Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Film: Son of Frankenstein (1939)
Stars: Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Josephine Hutchinson
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We continue on our month of classic horrors with a film that made it on the marathon partially because it was already on my Netflix queue, but mostly because I was so shocked when researching this article how the studio system, while it was generally unkind to actors such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi when they stopped being bankable, also didn't exploit them as ferociously as I would have expected.  In an era when, say, Myrna Loy and William Powell were playing Nick & Nora every year, stars like Karloff & Lugosi didn't continually reprise their most iconic characters, instead only playing them a few times.  Karloff, for example, only donned the Frankenstein makeup thrice-first for his two classic outings (reviews listed below) and then one last time after Universal, who was suffering after ousting the Laemmles, wanted to take advantage of a recent revival in theaters of Frankenstein movies (a bankrupt LA theater ran Dracula, Frankenstein, and King Kong as a Hail Mary to make money and the gimmick worked, leading to a second wave of horror movies from Universal).  Son of Frankenstein would not be Karloff's last outing in a Frankenstein picture (he'd appear as a mad doctor in House of Frankenstein, which we'll get to later this month), but it was his last time in the monster's getup, and is famously considered the final "A-Grade" horror movie of its era, as soon the Universal horror films were being made cheaply and more generically.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around, as the title suggests, the son of Frankenstein, named Wolf (Rathbone), who has come back to his father's castle to claim his inheritance, the estate and, most specifically, the laboratory.  The people in the local village loathe Wolf, as they view he and his family as bad omens, and so the only friend to Wolf, his wife Elsa (Hutchinson) and son Peter is a local lawman, Inspector Krogh (Atwill), who lost an arm to the monster as a child.  Despite clear reasons not to do so, Wolf is set to avenge his father, trying to prove his place in scientific history by reanimating the monster (Karloff), with the help of Ygor (Lugosi), who has taken control of the monster and is using him to murder members of a jury that once tried to have Ygor hanged.  As one could expect, Wolf's plans go awry as the monster kills and terrorizes the surrounding countryside, but is ultimately saved by Inspector Krogh, with the monster and Ygor dying while the Frankensteins leave the village, presumably forever (or at least until the next sequel).

One of the harder things about reviewing older movies is trying to figure out what is being played for laughs and what is genuinely supposed to be terrifying.  A contemporary review of the film at the time called it "the silliest picture ever made," but that's hard to digest since many of the horror movies of that era play for camp to modern audiences.  Still, you can see the way that articulate, Shakespearean-trained Rathbone feels a tad ridiculous as Wolf von Frankenstein.  The way that he descends so quickly into the same madness that doomed his father feels hackneyed and preposterous, but it's also quite fun.  Rathbone has such a theatrical flare that he fits right in and feels like an appropriate offspring of Colin Clive (it's alive, it's ALIVE!).  Atwill is a strange oddity in the film (and also feels weird when you think of the chronology of the picture as he feels too old to have been hurt as a child by the monster), and Hutchinson is as generic as you can get as Wolf's clingy, wispy wife.

But the whole point of these films is the monsters, and weirdly it's Lugosi's Ygor and not Karloff's Frankenstein that stands out in a major way here despite Karloff generally being the better actor.  Lugosi basically steals the picture, as Karloff's Frankenstein has been muted and is less defined than in the previous iterations of the series.  Ygor, though, is cruel, funny, and played as much for laughs as he is for fears.  It's hilarious to think that this creepy, nasty guy would so easily fool Wolf, and it's practically like he's breaking the fourth wall with his "behind Wolf's back" sorts of grimaces.  All-in-all, it is, as the Times put it, quite silly, but it's also more fun than I was suspecting, especially as Wolf goes mad, and not a bad way to spend a cloudy afternoon.

This Month We Are Seeing As Many Classic Horror Movies from the Pre-1970 Era as Possible.  If you want to check out some of our past reviews, here they are:

Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Mad Love