Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man

Thanks for the reflections on Frankenstein meets The Wolfml Man, despite its pretense of offhand, Street language sarcasm, unnecessary and painful at points, but not t so much so that the purity of your inner teenagers astonishment in admiration for the film is obscured.

Unlike many others who have become too jaded or embarrassed by their boyhood passions for the wonderful narrative that Curt Siodmak created for his original character, I have shameless open admiration for the narrative at every level, conception, story, execution, acting and, being a lifelong composer and a long time friend of the man who wrote the music for this film, Hans J Salter, who wrote him a typed eight page letter of analysis and admiration of his many wonderful scores for universal horror films in 1963, at the age of 16, and who received a wonderful glossy 8×10 personally inscribed photograph from the man.

One cannot say enough about the consummate command of atmosphere in the horror legacy, particularly in the films of the Wolf Man, which tended to dwell far more in the mystic regions of the Welsh Morris and the Bavarian valleys than in the cold clinical laboratories that were so much in evidence of the Frankenstein series

Has this film goes, it is a fairly perfect extension and expansion upon the Wolf Man mythos, with one of the greatest openings of any horror film anywhere, for sheer raw thrill. The grave robbers are played with Shakespearean gravitas and their fear is literally palpable as their eyes and faces are under lit by the single lantern on the sarcophagus, and eventually come a side lit by the rising of the faithful full moon. Just watch the surviving grave robber clamber up to the transom window and scramble out of the mausoleum, in utter disarray.

Well few have enough attention left in this riveting scene to give to the musical underscore, it is one of Mr Salter’s greatest moments, with sonorities so bone-chillingly alien and icy that it literally sends the proverbial chills up one spine has the resurrected hand emerges from the murky depths of the coffin.

And what perfect trembling on the part of the doomed captive!
Away, away, through the Edgar Allan Poe night, replete with a flapping Raven upon a bony limb, through the tortuous path of the graveyard and out into the terrified night.

Ah, I could go on!

… And, come to think of it, I think I will.. for every bit, every scene, every nuance, from start to finish is delectable and has been, at least for me, over the course of the past 62 years.

You would think by now one would have grown weary of this fantastic tale, but no such luck! Each time I darken the room to view it, and perhaps intervals of 2 years more or less, the same timeless thrill runs through my being as I watch the laughing smoke of the credits to send upon the screen.

As The story goes (at least as far as it’s creator Curt Siodmak tells it, he was in the studio commissary wondering how we could earn enough money to pay for his next car, when director George Waggner interrupted his reverie. Sometime earlier, Curt had turned a silly pun to Waggner in an absolutely unserious frame of mind, which went something to the effect of mentioning a new film with the title, ‘Frankenstein Wolfs the Meat Man’,… But instead of laughing, Waggner’s eyebrows bent into a concentrated furrow and his face darkened.

Later that day, interrupting, ‘you’ve got your next script assignment… And the money for that car you’ve been waiting to buy…’

Siodmak insisted he was only kidding, but Wagner wasn’t buying…. He knew a great idea when he’d heard it.

Has our friend does observe, the narrative respects both the Wolf Man and the Frankenstein monster’s lineages, fresh from Ghost of Frankenstein and the Wolf Man – and even more faithfully than most people would ever realize.

Aficionados will recall that the climax of The Ghost of Frankenstein was a stunner indeed.. both inspired and bizarre, fascinating and horrifying, with the successful realization of the plot to transplant Ygor’s brain into the Monster’s skull, endowing him, in one fell swoop endowing him with speech and cunning and malevolence far beyond that which the monster ever might have had.
Well, unbeknownst to many, this hybrid creature is the character that Siomack very faithfully and ingeniously developed in Frankenstein meets The Wolf Man… Lovers of the simple old Frankenstein Monster and his rather inept in lovable ways May understandably object, having lost their friend in the finale of the previous film, and having had the cantankerous and genocidal Ygor-mind replace and inhabit him, but once over that hump, the possibilities are literally endless, and the script writer took excellent advantage of them.

However, as many know, both the speech and the scenes in which the monster intelligently discourses with Larry Talbot were all excised from the film prior to its release. The supposed explanation was that people couldn’t countenance the Hungarian accented voice coming from the lips of the monster.. and yet, ironically, this is exactly SHOULD have been the case if, as the prior film clearly reveals, the consciousness of Igor was now driving the monster, and as both son of Frankenstein and ghoster Frankenstein clearly taught us, Igor is the possessor of a curiously diverse European accent, with the flavor of Bavarian madman and a strong current of Hungarian allspice…. One of the ghosties greatest creations, if not, arguably, actually his greatest.
So, gone were the dialogues with the doomed Talbot, and their philosophical ruminations of life and death, the hatching of the Ygor-Monster’s cynical and diabolical plans.
Likewise, it is important to remember that the Monster goes blind at the end of the Ghost of Frankenstein due to the mismatching of blood types on the optic nerves, a clear and perfect justification to completely wipe away all the criticisms of legosi enacting the monster stumbling around through the catacombs stiffly his arms out in front of him, just the way a blind person might in a similar situation.
And there are several moments where it is obvious that he cannot see but must feel for Talbot, making exaggerated moves until his hands clasped Chaney’s body. We see this clearly when the festival of the new wine is interrupted by the monsters entrance and Talbot goes up to him and seizes him placing his hands upon the Monsters body so that he can be felt as a friend, yet maintaining safe distance less the monster should strike out blindly.

Finally, there is the peak moment at the climax when the monster opens his eyes with a strange and faithful knowing, indeed, almost a cunning. This is due to the fact that throughout the film, which he we have never been allowed to be informed, the monster has been suffering from profound weakness due to his mismatched blood condition, and he is a mere shadow of himself with regard to strength.. indeed, quite depressed. But at this point in the film, mannering has charged him to his prior superhuman levels of strength, and he is mightily empowered, bursting his bonds in a single stroke.

Now, you seek, campers, it all makes wonderful sense! And that is the film that we should all keep in our ideal minds when we are assailed by some confusion or complaint that Lugosi is not doing it correctly or as well as Karloff… Of course not! He was doing it that way because he’s a great actor, and he was acting the part of a crazed Shepherd whose brain was transplanted into a dumb root, who then fell into blindness and illness, and encountered a friend who just happened to be a lycanthrope as well as a really nice guy, who befriended him and helped him along his way and his darkest hour, only to be betrayed by the return of his power, enabling him to implement his dark desires.

As a musician I have no end of the lights and musical respect for the wonderful spectacle of the festival of the new wine, with h its marvelous ‘Faro-la, Faro-li’, a seemingly merrily tyrolian drinking song, but under lit with poignant gravitas, a creation of none other than producer George Waggner… With the faithful, ‘for life is short, and death is lo-o-o-ng,…’, as indeed they are, a painful fact which Talbot knows only too well, and about which he does not need to be reminded… But this is alone worthy of an Oscar for the gifted Mr Salter, who himself had conducted Opera at the Vienna Vilksopera before he fled Hitler’s Europe to come to America, and the music is full of delightful middle European harmonies and melodic turns… Bravo, friend Hans!
For those who wish to see the depth both of Mr Salter’s art and my admiration for the man that is work, please have a gander at my 40 page essay in the Magic Image filmbook, The Wolf Man, in which will be found photographs of the master himself and of that Master with this writer, taken upon one of his visits to the Grand Old gentleman in his ninth decade on planet Earth.
Frankenstein meets The wolfman contains Lon Chaney’s most brilliant and moving moments, it completely dedicated and infused portrayal of the tortured Lawrence Talbot character, so many of whose Dynamics he shared due to his own natural emotional intensity and inner torments.
And it has to be said, because comparisons always seem to leave him slightly tarnished, no one could have done better.. not carlos, not the go see, that any straight dramatic actors of one’s choice.. Cheney had the strange, touching blend of tenderness, tragedy, emotional extremity and sheer balletic ferality of a man who had become a Wolf Man, who’s every turn of the head or rotation of the eye towards intended victims scares the living of daylights and of anyone who dares to behold it in a way far more electric and brinkish then any other horror actor that one can bring to mind. Carlos terror was a slower and more insensate one, his warning growl more submerged and dour, just as Lugosi’s Dracula menace was more the product of subtle inference and suggestion, and convey through mesmeric silence.
And what I have never heard anybody mention it, and I’m not sure whether or not it was an intentional choice upon Curt Siodmak’s part, even in the very climax of this saga, what do we find?.. but the ever empathetic Lawrence Talbot character , well intention to the end, somehow managing to emerge even in his lycanthropion fury, to save the heroin from the attacking Monster, with a thrilling faithful run up the steps to tackle him just prior to his seizing Elsa under the stone archway, causing both to pile into the dust of the operating theater for their final confrontation.

How delicious, in that battle of brute strength against animal cunning, the almost surreal floating away of the machine upon which The Wol Man threatens from above, sailing through space as if in defiance of gravity itself.

And the gleeful gloating of the Ygor-Monster at the haddock his newfound power wreaksupon the wolf creature.

Oh, I can go on!..

But not to worry, I can’t, any more at least. Now, campers, it’s time, isn’t it?, To pluck that title from off your shelf, darken your own operating theater, and sink into the joys of yesteryear, Justice if you were all of 12 again

Even a man who is pure in heart

And says his prayers by night..

😟

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