Halloween, the best holiday in the history of anything, is just around the corner. After a couple of days of high 80s/90s weather, a weird cold snap just hit Denver. I’m listening to some pretty intense Liszt piano sonatas right now. I'd say it’s Frankenstein time!
For starters, James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are easily some of the best classic Hollywood studio era movies ever produced, yet I know an unfortunate amount of people who haven’t seen them. If you are one of those people, you need to get your shit together and watch them right now. Someday when I feel up to it, I’ll transcribe my frequent longwinded rants about Whale’s brilliance onto Movie Advocate…someday. For my purposes today, suffice to say that these are profoundly good movies which are as critically lauded as they are perennially popular. In 1938, almost a decade after Frankenstein’s premiere, a double bill rerelease of the Universal Frankenstein and Dracula pictures revived interest in the series, prompting Universal to put a third Frankenstein movie into production. Son of Frankenstein stars not only Boris Karloff as the monster that made him a legend, but also Bela Lugosi – the cinematic face of Dracula – as Dr. Frankenstein’s crippled servant, Ygor. Wolf von Frankenstein, the original doctor’s son, now grown and ready to take up his father’s mantle, was to have been played by Peter Lorre. The mind is boggled at how great Lorre would have been in the role. Granted, Son of Frankenstein deals heavily with father/son relationships, and visions of Fritz Lang’s ‘M’ would haunt my ability to accept Lorre as a loving father to an innocent child. Nonetheless, replacing Lorre with Basil Rathbone – a heavy hitter in his own right, with several Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn movies not to mention a star turn as Sherlock Holmes under his belt – changed the face of the Dr. Frankensteins forever. Gone was Colin Clive’s toady visage, which would have been echoed and deliciously enhanced in Lorre. Instead, the Frankensteins would live on long faced, tall, and underfed, all the way up to Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein.
James Whale had left Universal by this time. The director’s chair was filled instead by Roland V. Lee. Unfortunately, Whale’s departure also marks the departure of the Frankenstein story’s subversive, naughty subtext. Whale was infamously, flamboyantly gay, and the extent to which subversive subtext can be read into his two entries in the Frankenstein saga is another story for another day. Son of Frankenstein, on the other hand, is decidedly straight. A morality tale about ‘family first.’ In the company of his beautiful wife and son, Wolf von Frankenstein returns to Castle Frankenstein after being brought up in America. Wolf is a scientist, too, one who seems inexplicably willing to follow in his father’s nefarious footsteps. This, naturally, has the townspeople a little concerned. If you’ve seen Young Frankenstein, the plot here will be strikingly familiar. Out of all the movies in Universal’s original Frankenstein run, Mel Brook’s parody most closely resembles this. There’s even an inspector with a movable prosthetic arm (Lionel Atwill). Here we learn that the arm in question was brutally ripped from its socket by the monster when the inspector was just a boy. The doctor goes crazy in the shadow of his dead father, the monster escapes his control, the townspeople riot, blah blah blah, you know the deal. In the end, Wolf learns the error of his ways, and after killing all of the movie’s monsters, retreats into the domestic comforts of his wife and son. Director Lee completely misses the point of Whale’s Frankenstein movies. You will recall that the monster at the end of Bride looks the doctor – his creator – right in the face and utters the final, devastating line, “We belong dead.” Nope, this doctor gets to make all better.
That’s not Son of Frankenstein’s only radical shift in cannon. Before reviving the monster, Wolf and Ygor perform a complete examination on the comatose creature. Despite the fact that the other two Frankenstein movies belabor the point that Frankenstein is stitched together from human parts, Wolf inexplicably, laboriously deduces that the monster functions entirely differently than a normal human. We are shown how it’s cells attack each other, how it’s heart beats 3 times faster than that of a normal human, how it’s very being is build for carnage. The doctor concludes that the monster was not brought to life by the lightning strike but by “alien cosmic rays.” Seriously. What the hell?
Incidentally, I should mention that while Son of Frankenstein is fairly dull in terms of what actually happens on screen, in terms of what is suggested through dialogue the movie has a disturbingly violent imagination for 1938. The mention of the monster ripping arms from their sockets in live victims, for example. Also, Ygor relates the tale of how the townspeople tried to hang him once for the crime of digging up dead bodies. He didn’t die, but the fall snapped his neck, and a bone protrudes disgustingly out of the side. He knocks on the bone to freak out Frankenstein for an uncomfortably long time. Whereas Whale’s movies dwell more on the intrigue of the non-normative, Lee’s movie predicts horror’s long and storied history of grotesque one-upmanship.
If you haven’t caught on yet, I don’t really like Son of Frankenstein. I feel that it takes all of the things I like about Whale’s movies (naughty subtext) and replaces it with obnoxious mumbo-jumbo (cosmic rays). It sets the cheap, shoddy standard that would become Universal Horror’s unfortunate reputation in the 40’s and 50’s. Nevertheless, I find the movie fascinating. It illuminates and makes clear what was so great about Whale’s movies through its diametrical opposition.
Furthermore, if I’m reading the culture temperature correctly, I think there are many more people in my generation who have seen Young Frankenstein than have seen any of the movies it is parodying. Son of Frankenstein provides Brook’s movie with a compelling subtext that might not be obvious to most. You see, after watching Son, I see that not only is Brook’s movie a satire of the Frankenstein story, but is actually fits into Frankenstein continuity. In other words, you can watch Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein as one long story. Ready for the real head trip? Gene Wilder’s character Freidrick Frankenstein, I think, appears in Son of Frankenstein as Wolf’s young son. Okay, it’s not an exact match, as the son here is named Peter, but that tangled curly blonde mop of hair is unmistakable. Any wonder then that the portrait of Freidrick’s father in Young Frankenstein is unmistakably a painting of Basil Rathbone? If my theory is correct, you can read all sorts of previously unexposed undertones into Brook’s movie. For instance, when Freidrick sleeps with his lab assistant, Inga (Teri Garr), is it because she looks strikingly similar to his own dead mother, played in Son of Frankenstein by Josephine Hutchinson? Just sayin’…
With the exception of Star Wars, Terminator, and Aliens, sequels are often not present in critical conversation. While this is probably due to an alarming lack of quality in many of these movies (Star Trek 5, Rocky 5, etc.), I don’t think this is a good excuse to make sequels absent from the table. Though Son of Frankenstein is a bad movie – sometimes obnoxiously so – it’s absolutely worth watching, as I hope I’ve illustrated here. We’ve been exploring a lot of sequels at The Movie Advocate lately (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Justin’s awesome run of stories on the Death Wish series). We will be covering many more in the near future. The conversation is very different from criticism of stand alone movies. The different criteria of quality and success, I feel, leaves open a fertile area for exploration and debate. I started The Movie Advocate not only to work on honing my own writing skills, but as a place for open discussion with friends both local and online. I’d like to reiterate that intent here. As we continue the conversation on sequels, I imagine and hope that many different opinions and points of view will arise. I want everyone to feel free to bring theirs to the table.
-Ben