Frankenstein

Over the next four years, Universal tapped the fantasy market again and again with such productions as Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Mummy (1932), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Black Cat (1934), but it was not until 1935 that they hit upon the idea of a sequel to Frankenstein and gave James Whale the directorial reins again for Bride of Frankenstein. The film is presented as though its plot were written by Mary Shelley herself and indeed the prologue shows her beginning to tell the sequel to Byron and Shelley, her companions when writing the original novel. Once again, Frankenstein is played by Colin Clive and Boris Karloff is the monster, who has survived his supposed fiery demise in the first film by plunging into an underground reservoir beneath the windmill. This presented Universal with a problem and, in order to give continuity with the original, the studio hurriedly excised the happy ending of the film, in which Colin Clive is seen sitting up in bed and recovering from his ordeal, from as many of the prints of the film as they could; fortunately, however, the scene survived and it has been re-inserted into most copies now shown. Bride of Frankenstein is pervaded by a dark and quirky sense of humour, particularly in the performances of Ernest Thesiger as the unhinged Doctor Pretorius and Una O’Connor as Frankenstein’s hysterically raucous housekeeper, and Karloff certainly meets his match with the all too brief, but very impressive, appearance of Elsa Lanchester as his prospective mate (she also plays Mary Shelley in the prologue).

Another four years passed before Universal made the next film in the series, Son of Frankenstein (1939, directed by Rowland V. Lee), starring Boris Karloff as the monster (for the last time), Basil Rathbone replacing Colin Clive by playing his son, Bela Lugosi as the mad Igor and Lionel Atwill as the one-armed police inspector. The film is graced with some superb overacting and is the last of the Universal Frankenstein productions with any real class, as lower budgets and some pretty second-rate stories took over, beginning with The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942, directed by Erle C. Kenton), in which Cedric Hardwicke’s Frankenstein inadvertently transplants Igor’s brain into the monster, played for the only time by Lon Chaney, Jr. Unfortunately, Igor’s and the monster’s tissue types do not match and the creature ends up blind!

The ending of “Ghost” would have neatly explained why in the next film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943, directed by Roy William Neill taking a break from his Sherlock Holmes series), Bela Lugosi plays a stumbling, clumsy monster, as though he were groping round in the dark, which is of course precisely what he is meant to be doing. It would also have gone some way to explaining why Lugosi, who was not really suited to the part, was cast as the monster in the first place. However, Universal, for reasons best known to themselves, deleted the explanation from the final version of the film, with the result that, to anyone who has not seen The Ghost of Frankenstein, the creature’s reactions and awkward gait in the sequel appear (perhaps unfairly) to be due to some rather bad acting from Lugosi! The story mainly concerns the plight of Lawrence Talbot, alias the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr. reprising the role he had first played in 1941’s The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner). Accidentally revived from his tomb in the tiny Welsh village of Llanwelly, Talbot makes his way to Europe in a desperate search for Frankenstein, who he hopes will be able to do something to help his accursed condition. When he eventually arrives at the castle, he finds that the Baron is dead but that his creation is still very much alive, setting the scene for a climactic battle between the two great monsters, which ends as the local villagers blow up the dam above the castle and unleash a raging torrent which apparently drowns them both. Although overall a little disappointing, a definite point in the film’s favour is that it features the welcome return of actress Maria Ouspenskaya, again turning in a fine performance as the old gypsy woman Maleva, Talbot’s mentor from The Wolf Man.