing tables and electrical generators into the sulfur pit is comical in a deranged sort of way, but also moving. (When Orson Welles tears apart a room and its furnishings in Citizen Kane two years later, the sequence echoes the imagery in The Son of Frankenstein). The film's sets are spectacular, certainly some of the most impressive in film history. There's not an inch of footage in the movie that depicts anything remotely realistic or natural -- the castle has a huge tower near its gate that looks like a giant needle-nose pliers made from mighty boulders; there's a tiny hatch at the top through which the saturnine Ygor peers down at proceedings. The interior of the castle is dominated by vast stairways with open steps cantilevered over a whited sepulcher, a sort of vaulted bleached plaster space. The steps are lit in such a way as to project enormous shadows onto the walls -- figures move up and down across what seems to be a huge black xylophone. (The lighting that creates these shadows is completely unmotivated -- where is it coming from?) The laboratory, conveniently adjacent to the fuming sulfur pit, looks like a combination of a shattered geodesic dome and the Mycenaean acropolis, all tilted cyclopean monoliths. Sometimes, the camera follows characters so as to simply tour these locations -- even the domestic corridors in the castle are hundreds of feet long with giant angular beams protruding over the white expanses. Everything is a combination of angular, distorted sets with bizarre perspectives derived from the expressionistic backdrops in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and vast megalithic architecture, huge stones leaning against one another. Of course, there are massive walls that open into hidden corridors, secret passageways, and a cave branching away from the loathsome bubbling sulfur pit that looks like one Kurt Schwitters Merzbau, a hollow grotto with a ceiling congested with swollen, drooping mammiform stalactites. At times, the photography and the sets look Constructivist, as if designed by Vladimir Tatlin. Against, these backdrops everyone rants and raves. Mel Brooks' comic take on this movie doesn't need to deviate too far from this movie's original premises -- there's an insanely dart game in which Wolf Frankenstein becomes increasingly manic and agitated, all the while pitching darts at a tiny target suspended from one of the cyclopean pillars in the castle. When it's Krogh's turn to play, he blithely jams the set of darts into his wooden arm so that this quiver will be conveniently accessible to him. Of course, the vast and grotesque sets overwhelm the action and the director, often doesn't know how, to film the characters against these backgrounds -- usually, the figures are too small and there is a theatrical quality to their spoken arias; it's like the mighty silent-era style sets are simply too vast and imposing for the figures filmed against them. In the resurrection scene, Dr. Frankenstein cries that "his mother was lightning" and the shot cuts to the mutilated Ygor filmed like one of El Greco's saints against a glowing void. The sexual dysfunction illustrated by the movie is pervasive and grotesquely amusing: someone comments -- "When the household's full dread, put the beds head to head" and we see the two marital beds like tombs angled away from one another, divided by a massive phallic column of black, lathed wood. On the overhangs on the walls, boar gargoyles snarl at one another. The movie's ending is a complete bust, so cheery as to be hilarious -- the Baron and his little family depart the hamlet with merry "Goodbye!" and so the film ends.
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