Universal ’40s Monsters: A Critical Commentary
by John Soister , Harry H. Long, Henry Nicolella , and Dario Lavia . BearManorMedia 798 pages. Hardcover : $52 https://tinyurl.com/3x3jc35e Paperback $42 https://tinyurl.com/39tm7ey3
We are pleased to present another chapter from the now just released new book covering the classic Universal monster films, going from THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS ,1940 ( see our preview : https://tinyurl.com/udjxvcw )to 1948’s ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEETS FRANKENSTEIN.
One point that I would like to make. There are certain toxic members of fandom who feel that they PERSONALLY own the classic films and make snarky comments about others who dare to cover the genre . These people need to realize that others love these films and have the right to write about the movies . The “toxics” can of course voice an opinion , but they need to review the work itself and not make lame childish swipes to make themselves feel superior . Fan was derived from “fanatic” , and the toxics bring negativity to what is supposed to be an enjoyable exchange of ideas on a subject that we all enjoy .
Now , with that out of the way , SCARLET is glad to share another chapter of this new book . This chapter : THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN:
The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
Synopsis: We open in the village of Frankenstein, as the villagers receive the mayor’s permission to blow up the remains of Castle Frankenstein, which they see as the cause of all the misfortune that has befallen them. This proves to be harder than anticipated, for Ygor – the broken-necked, vengeful blacksmith from Son of Frankenstein – is not above tossing a few rocks at them from a parapet. Fleeing to the castle’s nether-regions for safety, Ygor espies a hand sticking out of the now-hardened sulfur pit. Digging in, he is astonished to see that the hand belongs to the arm of the Frankenstein Monster who – albeit somewhat the worse for wear – is still alive. Freeing his “friend,” Ygor leads the Monster off into the nearby woods.
A thunderstorm rises suddenly, and the Monster is struck by lightning; remarkably, rather than destroying him, the lightning restores his strength. Putting two and two together, Ygor leads his friend off to Vasaria, wherein dwells Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein, younger son of the mad scientist who first cried out, “It’s alive!” Somehow, despite his bearing one of the most unique and infamous surnames in all of Germania, Ludwig has avoided being associated with his father’s woeful experiments by everyone in the vicinity – and that includes his daughter, Elsa. While Ygor is putting the arm on Ludwig, the Monster has killed one of the locals and is now in police custody. Only after Ygor threatens to spill the beans about Ludwig’s patronymic does the good doctor head down to the courthouse to see about the Monster. The Monster, possibly seeing a family resemblance and sensing an ally, is nonetheless enraged when Ludwig denies knowing anything about him, and bursting his chains, runs off to the hills again, accompanied by Ygor.
Come nightfall, the pair make for the castle Frankenstein, where the Monster tears through the doctor’s laboratory in an effort to carry off Elsa, killing assistant Dr. Kettering in the process. Both Monster and Ygor are overcome by gas pumped in through the air ducts, and Ludwig – determined to disassemble the Monster piece by piece – asks Dr. Bohmer for advice and assistance. Bohmer talks Ludwig out of the dissection and suggests that the placement of a normal brain inside the Monster’s body might result in a creature who is an actual boon to mankind. Seeing as he has Kettering’s brain on hand, Ludwig agrees and prepares for the operation. Bohmer, looking to regain his professional reputation (tarnished by past experiments-gone-wrong), conspires with Ygor to place the blacksmith’s brain in the Monster’s skull instead of Kettering’s. In the meanwhile, the Monster has kidnapped young Cloestine – a child who has acted in a friendly fashion toward him – and brings her to the laboratory, insisting that her brain go into his head. Ludwig straightens things out (in the course of which Ygor is crushed behind a sturdy door by his erstwhile “friend”), preps the Monster for the transplant, and then – unbeknownst to him – connects Ygor’s brain to the Monster’s circuitry, thanks to Bohmer.
Back at the village, everyone is frantic about the Monster having vanished and the sudden disappearance of Cloestine. As they prepare to storm the castle, Elsa’s boyfriend, Erik Ernst, confers with Ludwig, who informs him that – the operation having been quite successful – the Monster’s personality is now that of the gentle Dr. Kettering. All – except for Dr. Bohmer – are shocked when the Monster, now speaking with Ygor’s voice, boasts that with his newly recovered strength he will rule the world! Moments later, though, the Monster is apparently going blind, due to incompatibility of blood types. While the angry mob breaks into the castle, the Monster, raging about the laboratory sends Bohmer crashing to his death into an electric panel. Thrashing about wildly, he knocks chemicals onto the floor, where they combine to set the place afire. Erik and Elsa escape with their lives, but Ludwig and the Monster perish in the flames .
Much of the fun one has with Universal’s Frankenstein series, of course, is to be found in marveling over nomenclature and inconsistencies. The 1931 Frankenstein originally keyed in on the epic missteps taken by Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein in an abandoned watchtower high in the hills above the village of Goldstadt. “Missteps” is a moral evaluation of Henry’s purposeful experiments, which suffered also from muck-ups, like the breaking of the neck of the cadaver cut down from the gibbet, and the deceitful substitution by Fritz of an abnormal brain for the good one he dropped, having been startled by the dramatically inexplicable sounding of a gong at Goldstadt Medical College. (Said college is doubtless part of the larger Goldstadt University from which Dr. Pretorius will admit to having been “booted” in Bride.) Lying somewhere between missteps and muck-ups are also mysteries, such as why Henry is disturbed when Dr. Waldman informs him that the brain Fritz – Dwight Frye, enacting his second straight tormented sidekick for Universal – had filched had belonged to a criminal, when the first place Frankenstein had ventured in search of a brain was the body of someone publicly hanged by the neck (and presumably not for acts of charity). Or what was the logic behind issuing the new creation a pair of black platform shoes? Were these – like what would become the Monster’s trademark black suit – found in a cupboard someplace? Despite all this, we had our iconic “Frankenstein Monster.”
With Frankenstein a hit, Junior Laemmle’s production team had begun readying the world for The Return of Frankenstein – the sequel to the earlier sensation and the film that marked the reunion of James Whale and Mary Shelley’s legacy – in 1933. Soon enough, the project was retitled Bride of Frankenstein, and it was bandied about by the publicity department that a “search” was underway for just the right actress to portray the titular bride. Although Colin Clive had reportedly been disappointed that his much-anticipated death scene at the end of the 1931 classic had been supplanted by Frederick Kerr’s toast to an heir for the “House of Frankenstein” and the need for his character to survive to experiment another day, he was happy to be involved in the sequel, which would open with his Henry and the Elizabeth of
… ummm… Mae Clarke? making good on the old baron’s toast. Okay. While Clarke would soon appear again at Universal with the increasingly popular Boris Karloff (Night World, 1932), she was either unavailable, unwilling, or unasked to come to the signing of contracts a couple of years later. For all the good-natured folderol of the supposed search for one bride or the other, there was little mystery as to with whom said “bride” would be paired. Only had Elizabeth’s heart been used to power up the female creature the Monster would briefly woo – as plotted in the original script – would anyone have paid a brass farthing to witness the goings-on of Valerie Hobson.
Although little flower-tossing Maria had ended up in the drink as she was bonding with the Monster in the 1931 original, the next time the Monster was a total emotional mess had to be when O.P. Heggie’s blind hermit sawed away at the “Ave Maria” in his cottage (a musical hommage to the Monster’s first, inadvertent victim?). In fact, following the clever opening badinage between Byron and the Shelleys, Bride gets underway as Maria’s dad, Hans (Reginald Barlow), spews righteous anger over his daughter’s death, a moment that allows the audience to recall the scene in which Maria’s dad, Ludwig (Michael Mark), had carried her lifeless body through the streets of Goldstadt in the earlier film. Hey, if Elizabeth can undergo such an amazing transformation (for the better, many argue), why not old Hans… errr… Ludwig?
And why can’t the torch- and whip-wielding Fritz metamorphose into the near-imbecilic Karl, in what would be Dwight Frye’s third straight take on a half-wit at Universal? (Please recall that Frye’s appearance as a cogent, articulate reporter in Whale’s The Invisible Man [1933] was uncredited.) In his seminal It’s Alive: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein, film historian Gregory William Mank explains the hemi-demi-semi-nature of Frankenstein’s latest assistant:
To showcase Frye’s talents at lunacy and comedy, Whale combined two separate roles of the original script: Karl, ‘a bit of a village idiot,’ quoth the script, and Fritz, the ‘first ghoul’ who assists Pretorius, into simply Karl, who became both a village idiot and a ghoul and one of Frye’s most memorable performances .
Frankenstein’s Monster also became simply “Frankenstein” a lot sooner than it took the studio to acknowledge the maneuver via Basil Rathbone at the town railway station (please note: town also now apparently yclept “Frankenstein”) four years later. No one (that I’ve ever met, at any rate) ever raised an eyebrow over Henry Frankenstein’s having miraculously survived the climactic laboratory detonation that was set off by the jilted Monster (please ignore the long-shot to the contrary that somehow survived the final edit), or his subsequently making an honest woman of Elizabeth, or her bearing him a couple of sons, or his ending up a baron (the original script for the 1931 film had called for Frederick Kerr’s character to die of shock, thus passing the title down to Henry), or even that the “Henry” of the first two features turned out to be the “Heinrich” of the third .
Come that third – the Whale-less Son of Frankenstein of 1939 – and we learn that Heinrich und Elizabeth had a son, Wolf, who at some point married a redhead named Elsa, moved to the USA to teach at an American college, and had his own son, Peter. (The order in which these events occurred is of no importance.) Unlike his dad and grandfather (called plain old “Baron Frankenstein” in the 1931 film), Wolf goes by von Frankenstein, which can be translated of or from Frankenstein. Per our colleague, AllMovies.com reviewer Hans Wollstein, there’s a method to this morass:
If dear old Frederick Kerr’s character was a baron, then his son’s name should have been Heinrich, Baron von Frankenstein all along. Heinrich/Henry would have had his father’s family surname – which might well have been Müller or Schmidt – when he was CREATED Baron Frankenstein, at which point the “von” would then have been applied when spelled out. The title would have been awarded by the emperor, Wilhelm I, or his chancellor, Prince von Bismarck, and it would be in evidence from the costumes and setting.
Thus, God only knows what the family name of the baron and his progeny and their issue was “in reality.” If the men insisted on bearing the title that was evidently handed down from one generation to the next, they could wander about known only by it and their Christian name (Guten Tag!Ich bin Heinrich, Baron von Frankenstein!) Wolf either took a pass on the title (his brother, Ludwig – who gets embroiled in this mess in Ghost – didn’t toss his being a baron in anyone’s face, either) or adopted this short-cut en route to assimilating into the USA. A tempest in a teapot? Yessiree!, but we learn from that conductor’s timely interruption of Wolf’s diatribe that the eponymous terrain on which stand the family castle and old watch tower is a village large enough to be worthy of its own train station, grumbling populace, and hair-splitting Burgomeister: “We come to meet you, not to greet you!”
Again, there’s that bit of nonsense about just who is being touted in the picture’s title. Wolf is, of course, the son of Heinrich, “Maker of Monsters” (per the torch-inscribed snarl that someone managed to sneak in and scrawl onto his tomb); little Peter is the son of Wolf, and it is Peter’s precarious position (under the platform-shoe’d foot of the Monster) that leads his father to finally do something more action-oriented than playing darts. As for the Monster… well, Ygor’s intriguing insistence to Wolf that “Your father made him, and Heinrich Frankenstein was your father, too!” does little more than once again poke those viewers who had chuckled their way through the “Bride” kerfuffle some years earlier. (One of the kids with whom I formed a monster club a lifetime ago argued at the time – seriously, and not a little persuasively – that Karloff’s Monster in Son was the offspring of Karloff’s Monster from Bride, as the 1939 iteration was “not dressed” up in his trademark black suit, but instead “wore a sweatshirt.” So how, my old friend continued, could that Monster – the one kicked into the sulfur pit whilst accoutered in something akin to what we would now call a “fleece”-be the same Monster who was resurrected from the pit in The Ghost of Frankenstein ? We weren’t familiar with technical terms like “continuity in those days …)
Anyhow, with The Ghost of Frankenstein (why the “The” and why now?), we’re back at it; the
ambiguity has returned with this, the first ‘40s execution of a radically ‘30s concept. Ghost-wise, one
might opt for the ethereal Sir Cedric Hardwicke (transparent of figure and naked of scalp as
Henry/Heinrich) as he lays a guilt trip on the corporeal Sir Cedric Hardwicke (who is weighted down
with hair appliances) as Ludwig (no “von”) Frankenstein. Or one might take the low road and claim
that Chaney’s initial appearance onscreen as the Monster – covered with “dried sulfur” and as white as
any flour-dredged apparition in a Mantan Moreland comedy – gave him dibs on the meaning behind
the title. Discussions like this one are always fun, even if they seldom matter; as neat a shot as the
erstwhile House That Carl Built took in 1942, it was the very “Frankenstein” franchise that was but a
shade of its former self .
James Whale had bailed after the first sequel – and he hadn’t much wanted to do that one until
he was given assurance that his stylistic approach to the rest of Mary Shelley’s screed would be
welcomed – and fama erat it was he who had contrived to have the Monster blown to atoms to save
himself (and others) the trouble of yet another follow-up. Karloff had jumped ship after the second
sequel; in his opinion, his beloved Monster was rapidly becoming a stooge, a henchman. Although
only three films – quality outings, all – had been made, Boris felt that the integrity of the original
concept was being sacrificed to Mammon. The gentle Briton was enough of a realist to understand that
the undying Monster’s immortality was due to profitability, rather than to electricity or lightning, but
enough of an idealist to quit while he – and his immortal alter-ego – was ahead of the game.
For a while, the actor had gone AWOL from the industry itself. While the boys at Universal’s
publicity department were stirring up enough pap on the impending production to keep the trades and
the dailies happy, the Great White Way had taken Boris Karloff and all his boogeyman baggage to its
heart. Arsenic and Old Lace proved to be everything for the ‘40s-vintage actor that Frankenstein had
been for his younger self. Boris found that his reputation had preceded him, and that he could bring
down the house night after night by chalking up his latest murder to the victim’s unfortunate choice of
words: “He said that I looked like Boris Karloff!” The word was out that the actor did not mind
guying himself and was not at all upset about publicity pieces highlighting Jack Pierce’s famed makeup, those asphalt-spreaders boots, and/or even the unseen five-pound steel “spine” that the first film’s
publicity campaign claimed was “the rod which conveys the current up to the Monster’s brain.”
Back at the studio, of course, the bullshit was flying fast and furious. A glance at the stuff that Universal’s PR staff cranked out for The Ghost of Frankenstein makes one doubt – if not outright
disbelieve – anything he/she has ever heard about any of these films. The baloney stretched from the
news of the “search” (Zounds! Déjà vu, all over again!) for a successor to Karloff to Greg Mank’s
revelation of a “studio policy” that dictated which actors would always be seen in Frankenstein
movies: uncredited, perhaps, but still Lawrence Grant’s Burgomeister was back, as were Michael Mark
and Lionel Belmore as town councillors [sic] (despite their having been killed by the Monster in Son),
Dwight Frye as a villager, and even Colin Clive, via stock footage – he had died of a combination of
tuberculosis and alcoholism some five years earlier – as Henry/Heinrich Frankenstein’s
younger/handsomer self. In on the never-ending stream of absurdity came prefab and ludicrously
headlined pressbook articles like “Lon Chaney Appears as Monster in Horror Film” (as opposed to his
appearing as a monster in a comedy of manners or a Civil War drama). With the nonstop peddling of
blarney such as this, one might readily have come to the conclusion that Universal not only thought ten
or so to be the age of the average horror moviegoer, but also that ten might be on the high side of that
movie fan’s I.Q.
There’s probably more truth to that than any of us would care to admit. How old were my
colleagues and I – and I’d venture to ask the same of many of the readership – when we first fell under
the spell cast by Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, or any of the old horror movies we still embrace
so passionately? The TV fodder introduced by “Shock Theater” or “Son of Shock” at the end of the
‘50s had, in the ‘30s, been pitched to grownups; they offered offbeat takes on adult themes – life after
death, medical ethics, forbidden love, etc., etc., – and served them up in the company of grotesques
perfectly capable of scaring the drawers off the patrons. Come the ‘40s, and half the population was
either overseas fighting the war, or involved in the home front outfitting the war. No one needed
“adult” themes shoved down his or her throat, even if they were couched in greasepaint and putty;
wartime anxiety, death, and deprivation provided enough unwelcome fodder without any help from
Hollywood. Moviegoers were looking for escapism, and the grownups and the kids sought a breather
from Hitler and Hirohito in the company of Kharis and Frankenstein.
And The Ghost of Frankenstein didn’t just fill the bill back in April of ’42, it was – critics be damned – a hit. Wartime ticket-buyers were a different breed than the seat-warming populace looking
for a bit of relief from the Great Depression. The formula for most “B”-movies (please, let’s not get
unrealistic about Ghost) seemed to be that mood was fine and the plot important, but pacing was
everything. Especially in cases like this one – where most regular moviegoers knew the ongoing
details of the story backwards, forwards, and inside out – the picture could forego footage usually
devoted to exposition and cut right to the chase. (Would that the Son of Dracula crew had shared a
beer with Ghost of Frankenstein’s.)
Many fans regard this picture as being the last “solo” appearance of the Monster. Heck, I
maintain that that pitiable giant figure was never able to get by without his support system of mad
scientists, deformed/demented assistants, and the like – all of whom would be in on the official count
of monsters come the publicity campaigns for the House(s) of Frankenstein and Dracula a couple of
years down the road. The box office receipts in 1931 had assured that Henry Frankenstein’s problem
child would become far too profitable for him to handle only once and far too risky for him to handle
alone. Still, as the Monster returned for each successive misadventure, he became encumbered with
extra weight that may have added dimension to the ongoing saga, but also robbed it of its innocence
and purity.
Ghost was hardly a solo venture. Beginning with Son of Frankenstein, the Monster had been
terrorizing the countryside, so to speak, under the influence of an evil genius – Ygor. In the first two
films, Whale and Karloff crafted a Monster who was adept enough to tell right from wrong, to rescue
an innocent from drowning after having inadvertently drowned another, to relish the moments of
friendship and camaraderie with a person unable to judge a book by its cover, and so on and so forth.
In Son, the Monster came to rely, almost blindly, on his broken-necked friend and to lash out at the
most innocent of the assemblage (Peter) following Ygor’s death. Here, Chaney’s Monster – whose
capacity for recognition (Ludwig at first, Cloestine later) is the most human of his virtues and for
whom loyalty and friendship ultimately play no part – ignores, betrays, and finally kills his broken-necked comrade. With Lon under the makeup, no spark that might temper the supercharged Monster
can be seen; none of the sensitivity of his predecessor – the originator of the role – survived the
transition. While Ghost’s Monster latched onto a child, there was none of the childlike spark that
permeated his predecessor’s take on the role. Karloff, by far the more cerebral of the two actors, gave
us presence; Chaney, by far the more physical of the two, gave us volume.
Universal Horrors does a grand job of summing up the early aberrations of the script which
the eponymous MagicImage Film Book volume includes in toto, so there’s little point into going into
that here. Yet for all the effort at innovation – its new Monster, the new Frankensteins, and (save for the Messrs. Grant,Mark,Belmore,et al) the new villagers- Ghost is mired in a lot of same old same old.
Take the “fly in the ointment” wrinkle: from its inception, the cinematic Frankenstein success
story included an element of surprise, both logical and unpredictable, which had led to a cocking up of
the initial game plan. In 1931, the fly had been Fritz’s sneaky-ass substitution of the abnormal brain
for the good one; this, (we were told) led to the Monster’s propensity to lash out violently whenever he
was being whipped or seared with a torch. Bride’s fly was the woman; if the rallying cry of most men
is “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them,” just who did the Monster think he was?
More importantly, why would Henry Frankenstein imagine even for a moment that an old queen like
Pretorius could concoct a female who would soothe the Monster’s troubled breast? In Son, Wolf (like
the Monster) falls victim to Ygor’s mind-games and the loopy grandeur of the family residence; the
resultant misguided drive to restore his father’s good name leads to his firing up the furnaces once
again. (By comparison, the incredible 180 Frank Mannering pulls in 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the
Wolf Man is a total misfire. Even though his veins are completely free of Frankenstein blood, and he’s
strengthened by the resolve of yet another [and curvier] Elsa [who’s standing close by his side],
Mannering opts for the dark side only because, if someone doesn’t do something fast, the bell will ring
and the audience will have to go home.)
Here, we have more wrinkles than Ayesha after that second fire. The Monster’s all for the
transplant, but wants the brain of Cloestine (where do they get these names?) to sleep over forever.
Ygor, the sly devil, plots to have his own noodle plopped into that square skull, as he can see where
this would ease his way into prestige, power, and some real money. Dr. Bohmer, who at first doesn’t
seem to do much other than hang around in his smock and suffer Ludwig Frankenstein’s thoughtless
and insensitive comments, is lulled as much by a desire to marry his fist to Ludwig’s stiff upper lip as
he is by Ygor’s silver tongue. Even with all this slumgullion boiling on the fire, one knows that the
chances of Dr. Kettering’s brain making it into the Monster’s rigging start at zero and go down from
there.
Another leftover from earlier installments has already been brought up for consideration: the
Monster’s best suit. This – the absence of which in Son had sent Boris Karloff into rounds of
kvetching (about “furs and muck”) that were not at all like him – was accepted with not so much as the
blink of an eye upon its reappearance. Karloff had been right; the Monster’s Sunday best was part of
the larger picture, as closely interwoven in the Frankenstein mythos as the Wolf Man’s work clothes
and Dracula’s ever-crisp soup and fish were essential to their respective personas. The restoration of
the basic black ensemble and its presence throughout the rest of the Universal canon only made the furry miscalculation in Son seem more of a head-scratcher than it had been originally.
Bela’s Ygor is a sight for sore eyes. Happily as resistant to small-arms fire as had been George
Zucco’s Andoheb, the remarkably resilient high priest in the Kharis series, Ygor is hale, hearty, and –
if an apparent good scrubbing and the periodontal work is any indication – in better shape than he was
in the earlier feature. Along with his appearance, Ygor’s goals have been ratcheted up; ridding the
village of old nuisances is no longer a pastime worthy of his attention. The crafty old blacksmith’s
master plan now encompasses taking over the entire country! While this might be biting off more than
any one man (or Monster) can chew, Ygor’s yodeling away that he now possesses “the strength of a
hundred men” is a picture of megalomania unrivaled since Boris Karloff’s less exuberant but equally
daft claims in Mask of Fu Manchu.
(And yet you have to wonder if, indeed, the Monster did grow stronger with each successive
picture. In the first, Heinrich and the elderly Dr. Waldman [along with a hypodermic needle and a
bludgeon] managed to wrestle him to the floor. Bride witnessed him being tied down and carried off –
semi-crucified – by a mere dozen or so yokels, while in Son, a bit of momentum behind a well-placed
kick was all it took to topple the Monster from his pins. Still, this sudden blossoming of superhuman
power in the Monster’s mighty arms may exist only in Ygor’s feverish [and transplanted] mind; the
only other times we hear of such outlandish claims are in the excised scenes between a gabby Ygor-cum-Monster and Larry Talbot in Ghost’s own son, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.)
Ghost marks the first time since Frankenstein that brains are bandied about like wholesale
commodities, but the idea here seems particularly apt. You could watch any of Karloff’s three
performances and see his Monster turning over thoughts and ideas in his mind. Even in Son (wherein
Ygor does most of the mental heavy-lifting for the pair), his acceding to his partner’s decisions is
visible. With the vintage-1942 Monster bearing inscrutable and near-frozen features, there is very little
indication as to whether the lights are on upstairs and if, indeed, anyone is home. A new brain is
clearly called for, but the plethora of available raw materials not only skirts the edge of risibility, but
also foreshadows the “monster rally” sequels wherein frenetic brain-swapping would prove a plague
on both houses.
So long as you don’t require much humanity amid the horrors and can get past his perpetual
squint and scowl, Lon Chaney is not too bad as the Monster. His attachment to Cloestine is obviously
meant to reflect the Karloffian viewpoint where children were concerned, but no more perfect image of
the depths to which this concept had sunk can be had than the still whereon a stiff-limbed Eddie Parker
(doubling for Chaney), clutching a wooden stand-in for Janet Ann Gallow, has just sent a buttocks-grabbing stuntman plunging to his out-of-frame mats. The childlike confusion on the Monster’s part
that resulted in little Maria’s being tossed into the river had given way to slick contrivance. And again,
as Chaney’s Monster offers no other sign of fidelity and is evidently capable of turning his rage toward
anyone who stands in his way (including his old goombah, Ygor), no assurance is had that the brute
might not dropkick the little girl 100 yards or so down the road if someone else were to become the
apple of his eye. After all, Dr. Kettering is killed without so much as a second – or any – thought
(although the impulsive action does free up a brain for future use); killing is what monsters do best,
and Chaney’s giant is – first, last, and always – a monster.
The rest of the dramatis personae are fine – they almost always are in the Frankenstein series.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s cool and imperturbable Ludwig is an interesting sibling to Basil Rathbone’s
near-frantic Wolf, albeit the latter’s fairly constant state of near-hysteria makes him much more a chip
off the old Heinrich than his younger brother. Ralph Bellamy does better by Erik Ernst than he did by
Captain Montford in The Wolf Man, but this may be due to W. Scott Darling and Eric Taylor’s
screenplay providing him with a more well-delineated part; said screenplay also gives the delectable
Evelyn Ankers to him this time ‘round. Miss Ankers, in a role that’s essentially interchangeable with
that of Gwen Conliffe in The Wolf Man, takes another step toward her accession of the title of ’40s
Scream Queen. And Lionel Atwill is as enjoyable in his quieter moments (as when he’s glaring
daggers while Ludwig runs off at the mouth at Bohmer’s expense) as he is in his premature snarl of
triumph in the last reel.
Having all but snatched Son of Frankenstein away from Boris and Basil a couple of years
earlier, Bela’s copping the honors in Ghost must have been a walk in the park for him. With Chaney
portraying an unpredictable automaton, Bela runs the show, not realizing – until it’s too late – that
although the Monster can recognize Ludwig Frankenstein (whom he has never met), he will fail to
consider Ygor’s place in his heart while crushing the old boy behind the laboratory door. More so here
than in Son, Lugosi’s blacksmith has to shift gears constantly; here, he goes from being the guy in the
driver’s seat to the victim of his erstwhile friend’s petulance before being back (albeit quite briefly) on
top of the world. Performance-wise, Bela is in command every step of the way, and had Chaney
happened to glance sideways even once through those slits he used for eyes, he’d have learned more in
a moment from Lugosi than he’d cadged from Erle C. Kenton during the entire 25-day shoot.
Not up to the snuff introduced back in the ‘30s, The Ghost of Frankenstein was just fine, thank
you, for the tastes of the next decade. Hans J. Salter’s pulsating score keyed the film’s more ominous
moments, and both Woody Bredell and Milton Krasner performed the kind of visual magic in which
Universal’s cinematographers were known to excel. (If the puffs in their respective press-books were
meant to be taken – ahem! – at face value, the 1931 Monster stood seven feet tall, while Chaney’s
goblin was merely six foot, nine. Nonetheless, this very minor discrepancy might explain why James
Whale had Arthur Edeson’s camera capture the Monster head-on, while Erle C. Kenton had Krasner
and Bredell constantly aim the lens up at the shorter of the giants. The following year, George
Robinson – tasked with making Lugosi’s Monster as threatening as Eddie Parker’s [or even Gil
Perkins’] in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, had to contend with changes in perspective in almost
every scene.)
The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther – who never seemed to like much very much – ended
his rather tepid review with an act of prognostication that was hardly a foregone conclusion in 1942:
To be sure, the replenished monster is being consumed by fire when we see him last, but the
thought that he may yet return for further adventures with his body and Lugosi’s sconce fills us with
mortal terror. That is the most fearful prospect which the picture manages to convey.
-4 April, 1942
Richard L. Coe, assigned the picture as part of his responsibilities at The Washington Post, took
a somewhat unusual approach to informing his readership of the film’s story line:
This morning we will discuss the love life of your old friend ‘Frankenstein,’ the monster
who’s assumed, in the course of years, the name of his creator. This titivating subject has been raised
on the Pix screen of ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein,’ a yarn employing, uh, should we say, talents of Sir
Cedric Hardwicke, Lon Chaney, Jr., Lionel Atwill, and Bela Lugosi. But, of course, by now you’re
palpitating for further details of this beguiling passion – what’s she like, is she pretty, how big is she?
The “beguiling passion” mentioned in this 1 May 1942 appreciation of the picture turns out to
be Janet Ann Gallow’s Cloestine, and Coe – after averring that “Bela Lugosi becomes the town’s
philosopher, a sort of perverted Frank Craven” – concludes with “… there are other things you can read
in this morning’s paper, so we’ll let you go now.” Earlier that year, on the 25 March, the Los Angeles
Times’ Philip K. Scheuer tersely opined that “It’s a spooky movie, all right, in the best Universal
manner and fairly ingenious. At the close the monster goes down in flames again – but that doesn’t
fool us for a minute. He’ll be back, girls; he’ll be back. Grr.” Yet another prediction, but one that was
ultimately less impressive than Bosley Crowther’s.
A fast paced, atmospheric romp through familiar countryside, The Ghost of Frankenstein might
well be the next logical step to Boris Karloff’s well-stated fear: the Monster as henchman. Pretty much
a callow bully here, he had moved from a date that went tragically wrong to finding a homey with
whom to hang to palling around with little kids, all the while being manipulated by those who claimed
to act in his – and science’s – best interests. No offense is intended in calling the picture an excellent
journeyman effort, albeit the lack of a master’s touch is obvious and lamentable. The Monster and the
franchise could – and would – do worse.
The Ghost of Frankenstein – 13 March 1942 – 67 minutes (SoS)
CAST: Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein; Lon Chaney as The Monster; Ralph
Bellamy as Erik Ernst; Lionel Atwill as Dr. Theodor Bohmer; Bela Lugosi as Ygor; Evelyn Ankers as
Elsa Frankenstein; Janet Ann Gallow as Cloestine Hussman; Barton Yarborough as Dr. Kettering; Olaf
Hytten as Hussman; Doris Lloyd as Martha; Leyland Hodgson as Chief Constable; Holmes Herbert as
Magistrate; Lawrence Grant as Mayor; Brandon Hurst as Hans; Otto Hoffman & Dwight Frye as
Villagers; Julius Tannen as Sektal; Lionel Belmore & Michael Mark as Councillors; Harry Cording as
Frone; Dick Alexander as Vision; Ernie Stanton & George Eldredge as Constables; Jimmy Phillips as
Indian; Eddie Parker – stunts
CREDITS: Producer: George Waggner; Director: Erle C. Kenton; Screenplay: W. Scott Darling;
Original Story by Eric Taylor; Directors of Photography: Milton Krasner and Elwood Bredell; Art
Director: Jack Otterson; Associate Art Director: Harold H. MacArthur; Film Editor: Ted Kent; Musical
Director: Hans J. Salter; Set Decoration: Russell A. Gausman; Sound Director: Bernard B. Brown;
Technician: Charles Carroll; Assistant Director: Charles S. Gould; Makeup: Jack P. Pierce; Gowns:
Vera West
- JTS
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