The Art of Frankenstein : Feg Murray (Part 6)

On February 7, 1943 — a full month before FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN hit screens across America — cartoonist Feg Murray introduced his readers to the first Movie Monster Meet-Up with a splendid rendering of Bela Lugosi’s Frankenstein Monster and Junior Chaney’s Wolf Man locked in combat.

I’ve isolated the art (at the top) to better focus on Murray’s wonderful drawing and the outstanding coloring job. Click the thumbnail to see the whole strip and note, also, the always excellent layout, here with Bela and Lon’s pose echoed by dancer Dona Drake’s position.

Lon Chaney Jr.’s signature part as Larry Talbot, cursed with lycanthropy, was first featured by Murray in February 1942, and again in 1948, when Chaney was shooting ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. In all cases, the Wolf Man was beautifully rendered. See the thumbnails, below.

Chaney’s turn as Kharis, the slo-mo mummy, lugging Virginia Christine in THE MUMMY’S CURSE appeared in a December 1944 Sunday page. Note, yet again, the layout, perfectly bookended by Van Johnson and Betty Grable, with Fred Astaire as the central figure whose leaping pose is echoed by the flying child, and his wide, legs-apart stance mirrored by Chaney’s Mummy.

With thanks to George Chastain.

Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Detroit Riots of 1943

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man is playing at the Mayfair theater in Detroit. Outside, a car is overturned, ablaze. This is not an accident. It’s June 1943 and the Race Riots are sweeping through the city.

In the early Forties, when the city’s automobile plants switched to wartime production, recruiters scoured the Southern States for manpower, drawing some 300,000 whites and 50,000 blacks to the Motor City. Racial tensions flared as early as 1941, when blacks were settled into newly built housing projects. Cross burnings and violence ensued. The tension reached its fever peak in the spring of 1943 when blacks were promoted at U.S. Rubber, Hudson, and Vickers. White workers walked off the job when blacks were allowed into the Production Department, served as plant guards or were hired as tool-makers. In late May, over 26,000 men paralyzed Packard assembly lines when a handful of black workers were brought onto the factory floor to work alongside whites.

The riots, fueled by spurious claims of violence by either side against the other, ignited on June 20 and roared for three days, until Federal troops restored peace. Blacks bore the brunt of the violence. An investigation revealed that of the 34 people killed, 25 of them were blacks. Of 600 people injured and 1800 arrested, over 75% were African-Americans. A recurring story tells of blacks being pulled off city buses and beaten. Blacks driving their cars were stopped and chased away, their cars demolished and burned.

The Riots made the local papers, but very little information traveled beyond, censored so as to preserve national morale in wartime. At best, a few American newspapers ran short items about brief cases of “labor unrest” in Detroit. It would take decades for the story to be fully revealed.

The Mayfair theater on Woodward Avenue was built as a synagogue in 1902, it’s striking Beaux-Arts dome structure the work of Albert Khan, the “architect of Detroit”. It was transformed into a playhouse and civic theater in 1922 and modified again into a movie house, The Mayfair, in 1930. The building was taken over as a performance space by Wayne State University in 1951 and now serves as the Bonstelle Theater.

The Mayfair went dark on those terrible days of June, 1943. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the quaint Hollywood horrors within were no match for the real monsters prowling outside.

The Bonstelle Theater on Historic Detroit.

A Date with Frankenstein

Back in the Thirties and Forties, when promoting a new Frankenstein film, exhibitors used every trick in the ballyhoo book. Park an ambulance out front, have nurses patrol the lobby, send a man in a mask around the block. Then there was the Date With Frankenstein, a Dare You trick where, for a cash prize, a woman was challenged to sit alone through a midnight showing of the latest scary picture. The gag was promoted in newspapers or radio, a drawing was held and, with a little luck, the event would make the papers, good for free publicity for the movie and the local theater.

“Creepy business,” reported the Pittsburgh Press on January 1939, running a photo of Miss Martha Schwall of 3303 Christy Street, a good sport picked among 350 volunteers, seen reacting to “Son of Frankenstein which stars those two proponents of horror, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi”. Miss Schwall claimed she had no fear of Frankenstein “or any other monster — as long as it was on the screen”. The reporter suggested that “maybe her slight evidence of fear is traceable to the photographer’s flash.”

Under the title Brave Woman, an April 1943 issue of Life magazine showed Margaret McHale sitting alone, dead center in the cavernous Fox Theater of St. Louis, waiting for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man to unspool. “If Frankenstein and the Wolfman were here in person it wouldn’t make a difference to me,” she declared. “You could get Dracula and the Werewolf of London, too, and I’d sit down with them and we’d have a good poker game. I’m not squeamish and I like to play poker.”

Ms McHale earned a $25 War Bond and Universal scored priceless exposure in a national magazine. 

Shock Showmanship

“The two most terrifying creatures of all time” square off in a desolate landscape with swirling bats. A tantalizing trade ad in Universal’s Exhibitor’s Book of 1942 pitches the first Meeting of the Monsters, with Lon Chaney Jr. playing both Frankenstein AND the Wolf Man.

The dual casting idea was a great publicity hook, locking in Lon Chaney as the studio’s all-purpose go-to monster guy. It made sense continuity-wise, with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man conceived by writer Curt Siodmak as a direct sequel to both The Wolf Man (1941), Chaney’s signature role, and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), in which Chaney had taken over the boots and bolts from Karloff. On the other hand, the trick casting would have been problematic, with expensive and time-consuming split-screen effects needed for Chaney’s Larry Talbot to interact with Chaney barely recognizable under the heavy makeup of the Frankenstein Monster. In fact, after Bela Lugosi was recruited to play The Monster, he would be spelled throughout the film by stand-ins, and the climactic “horror-battle” featured two stunt performers, with insert shots of Chaney and Lugosi snarling in closeup.

In the end, despite a difficult shoot and some choppy editing to cover its problems, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man turned out as one of Universal’s most entertaining sorties, its considerable success launching a series of so-called Monster Rally films that brought Frankenstein and the Wolf Man together again, with Dracula and assorted mad scientists and hunchbacked assistants thrown in, culminating in 1948 with the whole gang of monsters going up against Abbott and Costello.

Related:

When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

The Posters of Frankenstein : Belgian Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

A seminal film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) brought together horror stars Lon Chaney, Jr., and Bela Lugosi as Universal’s fiercest monsters, paving the way for portmanteau Monster Rallies, eventually throwing Dracula, mad scientists and hunchbacked assistants, and even an Invisible Man cameo into the mix, culminating with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and leading to countless multiple monster films still essayed to this day, notably in the 2004 bastardization, Van Helsing.

Universal’s ad campaign for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was singularly dramatic, its posters dominated by a rip-roaring pulp-style painting of the two horrors having at it. Here, a beautifully done Belgian version in French and Flemish reprises the monsters battling over a spilled blonde, with a tacked-on glamour clinch portrait of non-monstrous leads Ilona Massey and Patrick Knowles.

The artist, unfortunately, is unidentified. The printer, L. F. De Vos & Cie of Antwerp, was a major publisher of books, and travel and film posters. Perhaps the company’s most famous contributor was René Magritte who designed a couple of straight, workmanlike movie posters during a make-ends-meet fling with commercial art in the mid-Thirties. 

Related posts about Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.

Discovered! Ultra-Rare Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man Display

A crowd gathers on a chilly March evening in 1943, drawn to a garishly decorated cinema lobby. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man has come to town and the exhibitor blows the works: Floor to ceiling posters shout Mighty Monsters Clash!... Hair Raising Horror Hits New Heights!... Inhuman Beasts! Performers in costume entertain the throngs lining up for tickets and, look, up there on the box office booth, The Monster and the Wolf Man are at each other’s throats!

Miraculously, almost 70 years on, the mannequin monsters have survived and are shared here with us, thanks to collector Bobby Beeman. These unusual plaster heads, a bit battered but complete, are an unexpected and extraordinary find, and a wonderful example of classic movie ballyhoo.

There appears to have been more than one set of these built. The Frankenstein Monster in the old photos has a classic flattop and forehead bangs while the surviving plaster head is rounded out and made up like Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein, with exposed forehead clamps and a distinctive burn scar on the cheek. The Monster’s head shows signs of long-ago repair and may have been modified along the way. The Wolf Man head has fared better, still sporting its scraggly hair and eerie glowing eyes, the bulbs, sockets and cord embedded in plaster and, amazingly, still operational.

Based on a few tantalizing clues and some digging around, it appears that the heads were constructed by the J.H.Blecher Studio of Detroit. Through the first half of the 20th century, the Greektown company produced full-body mannequins for department and clothing stores, and display heads for hat, wig and cosmetic suppliers. It may have also produced affordable plaster statuary for churches. In 1963, Mario Messana, a long-time apprentice of Harry Blecher, bought out the business. Now called Mario’s Mannequin Studio, the company concentrated solely on repair work for a dwindling market, the classic plaster and fibreglass figures being progressively replaced by mass-produced plastic mannequins.

Until his own retirement, in 1995, Messana stored away a number of classic torsos, assorted limbs and exceptional heads, including delicate, early wax creations by the famous Dutch studio of Pierre Imans. This is where the Frankenstein and Wolf Man heads, no doubt saved for their novelty value, were first discovered back in the Eighties.

It is possible, of course, that the heads were manufactured by another company, landing at Blecher’s or Mario’s unclaimed or brought in for repairs, but there seems to be a direct line of provenance here, based on the recollections of previous owners of the Frankenstein/Wolf Man display. Still, we don’t know who ordered these originally. It could have been Universal’s promotion department, a regional distributor, a theater chain or even individual exhibitors. Until new info or new photos surface, we can’t tell. The theater in the photos is still unidentified.

I want to thank Bobby Beeman for so generously sharing his remarkable discovery with Frankensteinia readers. Bobby has posted more images here, at the Universal Monster Army board, an essential and enthusiastic celebration of movie monster toys and collectibles.

More great photos on Universal Monster Army.
Tragic Beauties, a collection of haunting photographs from Mario’s warehouse,
by Barbara Abel.
An article about mannequins, with references to Blecher and Messana on Detroit’s Metro Times.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

Bela's 129th

Happy Halloween-time Birthday to Bela Lugosi, born October 20, 1882.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

The Art of Frankenstein : Joe Jusko

Doom is a heartbeat away even as Lon Chaney’s raging Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi’s superhumanly strong Monster leap at each other’s throats. In another instant, the castle tower, its mad lab and the battling twins of terror will be swept away by tons of churning water from an exploded dam.

The wild climactic battle from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942), all to brief in screen time, is captured in spectacular detail by Joe Jusko for the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland’s “retro” issue No. 71, coming to newsstands in September.

Joe Jusko’s dynamic cover introduces a classic FM feature, the novelization-like “Filmbook’ adaptation of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, written by Martin Powell. The job is a dream come true for both Jusko and Powell, raised on FM and Universal Monsters. Jusko recalls being mesmerized by the Basil Gogos covers, and Powell is an avowed Frankenstein fan. Recently, Powell introduced Frankenstein themes in his scripts for The Spider comics and his graphic novel adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story, with art by Patrick Olliffe, has been continuously in print since 1989.

Joe Jusko’s meticulous and vivid paintings, laden with details, evoke the classic covers of the pulp and paperback era masters. His inspired art for the Marvel Masterpieces trading card series was credited with launching the trading card boom of the 1990s. In ‘95, a set of 125 paintings for the Art of Edgar Rice Burroughs cards made him the most prolific of all the Burroughs artists. Jusko has created countless covers and merchandising images for all the major comic book companies and a stellar cast of clients. His fully painted graphic novel, Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure of All, received a Certificate of Merit from the prestigious Society of Illustrators.

Joe Jusko's website.

Famous Monsters of Filmland website. You can pre-order FM #71.

Martin Powell talks about his Filmbook adaptation.

Related:
More Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man covers:
Mad Monsters No. 5 and Famous Monsters No. 42,

Frankenstein: The Legend Retold, a guest post by Martin Powell.

Paul Naschy Meets Frankenstein

The Paul Naschy Blogathon is underway at MadMadMadMadMovies and there are tons of links up already. Go look! It’s going to be a wild week celebrating The International Man of Monsters.

Here’s my own humble contribution…

It’s Dracula and the Werewolf vs. Frankenstein, illustrated comic book-style on this ad mat for the venerable Victory Theater in Brussels. Actually, the film also featured a mad scientist, aliens and a mummy, but perhaps the title already ran too long. Also missing from the ad is Paul Naschy’s name, despite double duty as screenwriter and lycanthrope.

The film played in English alternately as Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Assignment Terror. In its original, 1969 incarnation, it was called Los Monstruos del terror — The Monsters of Terror. Multiple title confusion was typical for Naschy’s films, made in Spain and bumped around various distributors until they landed, dubbed, as drive-in and grindhouse programmers on this side of the Atlantic.

I first encountered Naschy’s films in the 70s as French dubs playing Montreal as bottom of the bill filler in second-run houses. I remember seeing this one backed with Viva Maria! with Brigitte Bardot. Naschy’s films were at once utterly confusing and strangely fascinating. I didn’t really know anything about Naschy until later, with the advent of VHS, but I had grown fond of the barrel-chested actor.
I came to think of Naschy as a monster movie fan who’d been given the keys to the studio, gleefully recreating the old Universal classics in widescreen and saturated colors, only with more blood and added cleavage. I don’t think I was too far off target.

By his own account, Paul Naschy’s life-changing inspiration came at a screening of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the highly entertaining 1943 monster combo movie starring Bela Lugosi as The Monster and Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man. Naschy would reincarnate Chaney’s Larry Talbot as the cursed Waldemar Daninsky, El Hombre Lobo, in eleven films — perhaps even twelve, one title having gone missing and apparently never shown.

Naschy paid homage to the film that had influenced him by staging a Frankenstein vs. Lobo rumble in Los Monstruos del Terror, but — despite a career playing most if not all of the cinema’s famous monsters — he otherwise steered clear of Frankenstein, save for a couple of indirect connections.

Naschy donned the classic boxhead makeup for a short scene, playing an actor in Frankenstein getup in El Aullido del diablo (The Howl of the Devil, 1988). Another reference is, well, accidental: Naschy’s first Lobo film, La Marca del Hombre Lobo (Mark of the Wolfman, 1968), was released in America as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror. Thing is, there’s no Frankenstein in the movie.

Picked up by Sam Sherman’s discount distribution house, Independent-International, La Marca del Hombre Lobo was dubbed and recut for American consumption. The misleading title was slapped on to satisfy exhibitors who had been promised a Frankenstein film. The Frankenstein reference is dealt in a fleeting instant, even as the titles scroll, with a simple statement that the Frankenstein family had evolved into the lycanthropic Wolfsteins, and that’s it.

I doubt that any patrons were overly upset. Back in the day, you pretty much rolled with the ballyhoo. B-Movies never delivered everything promised on their lurid posters and, besides, the film itself turned out to be a lot better than you had expected, not to mention the extra blood and cleavage.

A final Frankenstein reference: A new documentary about Paul Naschy is called The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry (2010). See my previous post about it and find out what the title means.

Again, there’s lots to see and read about Paul Naschy, and great blogs to discover all this week on The Paul Naschy Blogathon. Kudos to Blogathon host The Vicar of VHS!

Happy Birthday, Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi’s Monster gets jacked up to full power — “The strength of ten men!” — in a scene from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).

It’s Bela’s birthday today, October 20. In 1942, he celebrated his 60^th on a Universal set, playing the very part he had famously refused in 1931.

It was a harrowing shoot for the actor. Poor health and the exhausting makeup and costume led to his collapse on November 5, with ten days left in the shooting schedule. A tag team of stuntmen and stand-ins helped to fill out The Monster’s scenes.

Adding insult to injury, Lugosi’s dialog was ultimately edited out, leaving The Monster mute. Without dialog to explain that The Monster is blind, Lugosi’s stiff walk and cartwheeling arms appear awkward. In the photo above, The Monster’s curious, canny smile originally indicated that the climactic experiment had succeeded and The Monster’s sight had been restored.

In a rare moment of reprieve from the difficult shoot, Lugosi got a loving hug from his visiting five-year old son, Bela Jr.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters No. 42

I hadn’t planned on making this a Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man week, but here’s a nice tie-in with my two previous posts: A Ron Cobb reworking of the film’s original poster as a cover for Famous Monsters of Filmland No. 42, January 1966.

Cobb got started professionally at Disney Studios, working as an inbetweener on Sleeping Beauty, in 1955. By ‘66, he was an “underground” artist and a celebrated political cartoonist for the L.A. Free Press. In 1967, he created the classic LP cover for Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxter’s.

By the late 70’s, Cobb was combining a vivid imagination with meticulous drafting skills to produce designs and concept art for motion pictures. His credits include Star Wars, Conan The Barbarian, and The Abyss. He designed and directed the opening sequence for the Spielberg-produced TV series Amazing Stories. He created the spaceship for Alien, the Nazi flying wing for Raiders of the Lost Ark and the time-traveling DeLorean for Back to the Future. He also wrote the story that would eventually become E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Cobb’s non-film clients include NASA, the Los Angeles Olympics, and Peter Gabriel.

Ron Cobb has enjoyed a superlative career. It's nice to note that, along the way, he painted 11 splendid covers for Warren magazines.

Ron Cobb’s official website and IMDB page.

Creative Masters video interviews with Cobb on Wacom’s The Art of Wa site.

Related
When Frankenstein Met The Wolfman
Frankenstein y el hombre lobo
The Covers of Frankenstein: Mad Monsters No. 5
Happy 125th, Bela Lugosi

Frankenstein y el hombre lobo

On the cover, the two graceful, elongated monsters seem to float like characters in a Cocteau movie. Here’s a unique, rarely seen graphic adaptation — artist unknown — of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943), published in Spain by Editorial Fher, in 1946.

The book, a collection of postcard-like images, is done in expressionistic black and white washes. It is a perfect companion to the film, a wonderful Folk Art rendering of an elaborate fairy tale about two timeless monsters teaming up in an Oz-like quest for Frankenstein’s notebooks. One, lusting for artificial life, seeks a power boost. The other, cursed by the Moon, dreams of permanent death.

The story, told at a pace of one frame per page, 144 in all, is very faithful to the film, some of the art suggesting scenes remembered and reinterpreted by the artist, such as The Monster discovered in a very stylized ice wall. Other scenes, notably the laboratory sequence, are obviously copied from lobby cards or available stills.

Throughout, the anonymous artist’s style shines, his characters fairly dancing off the page. Wolfman Larry Talbot leaps from a speeding wagon and the bendy Frankenstein Monster towers over terrified villagers and strikes poses like Goya’s Straw Mannikin.

There’s very little information available on this lovely and intriguing book. Images measure 18 by 13 cm (roughly 7 by 5.5 inches). I've a seen photo of the cover art printed in purple.

All the illustrations here come from the excellent Spanish blog, El Desvan del Abuelito (Grandpa’s Attic). Click the link to see more great images.

If anyone reading this has any additional information, please share (in the comments, or email me: Frankensteinia at gmail.com) and I’ll update this post.

Related
When Frankenstein Met The Wolf Man

When Frankenstein Met The Wolf Man

On this day, November 11, in 1942, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man wrapped after a month of filming. During the editing process over the days that followed, the film would be fundamentally transformed.

The project began as a vehicle for Lon Chaney Jr., touted by Universal as their new horror star. The young actor had gone directly from his break-through part in The Wolf Man to The Ghost of Frankenstein, taking over The Monster role vacated by Boris Karloff. The new film, as planned, would combine the two monsters, with Chaney, the “Master Character Creator”, playing both parts.

Two days into shooting, on October 14, Variety was still reporting on Chaney’s “double-header” part, but that notion had been scrapped. The flashy twin-role stunt would have meant the use of doubles and complicated split-screen effects, not to mention the wear and tear of heavy makeup sessions on a notoriously impatient Chaney. The actor settled for his signature role as the lycanthropic Larry Talbot and, at the last minute, Bela Lugosi was drafted for The Monster’s part. It made sense. In the previous Frankenstein film, Chaney’s Monster had been given Lugosi/Ygor’s brain and distinctive voice.

Technically speaking, it was Lugosi’s second swipe at the part. Eleven years earlier, he had piled on the makeup for the notorious, now lost test reel for the original Frankenstein. But Lugosi had begged out of the part he felt “any half-wit extra could play”, only to see it make a star out of his replacement, Boris Karloff. By 1942, Lugosi had settled in as a Poverty Row menace and he no longer had the means to refuse a part, even the one he had evaded earlier. “Isn’t it crazy” Lugosi’s wife, Lillian, said, “After turning down the original, Bela winds up doing it anyway… He finally did it because of money. He didn’t do it any other way!” At least, this time, The Monster’s part was a speaking one.

Lugosi, who turned 60 on October 20^th, was not in good health. Reports had him rising at 2:30 AM, soaking in a hot bath and taking a massage to prepare for the grueling, four-hour makeup session and the sixteen-hour workday. Lugosi’s age shows through the makeup. He appears frail and shrunken in the big Monster suit. On November fifth, inevitably perhaps, Lugosi collapsed on set, due to exhaustion. It wasn’t a good day for the film’s cast: During another setup, a horse-drawn cart overturned, spilling Chaney, who suffered cuts and bruises, and Maria Ouspenskaya (as the old Gypsy Woman), who broke her ankle.

Lugosi’s part was filled out by a tag team of stuntmen. Sharp-eyed viewers can make out different people wearing the neck bolts and hinged skullcap in scenes showing The Monster lying in a block of ice, throwing barrels off a speeding wagon, carrying off sculptural heroine Ilona Massey, battling The Wolf Man, and getting violently swept away in the closing tsunami. In fight scenes, Lugosi appears in brief close-up inserts, tying the action together.

Update: Stuntman Eddie Parker has often been credited as Lugosi's stand-in, but careful study of the film indicates that most of the stunt work was done by Gil Perkins.

Shooting had been an ordeal for Lugosi, but the final ignominy was still to come. According to screenwriter Curt Siodmak, The Monster’s dialog “sounded so Hungarian funny that they had to take it out”. It seems late in the game, after a month of shooting, to decide that Lugosi’s accent was unsuitable for The Monster. Perhaps Lugosi spoke his dialog with Ygor’s spirited, lusty delivery, which had worked beautifully for that character but would have been overdone for the stone-faced Monster. Whatever the reason, the solution was drastic. Entire scenes were dropped and, in short sequences that couldn’t be excised, Lugosi’s voice was erased, though we still see his lips move.

Gone were all the exposition between Lugosi and Chaney. Surviving stills show Chaney and Lugosi sharing their stories in front of a warming fire in the ice cavern. Also gone with the dialog was a key plot point explaining how The Monster was weakened, half blind, and dependent on Chaney’s Larry Talbot. As a result, Lugosi’s flung-back head stares and outstretched arm gropes are interpreted as robotic spasms, and the impact of the final laboratory scene is lost: After the juice is turned on and The Monster is re-energized, a shot of Lugosi grinning malevolently was meant to signal that he was back at full danger-zone power, with eyesight restored.

For all the butchering done in editing, the resulting film is surprisingly effective. It’s a brisk and very entertaining adventure movie, with monsters. The graveyard opening sequence and Chaney’s moonlit reanimation is gorgeous. Chaney and Lugosi meet in an underground ice cavern, and go on to explore a wonderful smashed castle set. The local Tyrolean-type town and its festive villagers provide scenes for genre regulars Dwight Frye and Lionel Atwill, and everyone panics on cue when The Monster clomps down Main Street. The climactic wrestling match between the title monsters is a little too short to be entirely satisfying, but the stunt men go at it with wild abandon, Wolf Man leaping and The Monster throwing refrigerator-sized lab equipment, until the dam blows and the monsters are drowned, or at least sent into icy hiatus until the next film.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man’s advertising campaign, touting the “Titans of Terror”, yielded a great movie poster, a lurid pulp magazine-style painting of The Monster cranking up a knockout blow against The Wolf Man’s animalistic lunge. The title logo has “Frankenstein’ spelled out in riveted letters, and “The Wolf Man” written in fur. Ilona Massey reclines across the bottom of the image in a flimsy, off the shoulder nightgown.

The original script by Curt Siodmak, entitled Wolfman Meets Frankenstein — featuring all of The Monster’s dialog — is still available in book form.

The film is available on DVD packaged with The House of Frankenstein, or as part of The Wolf Man Legacy Collection.

The film’s very entertaining re-release trailer is on You Tube.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Mad Monsters No. 5

By 1961, the Monster Boom was in full swing, with all sorts of monster merchandizing flying off five and dime shelves. That year, Aurora released its now legendary Frankenstein model kit, and Charlton Publications jumped into the monster movie magazine sweepstakes with its twin titles, Horror Monsters and Mad Monsters, essentially the same magazine under two different logos.

Charlton was a model of strict vertical integration, with editorial, layout, film, printing and distribution all under one roof at it’s sprawling, seven and a half acre plant in Connecticut. The company was able to churn out its magazines and comic books more cheaply than most any of its competitors.

Further cost cutting was evidenced by the barest minimum of production values expended on the monster magazines. Monster Kids will remember the thin covers that scuffed easily and registered fingerprints, and the yellowish pulp interiors with typically dark and muddy photo reproduction. Nevertheless, Horror Monsters and Mad Monsters often were fun reads, straying into territory rarely visited by the reigning Famous Monsters of Filmland. For example, the issue at hand — Mad Monsters No. 5, from 1963 — carries articles on Face of Fire (1959), and the Mexican El Infierno de Frankenstein (aka: Orlak, The Hell of Frankenstein, 1960).

Exactly who edited or wrote for these titles remains a mystery. Articles were never signed, and the editorial staff was anonymized with supposedly funny pen names (Abernathy Farquad, Editor, and Farquad Abernathy, Associate Editor). Today, Ed Konick is credited as editor, though his contribution was probably just putting the mags through the Charlton assembly line. Konick first joined Charlton in 1952 and served as General Manager from 1975 until the end, when the company folded in 1991.

With the exception of a jazzy, buzzcut werewolf signed Steve Ditko on the cover of Mad Monsters number one, cover artists were never credited. Issue number 5 (1963), pictured here, features a bold design and a cool, colorful painting inspired by a promotional photo for Universal’s 1943 Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman.

The Charlton titles were among the longest-lived of the Famous Monsters coattail riders, with 10 issues apiece between 1961 and 1965.

Happy 125th, Bela Lugosi

This weekend, October 20 was Bela Lugosi’s 125^th birthday.

In 1931, Bela Lugosi became an instant sensation upon the release of Dracula, the film that ignited the first golden age of horror films. Universal Studios quickly followed up with a plan to shoot Frankenstein, featuring their newly minted star. Lugosi's name appeared on a preview poster for the film. A notorious, now lost screen test was made, and then everything fell apart.

One story goes that Lugosi stubbornly refused to play the part of The Monster because of no dialog and too much makeup. Another version has Universal chief Carl Laemmle laughing at Lugosi’s appearance and shelving the project, at least until James Whale stepped in, retooled the script and shot it with Boris Karloff.

In 1939, Lugosi appeared in the third Frankenstein outing, Son of Frankenstein, as the broken-necked Ygor, and pretty much stole the film right out from under Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone. Returning in 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein, this time with Lon Chaney, Jr. as The Monster, Lugosi’s Ygor, in the final scene, had his brains inserted in the Monster’s skull, with catastrophic results: The re-brained Monster was now blind!

In 1943, Lugosi finally accepted the part that had eluded him twelve years earlier when he donned the heavy monster makeup for Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. It made sense: Ygor’s brains were now inside The Monster’s square head, and Lugosi was able to speak The Monster’s dialog with Ygor’s accent. The part was difficult for the frail actor and he is doubled by stuntmen, often obviously, in several scenes. The final ignominy came when, prior to release, Universal yanked all of The Monster’s speaking scenes. Curiously, Lugosi’s stiff-arm groping, meant to indicate The Monster’s blindness, now unmentioned in the film, became the standard Frankenstein Monster robot walk.

Lugosi played opposite The Monster one more time, as Dracula, commanding Glenn Strange is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, in 1948.

Frankenstein may have been a footnote and an irritant in Lugosi’s career, but Bela made several contributions to the myth, and he made The Monster come alive in many ways.

The cover illustration above was designed and colorized by Joe Schovitz for Jim Clatterbaugh’s superlative Monsters From The Vault magazine. That issue, #22, is still available directly from the publisher.