House of Dracula (1945)

For this year's Countdown to Halloween, it's all-Universal Monsters, all-the-time, from Dracula (1931) to The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Join me daily for a fresh perspective on movies you may not have watched in a long time, if ever.  Today, the overdue end of an era: House of Dracula!

They should have quit while they were ahead.  I don’t know when that would have been, considering no matter how bad they became, the Universal Monsters movies featuring the original three (Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolf Man) were almost always fun to watch.  The final installment, though, House of Dracula (1945), is no fun at all and, at 67 minutes long, is also quite boring.

Its failure lies with the title monster, Dracula.  None of the other Universal Monsters suffered as greatly as he did throughout their runs.  Here, he’s inexplicably risen from the dead and seeking release from his curse.  John Carradine plays him for the second time and fares a little better than he did in House of Frankenstein.  At one point, I almost wondered if his appearance didn’t come closer to what Bram Stoker envisioned for the character.

But when did he become so wishy-washy?  He’s barely a threat to anyone, least of all Miliza Morelle (Martha O’Driscoll), the blonde assistant to Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens), who is instead, as all women seem to be, attracted to the “tragic” Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.).  Talbot also comes to Edelmann for a cure.  Impatient about getting results, he throws himself off a cliff, the better to end up in a cave where Frankenstein’s monster lies.

I always thought the Wolf Man was the common thread among the later Universal Monsters movies.  Instead, it’s really The Monster.  He’s the only character that remained true to any continuity.  Wherever he is found in a movie is where he “died” at the end of the last one.  In House of Dracula, there’s no explanation for how Larry Talbot survived a silver bullet.  He became somewhat tiresome, always whining about his condition and even willing to kill himself.

Let’s see, we also have a hunchback in this one, played by the lovely Jane Adams.  Her Nina is a loyal assistant to Dr. Edelmann, never asking for anything.  But when given the choice of being able to cure only her or Talbot, Edlemann would prefer to help her.  Unfortunately, the multi-tasking doctor has been giving Dracula transfusions of his own blood and has become tainted, turning into some kind of vampire/Mr. Hyde monster at night.

Ultimately, it’s a happy ending for Larry Talbot.  He does not transform into a wolf when the moon rises.  But almost everyone else is dead and The Monster once again lies beneath a pile of fire and rubble.  I suppose that’s a good place to leave our beloved characters.  We know that with the simple click of a typewriter, someone could resurrect them.  Thank goodness, though, no one ever did.

Tomorrow: She-Wolf of London!

House of Frankenstein (1944)

For this year's Countdown to Halloween, it's all-Universal Monsters, all-the-time, from Dracula (1931) to The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Join me daily for a fresh perspective on movies you may not have watched in a long time, if ever.  Today, it's everything but the kitchen sink: House of Frankenstein!

House of Frankenstein (1944) is another Universal Monsters movie for which, as a child, I owned a Super 8 excerpt reel.  For that reason, it lives in my mind as a terrific movie.  It’s almost heartbreaking to watch the full thing now and realize how bad it is.  Like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man before it, it’s fun for the different monsters to get together, but you can’t look any deeper than that for coherence.

Regardless of the specific circumstances of the stories, they’re ultimately the same:

1. Frankenstein’s monster lives in a state of disrepair.
2. Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, longs to die so he’ll be at peace.
3. A mad doctor promises to help Larry, but becomes consumed with reviving Frankenstein’s monster.

The set-ups, though, can be clever.  In House of Frankenstein, we also have an appearance by Dracula and a hunchback.  It takes some ingenuity to craft a story, no matter how ridiculous it is, that brings them all together.

Here, the common thread is Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff), who masquerades as Professor Bruno Lampini, driving his mobile Chamber of Horrors across Europe from Neustadt to Vasaria.  Mad scientist?  Check.  This travelling sideshow features the skeleton of Count Dracula, from which Niemann extracts the wooden stake to revive the vampire.  Dracula?  Check.

Niemann’s assistant is Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) who repeatedly asks Niemann to make him like other men.  Hunchback?  Check.  While hunting for Henry Frankenstein’s records so that he can do so, Niemann unearths the bodies of Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and The Monster (Glenn Strange).  Wolf Man?  Check.  Frankenstein’s monster? Check.

The climax always arrives in a laboratory when the particular drama of the movie comes to a head just as equipment is buzzing, lights are flashing and villagers are grabbing torches.  Here, it’s Daniel’s jealousy of Talbot’s relationship with gypsy sweetheart, Ilonka (Elena Verdugo), that causes silver bullets to be fired, man made monsters to be frenzied and bodies to be thrown out of windows.

Dracula’s involvement is limited to the first 30 minutes of House of Frankenstein and is totally uncharacteristic of the character.  John Carradine is slightly better than Lon Chaney, Jr. was as the Count in Son of Dracula, but the same effort is not made to connect him to the continuity that is so strict for the other monsters.  Here, he’s blackmailed to do Niemann’s bidding, which we all know Dracula would never do.

It’s nice to see Karloff in a Universal Monsters movie without elaborate makeup covering his face.  It’s also an interesting reversal in House of Frankenstein that he’s bringing a monster to life rather than portraying the monster being brought to life.  But Naish’s Daniel is the heart of this movie and the actor gives a moving performance.  So, it’s not without its little rewards, but the entire movie is no treasure. 

Tomorrow: The Mummy's Curse!

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

For this year's Countdown to Halloween, it's all-Universal Monsters, all-the-time, from Dracula (1931) to The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Join me daily for a fresh perspective on movies you may not have watched in a long time, if ever.  Today, the best of two worlds: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!

Although it features a big name co-star, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) is really a direct sequel to The Wolf Man.  However, it could almost as easily be called “The Daughter of Frankenstein.”  The story takes Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) from his grave in Lanwelly to the lab in Vasaria partially destroyed at the end of The Ghost of Frankenstein, where Ludwig’s daughter, Elsa (Ilona Massey) survived.  The Wolf Man and Frankenstein franchises then converge.

As the full moon lights their way, grave robbers unintentionally release Larry from his coffin in the Talbot mausoleum.  When they open it to find wolf bane on top of his body, they’re aware of the old legend, reciting the famous poem about werewolves.  This time, though, the final line has changed:

Even a man who is pure in heart

and says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms

and the moon is full and bright.

It used to be “autumn moon.”  Now Larry is an all-season werewolf.  But the thieves don’t put two and two together and one of them soon lies dead at the claws of the wolf man.

Larry realizes that he can’t die and his quest throughout the movie is to find a way to successfully end his life.  “I don’t want to be cured; I only want to die.  I can find peace in death.”   After searching for and finding the gypsy woman, Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), she tells him, “I know a man who has the power to help you.”  She takes him to Vasaria, but news must not have reached her that Ludwig “died for all his misdeeds.”

“Now I must go on living,” Larry whines.  “There’s no hope for me to die.”  After transforming into the wolf man again, a chase by angry townspeople causes him to fall into a snowy underground cavern.  When Larry awakens the next morning, he finds The Monster frozen in a block of ice.  It dawns on him that Frankenstein must have kept records, a diary, and asks The Monster to show him where they are.  They don’t find his diary, but they find a locket and realize that his daughter lives.

She’s reluctant to help.  “My father was a great scientist, but all he created brought unhappiness and terror.”  In the midst of potential terror, it’s time for a festival in the village, so that The Monster can lumber through, inciting a riot.  There’s a voice of reason, though, that says, “You won’t get anywhere by raving.  We must be more clever this time.  We must pretend to be friends with The Monster.”  The man to enact the plan is Dr. Mannering (Patric Knowles), who followed Larry to Vasaria.

He eventually takes the role of the mad scientist right before the finale of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  As Elsa encourages him to bring peace to both the monsters, he realizes, “I can’t do it.  I can’t destroy Frankenstein’s creation.  I’ve got to see it at its full power.”  He starts flipping levers, lights start flashing, townspeople start speculating, monsters start fighting, and a lone villager blows up the dam adjacent to the laboratory.  It’s an exciting and spectacular climax.

As you can read, it takes a lot of energy and screen time to set up the final battle.  That’s how dedicated to continuity between movies that Universal seems to have been, and I love that aspect of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  However, the script by Curt Siodmak conveniently leaves out some facts from previous movies.  For example, at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein, The Monster had Ygor’s brain.  He was talking and scheming.  Now he’s again mute and has no free will.

Casting may compensate for that, because it’s Bela Lugosi who plays The Monster this time.  (Lugosi played Ygor in both The Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein.)  His monster is not a towering giant and moves with jerkier motions.  His face has a more pronounced brow than that of either Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney, Jr. when they portrayed The Monster.    Like last time, we could assume its growing number of deaths contribute to a change in appearance in each new movie.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  As a child, I had a Super 8 film of excerpts that I watched over and over again.  Whenever I’ve watched the full movie since then, a mix of memories and imagination always embellishes the action, making it more exciting than it may be in reality.  As a kid, what’s better than a movie with Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man?  A movie with both of them!  As an adult, well, I’d ask the same question and answer it the exact same way.

Tomorrow: The Phantom of the Opera!

The Wolf Man (1941)

For this year's Countdown to Halloween, it's all-Universal Monsters, all-the-time, from Dracula (1931) to The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Join me daily for a fresh perspective on movies you may not have watched in a long time, if ever.  Today, one of the most significant: The Wolf Man!

Until I recently re-watched The Wolf Man (1941), I would have told you it was the best of the Universal Monsters classics.  Now I'm not so sure.  I think I was confusing my memory of a great character with that of a great movie.  Lon Chaney, Jr.'s performance as Larry Talbot gives us the most personal and sympathetic creature in Universal's history and singlehandedly raises the movie itself to something more impactful than it ever should have been.

Chaney is the primary reason this wolf man become a legend when six years earlier, a werewolf of London did not.  But there are others.  Remember that earlier Universal monsters were based on literary works:  The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  There was no road map for a werewolf.  So it's also Curt Siodmak's original screenplay that not only made The Wolf Man special, but also established a fundamental mythology for the creature.

Also, the wolf man was a home-grown monster.  The Hunchback and Phantom were from Paris, Dracula was from Transylvania, the Mummy was from Egypt.  Yes, he returns to his ancestral home in Wales where the action takes place, but it is after spending much of his adult life in California.  For all intents and purposes, the wolf man is an American monster.  Larry Talbot speaks like an American and, except for his great wealth, is an everyman figure.

Finally, the wolf man was a monster that we could become.  Yes, if Dracula bit you, you'd become a vampire, but you'd still be under his control.  A werewolf is fiercely independent and must live with the consequences of its actions as a human during an average day.  As Larry's father, Sir John (Claude Rains) tells him, a werewolf is a psychological explanation for the dual personalities that live in all of us.  It's the physical expression of good and evil in every man's soul, with evil taking the form of a wolf.

What of the movie itself?  Its structure is pretty typical.  The story has the same love triangle of nearly every other Universal horror.  Here, after Larry has already taken the lovely Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) on a moonlight stroll, we learn that she's engaged to Frank Andrews (Patric Knowles).  It's always the odd man out, though.  Gwen's attraction to Larry is obvious and after an unseen quarrel with Frank, we don't see much else of him.

The story also has the same crowd of non-believers, even when faced with overwhelming evidence that the supernatural exists.  Here, it's harder to believe because everyone in town knows werewolf lore and seems to be able to recite the poem:

Even a man who is pure in heart

and says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms

and the autumn moon is bright.

Yet as Larry continues to bring it to their attention, and finally outright declares that it's not a wolf, it's a werewolf, and he is the werewolf, they're more likely to believe he's a victim of some kind of mass-hypnotism.

The Wolf Man has more flaws than I remembered.  For example, if the werewolf that bites Larry takes the form of a real wolf, why does Larry walk upright (and wear clothes)?  Speaking of clothes, before Larry first transforms, he makes a point of taking off his shirt to look at his arms, but afterwards, is wearing more than just his t-shirt.  I'm pretty sure he was wearing different pants, too.  It's probably an exercise in futility to track the continuity mistakes in an early-1940s horror movie; alas, it's what I do.

Thank goodness for Lon Chaney, Jr.  His very countenance embodies a comment that another character makes about him in The Wolf Man, "There's something very tragic about that man."  He's not that happy a guy to start with, but during his ordeal, he becomes consumed with anxiety.  He'd also sound a little paranoid if we didn't know his claims were true, but he's certainly desperate when he cries, "Why does everyone insist that I'm confused?"

The Wolf Man never got a sequel, per se, but Larry Talbot was the human presence around which several other Universal Monsters subsequently revolved.  Lon Chaney, Jr. and this movie created a legacy of horror that affected almost every werewolf movie since then and continues today.  Sitting through its brief 70-minute run time may not be the best experience you've ever had watching a horror movie, but it is one of the most significant.

Tomorrow: Invisible Agent!