The Art of Frankenstein : Feg Murray (Part 9)

Cartoonist Feg Murray captured all of the Universal Frankenstein Monsters over the run of his Seein’ Stars newspaper feature. After Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi, the part fell to character actor Glenn Strange whose craggy Mount Rushmore face and six-foot-five frame made him a Monster to reckon with. In short but memorable appearances in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944) and HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945), the underused Monster would roll off the slab for a quick, last reel walkabout before meeting his inevitable doom. Murray notes how the apparently destroyed Monster would always “show up for the next horror film”.

Unexpectedly, Strange would get a chance to show his Monster chops front and center in the final film of the original series, the wildly funny and surprisingly influential ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948). Both illustrations here are contemporary to the Abbott and Costello comedy.


The full face-on image announcing the film is a direct precursor, and a worthy companion piece to the famous James Bama painting of the Sixties that used the same photo reference. 

Click the thumbnails below to see the full cartoon panels. I have included a third Glenn Strange image, found on eBay, although the quality is poor.

Next up: We wrap up the Feg Murray series!

With thanks to George Chastain!

Related:
The Monster: Glenn Strange

Flash Gordon Meets Frankenstein

A case of perfect casting: Larry “Buster” Crabbe as the intrepid Flash Gordon and Jean Rogers as his sweetheart Dale Arden strike a classic pose in this promotional still for the Universal serial Flash Gordon of 1936.

That staircase look familiar? Run upstairs, turn right, and you’re in Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Routinely identified on sites such as the IMDB or Wikipedia as the staircase from the original 1931 Frankenstein, these watchtower steps are actually from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Compare screencaps below: The Frankenstein stairs came straight down whereas the Bride stairs took a sharp ninety-degree turn at the bottom. The original ’31 stairs were also heavily weathered and worn down with ancient grooves. The ’35 stairs were cut clean and straight.

If anything was left standing from the ’31 production, it was heavily remodeled in early ’35 for The Bride, with a new plaster coat and a large overhead beam added. The original wall had gouges and a chunk missing on the left side, and the right side was much rougher, with several knobby stones sticking out. The Bride/Flash walls are smooth and flat, with relatively uniform stone shapes.

Dwight Frye made the most of the stair sets in both pictures. In 1931, as the frenetic assistant, Fritz, he famously stops midway to pull up his socks. In the 1935 film, as Dr. Pretorius’ murderous henchman, Karl, he runs downstairs pulling on his coat, muttering to himself about his mission to hurry up and find a “fresh” heart for the waiting Bride.

Based on the masterful, elegant comic strip created by Alex Raymond in 1934, Universal’s Flash Gordon was, reputedly, one of the most expensive serials ever made. It’s a wonderful piece of retro science fiction and kooky fantasy with smoke-belching spaceships, winged men, an array of monsters (including a unicorn gorilla), and crazy costume and set design that recklessly mix art deco, medieval motifs, Arabian nights and chinoiseries. The non-stop cliffhanger action is peppered with surprisingly erotic moments provided by Jean Rogers as the virginal Dale Arden in a clinging white dress and slinky Priscilla Lawson as the alluringly evil, dark-haired Princess Aura.

Buster Crabbe was a true Golden Age movie action star, playing Flash, Tarzan and Buck Rogers. Despite his expressed displeasure at having his hair bleached blonde and curled, he makes for a fabulously dashing spaceman. On the principle that a great hero needs a great villain, the mayhem on planet Mongo is orchestrated with considerable élan by Charles Middleton as the unforgettable, aptly named Ming The Merciless. Today, Flash Gordon stands as the first serial officially preserved under the American Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

The Frankenstein staircase is used twice, in quick succession, as two different locations. It is first featured in a procession scene, decorated with a large freestanding torch. Moments later, it has been repurposed as an escape route, torch removed and a tall urn set to the side, scene of an all-out brawl sequence after Flash has saved, in extremis, the brainwashed Dale from a shotgun wedding to the nefarious Ming himself, a fate truly worse than death. Further borrowing from Bride of Frankenstein, music cues were sampled throughout the serial, as well as insert clips of Kenneth Strickfaden’s electrical laboratory gadgets, now serving as futuristic machinery.

Another Frankenstein connection to Flash Gordon is the presence of a future Frankenstein Monster, Glenn Strange, plugging away in three uncredited parts. He is said to have played a robot, one of Ming’s soldiers, and his first monster role as the Godzilla-sized creature called the Gocko.

An anecdote: In the early Sixties, in my home town of Montréal, a local celebrity, Magic Tom Auburn, hosted a late afternoon TV kids’ show that showed cartoons, Three Stooges shorts and serials like King of the Rocket Men and The Crimson Ghost. The Flash Gordon serial, much to my chagrin, was yanked after only two episodes when parents complained that the dragon-like Gocko had sent their children into fits of hysteria. Took me another thirty years before I found out how Flash had escaped those giant lobster claws!

Update: Richard Sala reports that Carroll Borland, soon to become famous as Bela Lugosi’s Vampire Girl in Mark of the Vampire (1935), appears in the Flash serial as one of Aura’s handmaiden. Also noteworthy: Bull Montana, the Missing Link from The Lost World (1925) plays a “monkey man” wrestler.

More Frankenstein connections: Stuntman Eddie Parker, one of Ming’s soldiers, would sub briefly for Bela Lugosi as the Frankenstein Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and Harry Wilson, doing an uncredited bit as a sentry in Chapter One would go on to play the very homely female monster in Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958).

Finally, here’s a great YouTube clip from the serial showing the Bride of Frankenstein stairs in the wedding procession and the ensuing fisticuffs scene. There’s also a nice scene of Dale Arden getting zombified by super-science neon lights, and the idol with the moving arm was originally the Egyptian god statue that zapped Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

A very comprehensive Flash Gordon site

Source, top photo: Yesterday's Thrills and Adventures

Comics... GOOOD!

Perfect pop culture bliss: Frankenstein reading comics!

Glenn Strange and comic Ole Olsen ham it up for Universal’s publicity department. That’s Batman No. 23, with a cover showing Batman literally checkmating The Joker, done in the Bob Kane house style by George Roussos. The comic, cover dated June-July 1944, hit the stands in April, which coincides perfectly with Glenn Strange’s two-week gig on House of Frankenstein. Olsen, of the comedy duo Olsen and Johnson, was busy shooting Ghost Catchers on an adjacent set.

Worth noting: Strange was paid a measly $500 for two weeks of work on the film. You couldn’t buy a copy of Batman No. 23 with that kind of cash today.

A year later, reclining in the makeup chair, Glenn Strange enjoys Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Look closely at the comic, there’s Flattop, the bizarre hitman character based on real-life killer ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’. Strange must have felt a certain kinship with the cranially-challenged character.

In another photo from the same Fall of ’45 session, Strange is reading Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates while makeup man Jack Pierce finishes up. The mud-splattered makeup was used when The Monster first appears in House of Dracula, stuck in dried-up quicksand.

Related:
The Monster: Glenn Strange

The Monster : Glenn Strange

Glenn Strange is a contemplative Monster in this striking portrait, which recently appeared in a Heritage auction.

Glenn Strange (1899-1973) first came to Hollywood in 1930 as a singing cowboy with The Arizona Wranglers. With rugged good looks and the strapping six-five frame that earned him the nickname “Pee Wee”, Strange was immediately cast in horse operas, embarking on a career that would span 40 years and over 300 films, almost all of them westerns.

Sporting names like Slim, Bull, Bat, Bart, Blackie, Tex or Stu-Bum, Strange’s characters operated both sides of the law, equally reliable in lynch mobs or a sheriff’s posse. He was just as likely to appear as a dirty low-down rustler or some poker-faced gunman as he was a stalwart Marshal, a steadfast stagecoach driver, or an easygoing harmonica-playing cowhand. A standout part was that of the murderous Butch Cavendish, The Lone Ranger’s nemesis, which he repeated in movies and on TV between 1949 and 1955.

In the Fifties, when westerns were a television staple, Strange worked all the classic series from Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry to The Rifleman, Cheyenne, and Rawhide, eventually earning a regular spot, starting in 1961, on Gunsmoke, quietly polishing shot glasses through 210 episodes as the rock steady, mustachioed bartender, Sam.

For all the interchangeable cowpokes he portrayed, Strange fairly shined in his rare appearances outside the western genre. He showed great flair for comedy as a memorable Hillbilly character, Devil Dan Winfield, in the otherwise minor Abbott and Costello vehicle Comin’ Round the Mountain (1951). In fantasy films, Strange first appeared, briefly and uncredited, as one of Ming’s minions in a 1936 Flash Gordon serial. In 1942’s The Mad Monster, a Poverty Row B-movie devised to cash in on the runaway success of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), Strange’s size served the part of Petro, a hulking, simple-minded handyman who turns into a hairy, fanged monster. In 1944, Strange played a hulking orderly in the bizarre acromegaly horror film The Monster Maker, and he was back in heavy makeup — created by Jack Pierce, freelancing after being dumped by Universal — as Atlas, a hairy giant whose brains get switched with Huntz Hall’s in Master Minds, a 1949 Bowery Boys comedy.

Glenn Strange’s most famous and enduringly popular role, no doubt, was playing the last of Universal’s Frankenstein Monsters. By 1944, the Monster had become a stock character, trotted out with Dracula and The Wolf Man in kitchen sink monster rallies. In House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), the monsters, with attendant hunchbacks and mad doctors, were displayed and quickly dispatched in what amounts to individual vignettes, with little or no interaction. Strange’s Frankenstein, after spending most of the show strapped to a slab, was activated in time for a short, climactic walkabout and a quick, catastrophic end.

Without a lot of screen time and very little to do besides glowering at torch-bearing villagers, Strange’s contributions might have been a footnote to Frankenstein film history if not for an unlikely third film, the brilliant Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). With a stellar cast that included Chaney as The Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Strange’s Monster was a central character, interacting with the principals and chasing The Boys in a wild, genuinely funny romp that became one of the most influential movie comedies ever made.

Strange would go on to promote the film with a number of personal appearances wearing an over-the-head mask made for him by Don Post, eventually appearing again with Abbott and Costello, with The Creature from the Black Lagoon thrown in for good measure, in a 1954 episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour on TV. The affable actor even participated in one of fan-filmmaker Don Glut’s 16mm epics, the Frankenstein’s Fury episode of Adventures of The Spirit, in 1963.

The Frankenstein makeup worked very well with Strange’s craggy deadpan. With a boxy head, big shoulders and his trademark windup-toy thread, Glenn Strange gave the Frankenstein Monster its definitive pop culture profile. It was Glenn Strange’s features that would be sampled for a best-selling Frankenstein rubber mask, and his face that was repeatedly used on toy packaging. Significantly, perhaps inevitably, when Boris Karloff died in 1969, most newspaper obits were illustrated with a photo of Glenn Strange in Frankenstein makeup.

Trailers: House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

An excerpt from The Bowery Boys’ Master Minds

A look at Glenn Strange's career in westerns.

     

Related: 
Making Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein 
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein gets knocked off : Frank Dietz on the legacy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Jack Pierce Birthday

Glenn Strange gets a fresh coat of paint as he is being transformed into the Frankenstein Monster by makeup genius Jack Pierce.

On this day, May 5^th, in 1889, Jack Pierce was born. A Greek immigrant in America, he was a baseball player, a silent movie actor and stuntman, and eventually, a makeup artist. Becoming Head of Universal’s Makeup Department at a time of unparalleled effervescence, Pierce created the wolfmen, the living mummies and all the memorable movie monsters — including a certain Bride — we have come to regard as the classics. The crowning achievement, of course, was his brilliant design for the monster of Frankenstein.

In the early days before modern movie cosmetics and lightweight foam appliances, Pierce painstakingly built up his remarkable creations with wax, cotton, greasepaints and crude chemicals. In 1935, he designed an early reusable “appliance”, casting The Monster’s towering forehead in rubber.

Despite his years of service and his incalculable contributions, Pierce was summarily let go in a management shuffle at Universal in 1947. He continued working as a freelancer for movies and TV. A legend today, he died in relative obscurity, in 1968.

See my previous post about Jack Pierce creating the Frankenstein Monster, and a post about the "lost" Karloff Frankenstein.

Jack Pierce on Wikipedia, featuring links to interesting sites.

Thanks, Max!

Frankenstein Memorabilia

Straight From The Son

He was the four-year old son of the Son of Frankenstein (1939). He is the last surviving actor to have played opposite Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster. Donnie Dunagan, now 73 years old, has put his personal collection of memorabilia up for auction. These unique and important items include photos, contracts, letters, pay stubs, scrapbook pages, and a wonderful autographed still of Boris Karloff signed “with love from the giant”.

The auction goes live on October 6.

Info via Tim Lucas' Video WatchBlog. Essential reading!

Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein Mask

Also on the Heritage Auction site: Monster masks used as props in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

A vulcanized rubber Frankenstein stunt head, a perfect likeness of Glenn Strange, appears surprisingly well preserved for its age and one suspects it might be a more recent “pull” from the original mold. Nevertheless, it is a stunning piece.

Frankenstein Exhibit

Right in time for Halloween, here’s an exhibit of classic stills from the great Universal Frankensteins. Rutgers Student Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey will be displaying Frankenstein Pictures: A Photographic Tribute to Boris Karloff and The Frankenstein Monster from the collection of Ron MacCloskey, October 14 to the 27th.

Check the Creepy Classics website for all the details.

(Thanks to Stuart Gardner for the info!)

Young Frankenstein Lives Again

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon coordinated by Thom Ryan at Film of the Year. Click and see a list of all the participating bloggers.

Just like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein before it, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein spawned its share of imitators. For one, there was a rather miserable David Niven comedy called Old Dracula, but the kicker must be Sevimli Frankestayn, aka Turkish Young Frankenstein, a spectacularly inept shot for shot remake that plays like a straight horror film. In other words, a knock-off of a classic satire… that misses the joke!

At 81, Mel Brooks is the Elder Statesman of Slapstick. In November, in case you haven’t heard, he’s reviving Young Frankenstein as a big budget Broadway musical. The tryouts in Seattle have been widely publicized on TV and the Net.

Watch Brooks making his pitch on entertainment news shows, available on YouTube here and here. There is some overlap between the two clips, but you get a glimpse of the very elaborate sets that include a rising slab, complete with lightning bolts. Here’s a fine Seattle Times article, and a slideshow (pics by Greg Gilbert) of actor Schuler Hensley — who also played the Monster in the film Van Helsing — being transformed into a very green Frankenstein Monster, and this Playbill feature has good pictures (by Paul Kolnik) of the very energetic cast. The official website for the Young Frankenstein musical is here.

Frankenstein Meets The Mermaid

This weekend, the New York Times carries an article called “Monster, Meet Mermaid”. Turns out the competition for Young Frankenstein won’t be the other Frankenstein Musical opening at the same time, but rather the big new Disney show, The Little Mermaid. Now, how’s this for trivia: This is not the first time that a comedy-based Frankenstein Monster meets a Mermaid. Back in ‘48, at Universal, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was shooting concurrently with the William Powell fantasy, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Glenn Strange and Anne Blythe, both in costume, posed for a neat publicity shot.

All we need now is for Young Frankenstein’s Schuler Hensley and The Little Mermaid’s Sierra Boggess to get together and close the circle. Do it on January 1st, and it'll be a 60th year reunion!

And that wraps up my contribution to the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon. I had a ball! I was introduced to some great blogs, I read some terrific posts, and I made some new friends. Here’s a pie in the face to Thom Ryan at Film of the Year who made it all happen. Thanks, Thom, and congratulations on a job well done.

Frankenstein Gets Knocked-Off

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon coordinated by Thom Ryan at Film of the Year. Click and see a list of all the participating bloggers.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was a hit everywhere it played. I love the German title and the Jack Davis-style artwork on the above poster.

I saw French-dubbed version, Deux Nigauds (“Two nincompoops!”) contre Frankenstein, in a theater when I was a kid. No, I’m not THAT old. It was in the early 60s, and the film, incredibly, was still making the rounds in second-run houses a full 15 years after its original release.

Bud and Lou exploited the new formula, going on to “Meet” The Killer (aka The Killer, Boris Karloff), The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Mummy. They even worked the monsters, including the newly minted Creature from the Black Lagoon, into their television routines.

Outside the USA and, presumably, beyond the grasp of Universal’s legal department, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would spawn countless imitations, some of which amounted to unauthorized, unabashed remakes, which is a polite way of saying “plagiarism”.

An Egyptian-made copy, in 1953, stands out as a jaw-dropping, scene for scene clone of the original. The film, called Haram alek — which somewhat appropriately translates as “Shame On You!” — is also known as Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein.

Mexican movie comics stepped in with a slew of knockoffs, some of them quite accomplished. El Castillo de los monstruos (Castle of Monsters) in 1958, had Clavillazo dealing with a very human-like Frankenstein (the neck bolts gave him away) plus a mummy, a gorilla, an alligator pit, and the lagoon’s Gill-Man. Best of all, the great German Robles cameos as El Vampiro. Here’s a fun YouTube clip from the film where most of the monstruos appear.

The prolific, rubber-faced superstar comic Tin Tan made several excursions into the ghost and monsters genre, notably El Fantasma de la operetta and La casa del terror, both in 1960. La casa drew Lon Chaney, Jr. south of the border to play opposite the pachuco-style comic as a mummy who, once revived, turns into a werewolf. Nice combo, there! The film was notoriously recycled in the States as a straight horror film. Chaney’s footage was edited in with new, cheaply shot scenes and the whole incomprehensible mess was released as Face of the Screaming Werewolf in 1964.

Other Mexican-made variations included Pepito y el monstruos (1957), A Locura del terror (1969), Chabelo y Pepito contra los monstruos (1973), and Capulina vs los monstruos (1964). Most of these are available today on DVD if you care to Google around.

Of all the Mexican facsimiles, the one most faithful to Abbott and Costello’s original concept was Frankestein: El vampiro y compania (Frankestein (sic), the Vampire and Company), made in 1961 as a vehicle for Tin Tan’s brother, Manuel “Loco” Valdez. Here’s a write-up on that one.

Few movies have exercised as deep and wide an influence as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein has. Even fewer were ever copied in such detail. Homage or rip-off, you decide.

In the end, the original is still the best.

Update: Screencaps from the Egyptian-made Haram alek posted here.

Related:
Frankenstein Gets Knocked Off
El Castillo de los Monstruos

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon. Click to see a list of participating bloggers and links to all the Blog-a-thon posts through the weekend.

My contribution, an essay, is a bit of an experiment, a departure from the short post format of this blog. Let me know what you think.

The Brain of Frankenstein

By the mid-40s, Universal’s Monsters were played out. It’s as if the studio was bereft of new ideas for the characters, or perhaps box office projections suggested that Frankenstein, Dracula or The Wolfman couldn’t carry a picture on their own any more. The menacing trio was still being revived, but only as a group. They came bundled together, three for the price of one, in “Monster Rally” films with template titles: House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, in 1944 and ‘45.

It looked like the days of the great Universal Monsters had passed, and the once proud bogeymen would fade away without so much as a whimper.

Then Robert Arthur had an idea.

In late 1946, Arthur, the producer in charge of Abbott and Costello movies, was kicking ideas around and he came up with something about a mad doctor chasing the Boys, determined to stuff Lou Costello’s addled brains into the Frankenstein Monster’s cranium. Studio bosses suggested he throw Dracula and The Wolfman in, use the whole squad, and maybe it would amount to something.

A couple of script treatments were turned out and quickly discarded. One dreadful version had the Monsters defeated after being shrunk down to doll size. It was only when the project was handed over to Robert Lees and Frederic Rinaldo that it gelled.

The two writers loved the concept and attacked it with passion. They crafted a script, called The Brain of Frankenstein, that was unlike anything the Boys had done before. The story was solid and it raced to a genuine climax. It had strong supporting parts, including a female villain. The Monsters stayed in character, genuinely menacing, something to play off of, not play with. The script had new and original sight gags in it, good dialog and new jokes.

Lou hated it.

For all their talent, Bud and Lou were not innovators. The routines they mastered had been honed to perfection years earlier, in Vaudeville. The Boys had come to know what worked for them and they felt no need to experiment. Critics of the time complained about Abbott and Costello serving up “the same old corn” in picture after picture, but the public didn’t seem to mind at all.

It’s almost impossible, today, to grasp the magnitude of Abbott & Costello’s popularity. They had a huge constituency of fans, having been on radio continuously for over a decade. They played personal appearance gigs to packed houses. They made two pictures a year, but with older titles constantly re-issued, you could have 6 or 7 Abbott & Costello comedies in circulation every year. The fans just couldn’t get enough of them. The Boys were box-office gold.

Typically, an Abbott and Costello script started with a basic plot outline over which, through several drafts, gags and routines were added. Bud and Lou barely glanced at their scripts, relying on longtime friend and gagman supreme John Grant to look out for them, and fix or rewrite as needed. When the jokes got stale, the routines repetitious, the Boys could still find a way to wring an extra laugh out of them. Chubby, cheerful Lou Costello ad-libbed recklessly, and if all else failed, he’d fall back on hoots, howls and spectacular pratfalls to sell a gag. The lanky and morose Bud Abbott — the best straight man in the business — knew instinctively how much rope to give out and when to yank Lou back into the routine.

The new script was a challenge, and the Boys, at first, were uncomfortable with it. It came with all the jokes written down, all the gags and situations worked out. Only a couple of stock routines made it in, a “moving candle” gag, and a scene where Lou mistakes the real Wolfman for Bud was a variation on a bit the Boys were familiar with. It speaks to the script’s originality and cleverness that even those old stunts work in context and come off as fresh.

The Monster : Glenn Strange

Bud and Lou often complained, not without reason, of being saddled with uninspired supporting casts composed of clock-punching contract players. This time, they had no cause for worry.

Lon Chaney, Jr. reprised his signature role as the terminally anguished Larry Talbot. He’s a good guy, working with Bud and Lou to prevent Dracula from reviving the dangerous Frankenstein Monster, but he’s also a walking time bomb who can morph into The Wolfman and turn on the Boys at any moment. A nice surprise was seeing Bela Lugosi, in great form, don the Dracula cape again. The part had been essayed most recently by John Carradine, in top hat and fake mustache, while Lugosi had languished as a Poverty Row villain. Here, Lugosi was given a good, substantial role, and he handled himself with Continental aplomb, dignity intact, while the comics whirled around him. It was to be Bela’s last major film.

The cast of principals was rounded out with Jane Randolph as Lou’s sweetheart, Lenore Aubert as the evil and fatale Dr. Mornay, and the part of the Monster was assured, again, by Glenn Strange.

Strange had played the Monster in two previous outings but his screen time had been limited to being strapped on a slab until the final reel when, spurred by some mad scientist and his obligatory hunchbacked assistant, he rose, growled at the torch-carrying mob, and promptly walked into some quicksand, or a wall of fire. The End.

This time, the Monster was used throughout the picture, and he had the best, most fun scenes interacting with Bud and Lou.

Strange played the character as a stoic hulk, moving slowly and deliberately, hands out, like a blind automaton on remote control. His performance is rarely given the credit it deserves, but watch him closely in this film. This isn’t just a stuntman clomping around, it’s a real performance in pantomime. In a couple of scenes, incrementally sitting up at Dracula's command, or mechanically climbing the stairs in the gorgeous island dock set, Strange moves with such clockwork precision that it almost feels like the film has slowed down. His timing, always half a second late in reacting, is robot perfect.

Glenn Strange made a career as a character actor in Westerns. As The Monster, he was eclipsed by Karloff, Chaney and Lugosi who had all played the part in “serious” pictures. Strange was thought of as the fill-in Frankenstein, the one who got the part only after the part was discounted. But it was Glenn Strange who would give the Monster its pop culture profile. When the classic, flat-top makeup was applied to his wide, craggy face, it gave him a big, square, boxlike head, and this look became the Frankenstein trademark, better suited for toys and Halloween masks than Boris Karloff’s sensitive features.

Shooting on The Brain of Frankenstein began on February 5, 1948.

Cult Status

The Boys pulled their usual on-set antics, playing a marathon game of poker in their dressing room and refusing to come out for rehearsals. When they did made it to the stage, shooting would be regularly interrupted by the frenetic Bobby Barber, Lou's personal stooge, hired to create pandemonium and keep the company in good spirits. Universal crewmen reportedly loved working on Abbott and Costello pictures. Veteran director Charles Barton calmly steered the picture through all the chaos.

The only incident of note came when a stunt went wrong and Glenn Strange snapped his ankle. Lon Chaney, a good sport, offered to stand in as The Monster and that’s him throwing Lenore Aubert’s double through the window. Strange returned to the set a few days later, wearing a leg brace. Another incident, much happier, involved a scene where Lou backs into a chair and inadvertently sits in the Monster’s lap. His predicament dawns on him when he realizes that he has too many hands. Take after take, Glenn Strange, who was called upon to keep a straight, stone face, couldn’t help but break up. No amount of editing could salvage the scene and the two men had to be called back later on for retakes.

The film’s shooting title, The Brain of Frankenstein, sounded too much like a straight horror film. When it was released, in August ’48, it was called, simply, Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein. To Universal’s delight, preview audiences whooped as soon as the title appeared onscreen.

In retrospect, it was an early case of product branding. Comedians and monsters had mixed it up before, but these were not your humdrum haunted house ghosts or the escaped cheapsuit gorillas that had stalked everyone from the Ritz Brothers to the Bowery Boys. Abbott and Costello — household names to begin with — were tangling with Frankenstein! The Wolf Man! And Dracula! These were characters established over almost two decades worth of films. Their names had weight and significance.

The film was a runaway hit, the 3rd biggest box office attraction of 1948, and it gave Bud and Lou a whole new formula to exploit. Over the next few years, they would go on to “Meet” all the monsters they could scare up, from The Invisible Man to The Mummy.

Critics of the time were kind to the film, but it would take a few more years for it to be recognized as the comedy classic that it is. When horror films finally came under scholarly scrutiny, A&C Meet Frankenstein was generally regarded as an insult, the final ignominy for monsters whose potency had been slowly eroded through increasingly cheap sequels.

In an article for Sight and Sound (April-June 1952), Curtis Harrington — who had been a friend of James Whale — wrote that Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein was “the final death agony of James Whale’s originally marvelous creation”. Carlos Clarens, in his seminal Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967), lumped the film along with the portmanteau House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, stating that “unconscious parody finally gave way to deliberate spoof” and adding, “By then, Universal was flogging a dead horse”.

Boris Karloff was known to glower whenever the film was mentioned, though he had gamely accepted to pose for publicity pictures, standing in line to see the film in New York, and he had gone on to play in two pictures with the Boys, Abbott and Costello Meet The Killer, and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lon Chaney, Jr., who’d had a ball making the film, came to believe its pernicious influence had killed off the old monsters.

But, of course, the monsters not only survived, their reputations grew. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is an intelligent and vastly entertaining film. It was beautifully done. It has wonderful sets and a magnificent score by Frank Skinner. And it is still funny today. In the end, it was as generous, respectful and deeply-felt an homage to the classic Monsters as, say, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein was.

Universal’s Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman did not fade away, they went out with a bang in a fabulous film, a true and glorious Last Hurrah. More importantly, Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein, with its reverent use of Universal’s classic monsters, forever cemented their reputation as dominant icons of popular culture.

References:

Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein on DVD.

Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, by Bob Furmanek and Ron Palumbo (Perigee Books, 1991). Out of print. You can still find a copy through Amazon Sellers or AbeBooks.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: Universal Filmscripts Series, by Philip J. Riley (Magicimage Books, 1990).