The Ghost of Frankenstein

The Ghost of Frankenstein, 1942. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Cedrick Hardewicke, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, jr., Lionel Atwill, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Bellamy.

I finally got around to watching The Ghost of Frankenstein this weekend. I've owned the laserdisc for months (and I still haven't gotten around to Dracula's Daughter, which is on the same set of discs), but for one reason or another, it took me a while to work up to it. Part of this is the absence of Boris Karloff in the cast, but part of it also stems from the fact that I had absolutely no memory of the film--with one small exception--from when I saw it in my early youth. The exception is the freeing of The Monster from the hardened sulphur of the sulphur pits underneath Castle Frankenstein, which has stayed with me along with all of the other resurrections Universal used as a plot device in subsequent movies. Don't ask me why these images stay with me at the expense of the remainder of the movies, but that's just the way my mind works, I guess.

In any case, the first three quarters of the movie are a workable follow-up to the formidable pedigree established by the Karloff Frankenstein films. The cast is superb--it reunites most of the cast of The Wolf-Man, sans Maria Ouspenskaya and Claude Rains (it adds Lionel Atwill and Cedric Hardewicke). It starts with a bang, too, as the angry villagers storm Castle Frankenstein and blow it to bits with dynamite, releasing the Monster from the sulphur pits and sending both him and Ygor in search of another of Frankenstein's children. On the way, the Monster is struck by lightning, prompting Ygor to declare: "Your father was Frankenstein and your mother was the lightning!" This is the high point of the movie. It's all down hill from there. They find another Frankenstein--Ludwig Frankenstein, who is the head of a mental institution specializing in brain surgery. Ludwig has an assistant, Dr. Bohmer (Lionel Atwill), who is jealous of Frankenstein's brilliance, prompting him to sabotage Frankenstein's attempt to correct the abnormal brain. And here, we get one of the colossal blunders: the plot asks us to believe that--for NO good reason--Dr. Bohmer would agree to put Ygor's brain into the monster. Okay, I can handle that. But then....

Allow me to backtrack a bit. Boris Karloff was known to have disagreed with James Whale's decision to have the Monster speak in The Bride of Frankenstein. There is some justification for this view, but if Whale had acceeded to Karloff's point of view, we wouldn't have had that wonderful line where the Monster intones: "I ...love...dead." So Whale made a conditional success of it. In The Ghost of Frankenstein, the Monster speaks again, but this time, when it speaks, Ygor's voice comes out! At this point the movie completely disintegrates before our very eyes, as The Monster ceases to be a character and becomes a plot device--a pattern followed by all of the subsequent films in the series unto his final encounter with Abbot and Costello. This is the worst part of the movie, a fault compounded by a steady dissipation of the atmosphere the movie establishes at the outset. Most of the movie is overlit, and Erle C. Kenton does the movie no favors by including some stock footage of the creation scene from the first movie. In comparison, this movie's big science seems mundane. Cedric Hardewicke is much the same. We've gone from the neurotic frenzy of Colin Clive to the arrogant bravado of Basil Rathbone to Hardewicke, who comes off as a milquetoast do-gooder. One can hardly believe that this guy will so radically transgress from medical ethics. And I haven't even mentioned Hans Salter's flatulent oboe liet-motif for the monster...but what the hell, the movie is a botch anyway.

1942 was a watershed year for the horror movie. With The Ghost of Frankenstein, the great era of the Universal monsters was more or less over. Meanwhile, over at RKO, the Val Lewton horror movies were about to revolutionize the genre.... .