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This flies against all conventional wisdom, but Son of Frankenstein is my favorite of the Frankenstein movies. "Heresy!" I hear you saying, as you gather a mob and light the torches. Soon, chants of "The Bride, The Bride," echo throughout the Transylvanian twilight. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein (The Bride slightly less than the original). We're not talking about a quantum leap in quality here. They're all good. It's the small shades of difference. They're my only weakness, you see....

In any event, Son of Frankenstein gets a bad rap and I suspect it is because of rampant and unreflected auteurism more than the actual quality of the movie. James Whale was an auteur, after all, and afterwards an icon of crypto-queer cinema. Who the hell was Rowland V. Lee but a creature of the studio? But once you move past all of that, once you can groove on the movie itself...then its many and variegated pleasures begin to manifest themselves.

Let's start with an obvious one: Karloff gives his third performance as The Creature here, and it is as different from the performances in the first two films as the performance in Bride is different from Frankenstein. This is The Creature at his least sympathetic, at his most monstrous, and at his most frightening. Then there is Bela Lugosi as Ygor, the hunchback who has survived his own hanging. He's made The Creature his familiar. Lugosi gives what may be his best performance in this movie. If it is less iconic than his turn as Dracula, or less sinister than his portrayal of Legendre the zombie master in White Zombie, well, it more than compensates with shades of character. Ygor is a complex creation, more complex than anything else Lugosi ever played. The same can be said of Basil Rathbone's Wolf von Frankenstein. With all due respect, Colin Clive seemed altogether too neurotic to wrest the secrets of life itself from God or blind providence (whichever you prefer). He didn't have the ego for it. But Rathbone? Rathbone had the cinema's all time best arrogant sneer (Rathbone was always best when playing villains, though the arrogance of his demeanor was perfect for Sherlock Holmes). When you see Rathbone look down his nose at someone, you KNOW he has the ego to transgress the boundaries of life and death. And finally, there is Inspector Krogh, played to the hilt by Lionel Atwill. Krogh has no equivalent anywhere else in the Frankenstein series (at least, not until Kenneth Mars did a wicked send-up in Young Frankenstein--more on that in a bit). Krogh get's the movie's best line: "One doesn't easily forget, Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots," and more than holds his own against Lugosi and Rathbone (Karloff seems to exist apart from these three).

The most striking thing about the movie, though, is not necessarily its performances, but its design. Visually, this is the most ornate of the Frankenstein movies, with vast sets, and bizarre lighting schemes. More than any of the other Universal horror movies, this one is the closest in its design to German Expressionism. This is also the most generous of the Universal horror movies with its story. At 99 minutes, it is by far the longest of the studio's classic horror movies.

And I think this is significant: the movie is an archetype of sorts. It is the template for all subsequent films in the series . When Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder composed their love letter to the Frankenstein movies, they took bits and pieces from all of them, but it was THIS movie, not The Bride and not the original film, from which they took the most. Can it be that this is their favorite of the Frankenstein films, too? I like to think so....

Followed by Ghost of Frankenstein.

1/10/06