Director: Roy William Neill
Year: 1943
Rating: 6.0
By the time of this film in 1943 the popularity of the Universal horror films
was beginning to diminish. So someone came up with the idea of stuffing various
Universal monsters into one film – like cheese and sausages inside pizza
crust - so here we get both the Wolfman from the successful 1940 film and
Frankenstein who had been in a few Universal films. This trend continued
the following year with House of Frankenstein and then in 1945 with House
of Dracula.
Universal had been formed back in 1912 by Carl Laemmle who thought of movie
making in terms of production. Have a process where you could efficiently
knock out shorts, news, cartoons and a medium budget presentation and package
them all together and get it distributed. They occasionally produced a big
budget picture usually with Erich Von Stroheim at the helm, but Laemmle didn’t
believe in giving large contracts to big stars and so went for the small
markets in what they termed second run houses at the time. Unlike some of
the other movie studios, Universal did not own its own theaters for distribution.
Laemmle hired the Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg who pushed Laemmle to produce
bigger films but even with the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in
1923 Laemmle didn’t want to change his formula. So Thalberg moved to MGM
and that was the beginning of their success.
But with the economic crash in 1929 and Universal now being under the management
of Laemmle’s son they turned to horror films to stop the tide that was overwhelming
many of the studios – with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible
Man, The Old Dark House and The Wolfman and doing so introduced the world
to Boris Karloff (who was discovered in the commissary), Bela Lugosi (who
had been playing Dracula on Broadway) and Lon Chaney Jr. (whose father had
worked for Universal in the 1920’s before he died).
Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman is a mash of a film. It has a good 15
minutes at the start and a great 15 minutes at the end but much of the middle
is as soggy as slippers in the rain. But it could have been worse. The film
comes in at only 72 minutes because apparently three scenes were cut – all
with The Wolfman having lucid conversations with Frankenstein – but when
others looked at the completed film they thought these scenes were hilarious.
I would love to see them. It would make this film even campier than it now
seems.
Cheney plays the Wolfman as he did in the previous film and Lugosi
(who graduates from Ygor) lumbers as Frankenstein – ironic in that Lugosi
had been offered that role in the original film but turned it down thus it
going to Karloff. The Wolfman is tired of living and having to kill every
full moon and Frankenstein wants to live again and it becomes sort of a perverse
buddy movie. What is also peculiar is the time settings of the film – the
first half that takes place in England seems to be in the 1920’s or so while
as soon as they go to Germany it falls back into the 1800’s period of Frankenstein–
the USA being at war with Germany may have had something to do with that.
Also, this film is a sequel to two different films – The Wolfman and also
the Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) in which Chaney played Frankenstein. Oy
ve. It feels almost incestuous.
There were lost opportunities for some good horror such as the killing of
the beautiful girl in the inn that took place off-screen – with Martha Vickers
(the young sister in The Big Sleep) in the role as uncredited in her debut.
Also dropping by is Dennis Hoey playing a similar cop to the one he played
in many Sherlock Holmes films – Inspector Lestrade – not too surprising as
the director Roy William Neill directed eleven of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock
films.
Now I didn’t know much of this until I read up on the film in the books Universal
Horrors which seems to be very informative based on this one film and The
Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era which is terrific.
